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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AILEEN HERNANDEZ: Women were beginning to push back about whether or not they had a role in this society that needed to be addressed, as well, and laws were being passed.
REPORTER: President Kennedy today signed a bill making it illegal to pay a woman less than a man for the same job.
AILEEN HERNANDEZ: It was a huge big deal. Discrimination against women is now to be illegal, too.
Stewardesses filed a complaint of discrimination. They couldn't be married and stay on the airlines. They couldn't gain any weight. When they were no longer beautiful in the eyes of the people, they were gone. Women started filing in large numbers. Newspapers had ads: help wanted male, help wanted female, and we needed to do something about it.
Some of our commissioners were not taking action because, essentially, they were dealing with the race issues that they were familiar with. They were not familiar with discrimination against women. It was totally frustrating.
So they go up to Betty Friedan's room, and they agreed that the women need to rise up and say something, or else nothing is gonna occur. And the group grew a little bit. It started with about five at lunch. It got to 15 or so in the evening. And there was agreement that in October, they would have a national conference and create a new organization. Betty Friedan came up with the name National Organization for Women. The NOW people asked me to join, and so I joined.
That was a revolution. It was essentially a major revolution for the country that was very similar to the whole issues around the Civil Rights revolution that took place earlier in the game.
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.”
