The Women of NOW
How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America
In 1966, a diverse group of activists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) to build “a civil rights movement to speak for women.” The group sought to change the mainstream, but its core was a radical idea: that one organization could appeal to and advocate for all women and their male supporters. The Women of NOW is the first full account of the largest and most expansive feminist membership organization in American history.
Many people think they know NOW. But the organization has been neglected in popular memory and distorted in scholarship. Historians have reckoned with its scale and complexity in pieces, spotlighting specific leaders, chapters or campaigns. The organization’s own archive supports this segmented approach. Its leaders and members have left millions of pieces of paper piled across the country. Turk spent two decades traveling the country to reach into NOW’s many archives and talk with its members, past and present. This work revealed that the organization was the site, not simply the backdrop, of much of the feminist struggle in our recent past. NOW was singular in its foundational role, its flexible agenda and national reach, and the structures that have kept it running for half a century.
Turk’s research also pointed her beyond the more familiar founders. While they erected NOW’s skeleton out of their belief that women were oppressed as a class and had to fight back together, it was their successors who tested whether this idea could work. Those newer members stretched NOW in different directions and as far as they could. Their cohort was vast, but The Women of NOW spotlights three women who represent the broad range of identities and feminist visions that members brought to NOW in the late 1960s: Jamaican-American federal official Aileen Hernandez, working-class Catholic Mary Jean Collins and Republican artist and former beauty queen Patricia Hill Burnett.
Over the decades, NOW’s leaders and members built undeniable momentum that changed American law, politics and culture. But NOW’s mass appeal and open-ended blueprint also galvanized new opponents. By foregrounding NOW in the past half-century of American history, The Women of NOW reveals how mainstream feminism transformed the nation, clashing with conservative forces to create today’s social and political landscape.
Praise for The Women of NOW
“The Women of NOW gives an in-depth look at a vital part of feminism in America. The perfect read for those interested in women’s history, American history, and politics.”
— Booklist
“This smart, clear-eyed history of the National Organization for Women…expertly unpacks a complex institutional legacy. The result is a timely addition to the history of ‘second wave’ feminism that illuminates today’s debates about women’s rights.”
— publishers weekly
“Historian Turk tells a lively story of the development of the National Organization for Women…[in] a thoroughly researched and well-balanced history.”
— kirkus reviews
“Illuminating, unflinching, and galvanizing above all, The Women of NOW is more than a fascinating and accessible guide to the most influential American women’s political organization. It is a timely call-to-arms in a post-Roe society that reminds us that history may rhyme but it does not need to refrain. This will certainly be a favorite among activists, teachers, and students for many years to come, but, more importantly, it’s the kind of work that gives us hope in the fierce urgency of NOW.”
— charlotte clymer
“With The Women of NOW, Katherine Turk offers vivid prose and dramatic stories about the central role the National Organization for Women has played and continues to play in advancing American women’s rights through robust action—underscoring issues as urgent in the 1960s as they are now.”
— daniel horowitz, author of Betty Friedan and the feminine mystique: The American Left, the cold war, and modern feminism
“I lived through the history inscribed in this book but I never understood it anywhere as richly as I do now, having had it all laid out for me with impressive clarity and imagination, as Katherine Turk has done.”
— vivian gornick, author of unfinished business: notes of a chronic re-reader
“Katherine Turk’s The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America is popular history at its most captivating: The story of a vital and complex moment in time, told with sensitivity, nuance, and an eye to the future. Anyone interested in America will be fascinated by this book. For a new generation of feminists, it is necessary reading.”
— kate bolick, author of spinster: making a life of one’s own
“A rich and textured account of the way NOW came together and came apart. Turk provides a deeply researched history of complex organizational politics and a vivid portrait of a group of remarkable women who devoted their lives to achieving equality. Turk’s description of NOW’s significant accomplishments and its disappointing failures offer important lessons that may guide us as we face the challenges of a post-Dobbs world.”
— drew gilpin faust, author of necessary trouble: growing up at midcentury
“Katherine Turk’s rigorous archival research and groundbreaking cross-country reporting have culminated in this essential contribution to the history of feminism in America. The Women of NOW tells the story of a group of women, and three of their unsung leaders, who tried to change the world—and in so many ways, did.”
— Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep
“Finally, we have a book that centers a diverse array of women leaders who built NOW, a singularly important American organization formed to end male supremacy. The Women of NOW is an excellent work of history and essential reading for those who continue to fight for a society that values the experiences, recognizes the rights, and supports the aspirations of all women.”
— tomiko brown-nagin, author of civil rights queen: Constance baker motley and the struggle for equality
“Katherine Turk’s masterful The Women of NOW offers a long overdue and definitive look at the pathbreaking National Organization for Women and how it transformed both American feminism and American life. This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what feminism is—or could be.”
— mary ziegler, author of roe: the history of a national obsession
“Katherine Turk’s The Women of NOW charts the emergence, growth, and endurance of one of the twentieth century’s most important organizations engaged in the struggle for equality. To tell this story, Turk introduces us not only to NOW’s famous founders but to many of the forgotten women who built the organization—women like Aileen Hernandez and Mary Jean Collins, whose ethnic and class backgrounds challenged NOW’s early assumptions that gender alone defined a woman and shaped her goals. Throughout the narrative, Turk demonstrates a profound understanding of the larger social context in which NOW arose and the growth of identity politics that threatened NOW’s survival. Beautifully written and remarkably well-researched, this is a book that should be read by every American committed to the ongoing campaign for equality, in which NOW still plays a critical role.”