extend the minimum wage law to domestic workers. An expert on child welfare and education, she was
responsible for the country’s first federal legislation providing comprehensive childcare assistance to
needy families and managed to get it passed with bipartisan support—only to have President Nixon veto
it, surprising even members of his own Republican Party.
NOW’s chapters were autonomous and diverse, but its national office initiated both lobbying and
demonstrations on issues as diverse as getting women appointed to federal commissions, responding to
rape, and impeaching Nixon. NOW’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, founded in 1970, became a
powerhouse of expertise and litigation for judicial and legislative victories. It won the famed Title IX of
the Education Amendments of 1972, which virtually revolutionized women’s sports. In 2013 college
women began using it to combat campus rapes. It pressured the mass media to be more responsive to and
respectful of women. It trained feminist lawyers, produced the Rape Shield Law, and in alliance with
union women won the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978.
Through the 1970s NOW was increasingly deploying its “troops” in the battle for the Equal Rights
Amendment. In earlier decades many social justice feminists had opposed the amendment on the grounds
that it might cancel legislation that supported women’s needs, such as pregnancy benefits, as chapter 1
explained. Now labor unions were part of the pro-ERA alliance as well. Women’s numbers and positions
in the wage labor force had changed so much that the potential loss of protective legislation was less
threatening to women than the continued discrimination against them. By the time the amendment passed in
Congress in 1972, the lay of the land had shifted: the opposition came no longer from the social justice
feminists and labor unions but from the right wing. The anti-ERA lobby gained massive corporate and
conservative religious funding and propagandized by appealing to people’s fears: opponents argued that
the ERA would destroy the family, free husbands from having to support wives and children, send women
into combat, end separate women’s and men’s toilets, uphold abortion rights and homosexual marriages
and destroy businesses. Although a majority of the states ratified it, a constitutional amendment required
approval by three-fifths, and this hurdle the movement could not vault. Conservatives were able to keep
the United States as one of the only nations not to guarantee women equal rights, a bitter disappointment to
millions and a foretaste of the power of the backlash, to be discussed at the end of this chapter.
In retrospect, many feminists came to believe that it was a mistake for NOW to focus so exclusively
on this single project. In fact, the NOW and women’s liberation branches of the feminist movement
carried on with campaigns about many other issues. It would take a multivolume book to discuss them all,
so this chapter focuses on a few of the most striking.
Bodily Health and Harm
Paradoxically, the issue with which women’s liberation has been most identified, abortion rights, is
where it actually had little success. After the initial limited legalization of abortion through Roe v. Wade
in 1973, the anti-abortion-rights movement made abortions steadily less accessible. The history of this
conflict merits careful attention because the opposition made it symbolize the whole movement.
All known human societies have tried to control reproduction, and abortion was a common means. It
was legal in the three great monotheistic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—provided it was
accomplished before “quickening,” the old term for the moment when a pregnant woman could first feel a
fetus move. The same women who assisted in childbirth usually performed abortions. In the mid-
nineteenth century, moral reformers in the United States and Europe initiated a campaign to ban
reproduction control, and they made little distinction between what we today call contraception and