A History of the National Organization for Women

FAIN: FT-254415-17

Katherine Turk
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Chapel Hill, NC 27599-1350)

A book-length history of the National Organization for Women, 1966-2016

In 1966, a diverse group of activists created the National Organization for Women (NOW) to build “a civil rights movement to speak for women.” Claiming NOW will yield the first comprehensive account of the largest and most significant feminist membership organization in American history. Over the decades, NOW’s leaders and hundreds of local chapters built undeniable momentum that made feminism mainstream. But NOW’s mass appeal and open-ended blueprint also produced new adversaries as it fought to “desexigrate” American citizenship and destabilized the very category of “woman.” By foregrounding NOW in the past half-century of American history, Claiming NOW reveals how centrist feminism transformed as it took shape, intersecting with conservative forces to produce our own social and political landscape.

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