"I had no idea," Friedan said, "that my book would start a revolution." Or, as futurist Alvin Toffler put it, Friedan "pulled the trigger on history," launching a tumultuous decade for American women with Friedan at the epicenter.
In June 1966, Friedan joined members of state commissions on the status of women for a national conference in Washington. Frustrated by their powerlessness, some of the members decided that a new, nongovernmental organization was needed to make women's rights a top national concern.
Huddled with Friedan at the closing banquet, the women whispered their ideas for a feminist NAACP. Friedan scribbled these words on a napkin: "National Organization for Women."
Four months later, the women reconvened in Washington for an organizing conference. Friedan was elected president, and NOW plunged into battle.
In one of its first campaigns, it pressured the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to prohibit sex-segregated help wanted ads. Soon after, it forced airlines to change a long-standing policy requiring stewardesses to resign once they married or turned 32. Later it successfully lobbied President Johnson to sign an executive order prohibiting sex discrimination by federal contractors.
Today, the group is anchored in Washington and has 500,000 members and branches in all 50 states. But in its early years, NOW's headquarters was Friedan's New York City apartment, and Friedan was indisputably in charge.
On Valentine's Day in 1968, she led a platoon of angry women into the exclusively male Oak Room at New York's Plaza Hotel to draw attention to sex discrimination in public places. After a series of similar dramatic demonstrations, individual states began to outlaw such exclusionary practices.
In 1970, the largest feminist demonstration since the suffrage movement took over 5th Avenue as Friedan called for a national Women's Strike for Equality. Held on the 50th anniversary of the passage of the women's suffrage amendment, it drew 500,000 women and heightened awareness of the women's movement across the nation.
Feminism was blooming: in universities, where women's studies courses began cropping up; in politics, where the House of Representatives passed the Equal Rights Amendment and Shirley Chisholm ran for president; and in popular culture, where books such as Robin Morgan's anthology "Sisterhood Is Powerful" and Kate Millett's "Sexual Politics" and a new magazine named Ms. were fomenting debate and adding phrases to the American lexicon.
