1966 October 29

NOW Formally Chartered

 

The National Organization for Women (NOW), organized by feminist leader Betty Friedan and a small group of friends on June 30, 1966, was formally chartered on this day.

Thirty women had attended a conference on women in Washington, D.C. in June, and when they became disgusted at the lack of an active program they decided to found a new organization. Friedan was elected its first president, and NOW immediately became the leading women’s rights organization in the country.

Friedan was the author of The Feminine Mystique, widely regarded as an inspiration for the rebirth of the women’s rights movement in the mid-1960s. See April 7, 1963, for the hostile review of the book in the New York Times.

Visit the NOW web site: http://www.now.org

Read Friedan’s path-breaking book: Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)

Watch a 1964 interview with Friedan: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfgxHKli9CU

Read: Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (2011)

Learn more: Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of The Feminine Mystique: The American Left, The Cold War, and Modern Feminism (1998)

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