Working Women and the Need for NOW
In 1966, the National Organization for Women, or NOW, was founded. Watch this video and learn about Aileen Hernandez, the first female member of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the first Vice President of NOW, as she explains the challenges working women faced and why women felt there was a need for an organization like NOW.
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In its original Statement of Purpose (1966), NOW documented many challenges working women faced:
1.
“Although 46.4% of all American women between the ages of 18 and 65 now work outside the home, the overwhelming majority—75%—are in routine clerical, sales, or factory jobs, or they are household workers, cleaning women, hospital attendants. About two-thirds of Negro women workers are in the lowest paid service occupations.”
2.
“Working women are becoming increasingly…concentrated on the bottom of the job ladder. As a consequence, full-time women workers today earn on the average only 60% of what men earn, and that wage gap has been increasing over the past twenty-five years in every major industry group.”
3.
“Women comprise fewer than 1% of federal judges, 4% of all lawyers, and 7% of doctors. Yet women represent 51% of the U.S. population. And, increasingly, men are replacing women in the top positions in secondary and elementary schools, in social work, and in libraries—once thought to be women’s fields.”
