women’s rights was just as evident: proposals from the national and state commissions on the status of
women were languishing; the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission (EEOC), charged with
enforcing the 1964 Civil Rights Act, was not doing its job. It had ignored the complaints of flight
attendants who charged the airlines with unfairly firing them at age thirty-two; it failed to see the problem
with sex-segregated “Help Wanted—Male” and “Help Wanted—Female” job advertisements or with
hiring policies funneling men into managerial positions and women into dead-end clerical jobs. One male
commissioner called the sexual integration of the workplace the “Bunny problem,” referring to the
absurdity of men being Playboy Bunnies, and labeled the idea of a work world in which men and women
held the same jobs as “ridiculous.” The only woman on the EEOC, Aileen Hernandez, a Howard
University–educated daughter of Jamaican immigrants and a former organizer for the International Ladies’
Garment Workers’ Union in California, would soon resign, disgusted with the commission’s failure to take
sex discrimination seriously.
As those gathered at the annual meeting debated what to do, Keyserling, chairing the conference, tried
to keep order. She acknowledged the various complaints but cautioned against undermining and
embarrassing the Democratic administration. She also warned that the EEOC needed to proceed slowly
lest state laws protecting low-income women be lost in the rush to open up opportunity. Betty Friedan and
Pauli Murray disagreed, as did other influential women such as political scientist Kathryn (Kay)
Clarenbach, the chair of Wisconsin’s state commission on the status of women, and, in a surprising break
with their union sisters, UAW leaders Caroline Davis and Dorothy Haener.
At lunch, as speakers droned on, the dissidents finalized their plan, hatched the night before in
Friedan’s hotel room, for a new organization: an “NAACP for women,” devoted to women’s rights much
the same way as the NAACP pursued the rights of African Americans. The National Organization for
Women, the leading national organization of the new feminism, was born. In its 1966 Statement of
Purpose, drafted by Friedan and Pauli Murray and adopted at the founding convention in October, NOW
vowed to advance the “unfinished revolution toward true equality, now.”^37
Attendees at NOW’s Organizing Conference, October 1966. This group, along with the women who gathered in June 1966, are honored as
NOW’s founders. Courtesy of the National Organization for Women.
Social justice feminists divided in their response to NOW and to the new women’s movements
gathering power among college students and others. Caroline Davis and Dorothy Haener, among NOW’s
founding members, embraced the new feminism wholeheartedly. They convinced the UAW to support
NOW financially and give it office space its first year. Although they and other UAW women left NOW
briefly in 1968, objecting to its endorsement of the ERA, they eagerly returned a year later, having
convinced the UAW to change its position on the ERA—the first union to do so. Davis and other UAW
labor feminists also urged the EEOC to pursue sex discrimination claims aggressively, even if it meant
overturning woman-only labor standards legislation, a stance that infuriated many of their old allies.