New Book Explores the Push for the ERA & the Women of NOW

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, HOST: And next we turn to the historic fight for women’s rights in the United States. Founded in 1966, the National Organization for Women, also known as NOW, laid the groundwork for challenging gender discrimination there. In her new book, “The Women of NOW,” historian Katherine Turk details the tumultuous journey of establishing the largest feminist organization. And she joins Michel Martin to discuss how lessons from that past can inform the activism of today.

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MICHEL MARTIN, NPR, HOST: Professor Katherine Turk, thanks so much for talking with us.

KATHERINE TURK, AUTHOR: My pleasure.

MARTIN: You’ve spent two decades now researching the history of the women’s rights movement, in particular, the National Organization for Women. You know, I’m guessing a lot of people have heard of NOW, but don’t really know what it is and what it was designed for. What is NOW? What was NOW supposed to be?

TURK: Yes. So, NOW was founded in 1966 by a group of several dozen women, and then several dozen more women and men who joined them to form what they called a civil rights movement to speak for women. This was a moment when the labor movement was quite strong, the civil rights movement was quite strong, and women, of course, were part of those movements. But they also looked around and saw that movements around group-based solidarity were getting a lot done in American life. And so, a lot of women felt that there was a kind of contrast between the optimism about the American dream and the hopefulness about the power of democracy and all of the things America offers the people who live there a contrast between that and the limits that they experienced in their own lives. So, that’s sort of the basic premise of NOW, to organize on behalf of all women. They were especially focused on legal change, so both getting new laws enforced strongly, but then also pushing for new legal protections. But within just a couple of years after NOW’s founding, the organization became a mass movement dedicated to dozens and dozens of goals, pretty much anything anybody could think of.

MARTIN: So, it’s kind of like an NAACP for women, right? But instead of being focused on a particular group of women, their concept was they wanted it to be all women, which is kind of a tough goal, if you think about it. And I guess, was that a struggle at the beginning? I mean, was it sort of obvious at the beginning that it was kind of hard to get kind of everybody on the same page as it were? I mean, we’re only talking about like half the population. So —

TURK: Yes, to say the least. The kind of optimism that NOW founders felt and the kind of determination. It’s a good thing they had it because it convinced them to begin this organization. But very quickly, there were internal struggles, there were fights around which issues they should prioritize, which women, which — the concerns of which women should be prioritized. And this was an ongoing conversation that lasts up until this day about who can speak for women and what do women on the whole need.

MARTIN: Could you just set the table for us, like what was the legal landscape for women at the time that NOW was formed?

TURK: Women were solidly second-class citizens in this country when NOW was formed. Abortion was illegal pretty much everywhere. Women could generally not get credit cards in their own name, get mortgages. Until the mid-1960s, women could be exempted from jury duty. The idea being that, you know, why would you want to go through with jury duty when you really needed to be at home with your children? Women could receive harsher penalties for the same crimes, a husband who had a traffic accident could find that his wife’s driver’s license was also taken away. Workplace discrimination and sexism was not only permitted and pervasive, it was actually codified in the law in the form of state laws. All 50 states had different laws that required employers to treat women differently because of sex. So — and there’s plenty to say, too, about the cultural misogyny that was just everywhere in American life and was also just so a common joke for men in power to make. And I would also add that for women of color, for women who were queer, for women who were older, working class those women experience all of these injustices and more. So, I think that kind of backdrop really gives a sense for why this diverse group of women who came together as a sex to found now believe that such organizing was urgent.

MARTIN: It started out as being really big, really broad. We want to do, you know, all the things. We want to focus on things from a number of fronts. But at some point, they kind of narrowed their focus to the Equal Rights Amendment. And why is that? And why was that such a consequential decision?

TURK: NOW was a big umbrella, a big coalition for the first decade or so of its life. But by the mid-1970s, a couple of things had happened in American life that NOW’s founders did not anticipate, the Equal Rights Amendment, which had long been one of dozens of NOW’s goals and had a lot of momentum in the early 1970s. It passed both houses of Congress. And won in a number of states really quickly, but then it started to lose momentum. And the second thing I would point to is the Roe v. Wade opinion of 1973, which, of course, for a time, established a constitutional right to abortion. And both of those things, the ERA’s momentum and Roe v. Wade helped to galvanize a renewed movement of conservative women who organized explicitly against NOW. It sort of took NOW’s organizing style of nationally federated group, but turn now its premise on its head, arguing that equality and reproductive rights would hurt women, would not help them. And so, NOW’s leaders in the mid-1970s really felt themselves to be at a crossroads. They could either let the ERA go, let it expire without doing much more around it, or they could really focus their resources and try to get a lot more to try to push this amendment over the finish line and get it written into the law. So, that latter choice is what they did. They began engaging in new fundraising methods. They began to streamline the organization and concentrate power at the top in a new headquarters in Washington, D.C. and became a quite effective lobbying and fundraising machine.

MARTIN: I have to say that was one of the most fascinating things about your research. Just something that, again, as I said, it’s one of those stories that’s hiding in plain sight. One of the points that you make in the book and in an excerpt from the book that many people may have seen in “The Atlantic” is that eventually they earned money through a surprising donation strategy. Something that a lot of people associate with the political right, but which now used very effectively. So, tell us about that, and how did it prove so consequential?

TURK: Yes. So, starting in the 1960s, the very right-wing of the most conservative fringes of American politics were really frustrated with both political parties and frustrated with the status quo. And so, they developed a new strategy for reaching conservatives in their homes and raising money from them called direct mail. And direct mail initially — now, it’s e-mails, but it started out as letters, personalized letters that were tailored to donors and supporters of conservative causes, and direct mail letters are written with a very specific purpose in mind, typically designed to outrage or anger or at least motivate some action on behalf of an — by an individual, a recipient of that letter who will already be sympathetic to that cause. And so, it was the right that was using direct mail quite effectively by the late ’60s and early 1970s. And a number of groups on the political left saw this and decided to first dip a toe in and then dive all the way into direct mail. So, they started putting together lists of members of liberal and progressive organizations and merging those lists and sorting those voters into folks who would be most sympathetic to certain kinds of appeals. And so, organizations on the left and right start bringing in much more money across the 1970s using direct mail.

MARTIN: So, you write that the direct mail donation soliciting strategy ballooned NOW’s budget, but it also centralized power and narrowed the group’s focus, undermining the influence and the involvement of ordinary members. So, what makes you so convinced that it was this kind of pivot to the fundraising strategy that was so powerful and changing the shape of the organization?

TURK: Sure. Well, so NOW continues to gain members across the 1970s through direct mail. So, using direct mail both for fundraising and for just reaching out to sympathetic folks, NOW gets much, much bigger. And as it becomes associated with the Equal Rights Amendment in both its members’ minds, but also in the mind of the broader public, NOW becomes much more prominent on the national scene. And my book shows how after the Equal Rights Amendment expired in 1982, NOW is in this kind of paradoxical position where it has a lot of prominence, it has resources and the ability to get more, but it’s not really sure what its identity is. If it’s not the ERA anymore, what is this organization and what can it do? So, certainly, the sociologist, Theda Skocpol, has written brilliantly about how many membership organizations lost people. They lost members across the 1970s for the reason that you described and for others too, the sort of weakening of the labor movement, a kind of more individualistic culture. But through the 1970s, NOW actually bucks that trend and gains members. So, direct mail, a kind of tactic that’s especially suited for one goal, one vision, one objective. Direct mail was actually quite effective for NOW in helping it to grow. It’s just the nature of membership change. That suddenly with direct mail, you could — you would receive a letter from the national headquarters as opposed to seeking out your local chapter. And then, you would perhaps give some money, perhaps sign up as a member, but that might be the only contact you have with the organization until it’s time to renew your membership the following year. So, it’s just a whole different model of belonging and of being part of an organization.

MARTIN: Do you see a parallel to the current moment where somehow that there seems like an inverse proportion between how much money you can raise and how quickly and how effective you can be as an organization?

TURK: I think that’s right. And, you know, you could also look to all of the national organizations that have been working towards reproductive rights and abortion rights, right? The Dobbs opinion came down despite those organizations having raised millions and millions of dollars and, you know, mobilized supporters to give that money. So, yes, I think NOW’s story can help us understand what we lose when the grassroots is no longer in the driver’s seat. So, there are folks in every community all over this country who want to do something about workplace violence and sexual assault and want to do something about our abortion rights. But the national landscape, at least of these D.C. based organizations, what they’re offering people is oftentimes a way to give money, a way to sign up as a member, perhaps sign a petition, open your e-mail inbox to lots of messages, but what’s missing from the research that I’ve done on NOW in its most productive years in the early ’70s is a way to do something, a way to organize in your community around those issues in a local sense, a way that matters to you and to the people where you live, but can also be nationally coordinated. So, the book talks about how NOW in its — in the early ’70s, in its first decade or so, was really only loosely coordinated from the top, and it was local members who were in the driver’s seat, not only signing petitions and, you know, paying those membership dues, but actually driving the movement’s agenda. And what’s lost when it’s a more top-down model is people’s sense of ownership, not only belonging, but really being able to shape the agenda of a movement that is also theirs.

MARTIN: Once people have moved away from something, can you really go back to it?

TURK: I think you can. I think you could. I think you would have to define women expansively to include not only, you know, self-identifying women, but gender nonbinary people, and of course, all of their allies as NOW did. But I think that there would be a lot of power in that kind of organizing. There’s power in solidarity, power in coalition. And well, NOW — you know, when NOW was founded, there was not this mass movement of conservative women that we have now. So, an organization like that would have to perhaps reach out to those folks to the extent that they could, but might also have to be OK with leaving them behind in forging an agenda that is broadly conceived as beneficial to women. But I think you could get a lot done.

MARTIN: I think that some conservators would argue that the reason why an organization like NOW fell from prominence is that people just don’t agree with them. OK. That they always had organized resistance from certain, you know, conservative groups, conservative women’s groups because they didn’t agree with them. They’d argue that the reason why that groups like Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter have not achieved the effectiveness that they desire is that people don’t agree with them. What would you say to that?

TURK: Well, certainly. And as we were saying before, the notion of an organization that could speak for 51 percent of the population, plus male allies, that’s a wildly ambitious, even outlandish goal, right? Women are as diverse as the nation itself. But the — but pursuing the goal itself really matters, right? The Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, like today, was broadly supported. I think something like 80 percent of Americans supported the ERA by the late ’70s and support it today. So, this kind of expansive organizing can never capture everyone. Of course, I mean, how could we — how could our — a nation as diverse as ours possibly host organizations that can speak for every single person, right? Our own political institutions, which are supposed to speak for all of us are in disrepair and struggling at the moment. But the effort still matters. The effort to craft a big tent and stretch it as far as you can and keep a broad coalition of diverse people together in pursuit of change can accomplish previously unimaginable results. And you can look to NOW’s history to — for just one example of that.

MARTIN: It just seems interesting that your book arrives at a time when one of those animating decisions has now been reversed and the landscape is very different across the country. I mean, the access to abortion rights is wildly different across the country in a way that was the case 50 years ago. And I was just curious what some of the people you interviewed had to say about that. What do they think about that?

TURK: Yes. So, upset and perhaps not surprised because they’ve been dealing with this conservative backlash to groups like NOW for more than 50 years. But certainly, they shared a sense that when they won these landmarks, on behalf of women on behalf of feminism, they had thought they would be permanent and that it’s frustrating to feel that benefits and gains their generation secured are now being undone. But, you know, you mentioned that I’m a scholar and a researcher and a writer, but I’m also a teacher. And I teach women’s history. I teach feminist history. And one of the points I always make again and again in a semester is that the women who built this movement are just like you, women and men and people, I should say. They weren’t — they’re not special. I mean, everyone is special, but they’re not — they weren’t like preordained to be the leaders or even the members of a movement and the movement was not built or powered by famous individuals, individuals who are household names, it worked because millions of ordinary people decided to come together in their communities and be in solidarity and advocate for changes that would mean something to them and other people in their lives. And so, you know, the answer to the question of what can possibly counteract dark money and gerrymandering and out of control capitalism. The answer is people. Ordinary people, masses of people. And we’ve seen this. I know it can happen as a historian because American history is full of examples of exactly this kind of dynamic. So, while for many feminists, this is a frustrating time, but there’s also a lot we can draw on from our past, even our recent past to help us chart a way forward.

MARTIN: Katherine Turk, thanks so much for talking with us.

TURK: Thank you, Michel. It was a pleasure.