The Feminine Mystique - Betty Friedan [214]
It seemed to me that something more than talk had to happen. “The only thing that’s changed so far is our own consciousness,” I wrote, closing that second book, which I never finished, because the next sentence read, “What we need is a political movement, a social movement like that of the blacks.” I had to take action. On the plane to Washington, pondering what to do, I saw a student reading a book, The First Step to Revolution Is Consciousness, and it was like an omen.
I went to Washington because a law had been passed, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, banning sex discrimination in employment along with race discrimination. The sex discrimination part had been tacked on as a joke and a delaying maneuver by a Southern congressman, Howard Smith of Virginia. At the first press conferences after the law went into effect, the administrator in charge of enforcing it joked about the ban on sex discrimination. “It will give men equal opportunity to be Playboy bunnies,” he said.
In Washington I found a seething underground of women in the government, the press, and the labor unions who felt powerless to stop the sabotage of this law that was supposed to break through the sex discrimination that pervaded every industry and profession, every factory, school, and office. Some of these women felt that I, as a now known writer, could get the public’s ear.
One day, a cool young woman lawyer, who worked for the agency that was not enforcing the law against sex discrimination, carefully closed the door of her office and said to me with tears in her eyes, “I never meant to be so concerned about women. I like men. But I’m getting an ulcer, the way women are being betrayed. We may never have another chance like this law again. Betty, you have to start an NAACP for women. You are the only one free enough to do it.”
I wasn’t an organization woman. I never even belonged to the League of Women Voters. However, there was a meeting of state commissioners on the status of women in Washington in June. I thought that, among the women there from the various states, we would get the nucleus of an organization that could at least call a press conference and raise the alarm among women throughout the country.
Pauli Murray, an eminent black lawyer, came to that meeting, and Dorothy Haener and Caroline Davis from the UAW, and Kay Clarenbach, head of the Governor’s Commission in Wisconsin, and Katherine Conroy of the Communications Workers of America, and Aileen Hernandez, then a member of the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. I asked them to come to my hotel room one night. Most didn’t think women needed a movement like the blacks, but everyone was mad at the sabotage of Title VII. The consensus was that the conference could surely take respectable action to insist that the law be enforced.
I went to bed relieved that probably a movement wouldn’t have to be organized. At six the next morning, I got a call from one of the top token women in the Johnson administration, urging me not to rock the boat. At eight the phone rang again; this time it was one of the reluctant sisters of the night before, angry now, really angry. “We’ve been told that this conference doesn’t have the power to take any action at all, or even the right to offer a resolution. So we’ve got a table for us all to eat together at lunch, and we’ll start the organization.” At the luncheon we each chipped in a dollar. I wrote the word “NOW” on a paper napkin; our group should be called the National Organization for Women, I said, “because men should be part of it.” Then I wrote down the first sentence of the NOW statement of purpose, committing ourselves to “take action to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society now, exercising all the privileges and responsibilities thereof, in truly equal partnership with men.”
The changes necessary to bring about that equality were, and still are, very revolutionary indeed. They involve a sex-role revolution