Pauli Murray Calls for Women’s March on Washington – No March But Call Leads to Founding of NOW
Pauli Murray, pioneering civil rights and feminist activist, on this day called for a “March of Washington” for women’s equal rights.
Her speech to the National Council of Women, a staid old-line women’s group that had been founded in 1888, caught the attention of a New York Times reporter, and the next day the Times story was headlined “Protest Proposed on Women’s Jobs.”
No march occurred, but the news story set in motion events that helped lead to the founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which immediately became the leading women’s rights organization and led a revived feminist movement.
At the time Murray gave her speech there was the growing dissatisfaction among activist women with the lack of meaningful progress on women’s issues by established women’s groups. Leaders of the newly-created Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) did not take seriously the inclusion of “sex” in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Right Act (which had established the EEOC). (Lyndon Johnson, for example, did not include women in his first executive order on affirmative action; under pressure from feminists, he added it in a revised executive order.) Attention focused on sex-segregated “help wanted” ads which had separate listings for “Men Wanted” and “Women Wanted.”
Murray’s call for a women’s march spurred considerable networking among discontented activists, particularly in Washington, DC. Many talked aboug the need for a “NAACP for women.” Particularly important, it caught the attention of Betty Friedan, author of the highly influential book The Feminine Mystique, which many people believe sparked the revival of feminism in the 1960s. Friedan contacted Murray and they continued to work together over the next years.
They and other women in their growing network met in June 1966 in Washington, DC, at the Third Annual Conference of State Commissions on the Status of Women. Fed up with the lack of activist spirit at the conference, Friedan, Murray and thirteen other women met privately in Friedan’s hotel room on June 29th, and agreed to form the National Organization for Women, which they announced the next day.
Read the account of these events in Rosalin
Learn more about Pauli Murray: Pauli Murray, Proud Shoes (1956)
Read: Patricia Bell-Scott, The Firebrand and the First Lady: Pauli Murray, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Struggle for Racial Justice (2016)
And more at the Pauli Murray Project: http://paulimurrayproject.org/
And also read: Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray (2017)
Visit the National Organization for Women web site here