Women Picket White House – FBI Sees National Security Threat!
Alerted in advance (by a request for a parade permit), FBI agents observed about 100 women organized by the National Organization for Women (NOW) picketing the White House. The agents dutifully reported that some women carried signs reading “First Class Women, Second Class Citizens.”
There was, of course, no indication of any national security “threat” posed by the NOW demonstration, and this was just one of innumerable actions in which the FBI maintained surveillance of political groups it did not like. For the notorious FBI COINTELPRO program, which engaged in spying and committed other illegal acts, go to March 8, 1956.
The National Organization for Women was founded on June 30, 1966, and became the leading women’s rights group in the U.S.
Go to April 7, 1963 for the New York Times review attacking The Feminist Mystique by Betty Friedan, founder of NOW.
Read the NOW FBI file: http://vault.fbi.gov/National%20Organization%20for%20Women%20%28NOW%29
Learn more about NOW: http://www.now.org
Learn more about the growth of women’s rights: Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (2009)
Watch a video on the 40th Anniversary of NOW: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1GXcNYaY5Yk