National Organization for Women Statement of Purpose

On October 29, 1966, at its first national conference, in Washington, D.C., the National Organization for Women (NOW) adopted a Statement of Purpose. The document was written by Betty Friedan (1921–2006), author of the foundational feminist book The Feminine Mystique (1963), and Pauli Murray (1910–1985), a civil rights activist and the first African American woman Episcopal priest. Just four months earlier, on June 30, 1966, NOW had been founded by delegates to the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women. This commission was the successor to the Presidential Commission on the Status of Women, which President John F. Kennedy had created by executive order on December 14, 1961, and which was chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1963 the commission had reported its findings that women were the victims of gender inequality. Among the twenty-eight founders of NOW were Friedan, Murray, and Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to mount a serious presidential bid. The purpose of the organization, articulated in the Statement of Purpose, was to work for professional, political, and educational equality for women—to become a public voice for women and their aspirations.

NOW's Statement of Purpose was written at a time of massive change in the political and social landscape of America. Three years earlier, on June 10, 1963, Kennedy had signed into law the Equal Pay Act to ensure that in the matter of pay employers do not discriminate on the basis of gender, generally meaning that they do not pay women less than men for the same work. A year after that, Congress enacted the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed various forms of discrimination against African Americans and women and was a major victory in the civil rights movement. In 1965 the U.S. Supreme Court, in Griswold v. Connecticut, ruled 7–2 that a Connecticut ban on the use of contraceptives violated the “right of marital privacy.” Thus, by 1966, the women's liberation movement was well under way and would gather increasing momentum in the years that followed. NOW would emerge as the most powerful women's organization—and the largest, with half a million members and nearly six thousand local chapters.