THE WOMEN OF NOW

How the influential women’s organization evolved.

Historian Turk tells a lively story of the development of the National Organization for Women by focusing on three activist members: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins, and Patricia Hill Burnett, women whose vastly different backgrounds shaped their views on feminism. Hernandez (1926-2017), a New Yorker, was the daughter of Jamaican immigrants. In 1965, after a decade spent organizing textile workers, she was appointed to the newly established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. However, she soon became disillusioned “in her quest to make government power work for women.” Burnett (1920-2014), married to a wealthy Detroit businessman and the mother of four, was a frustrated artist, chafing against society’s “expectations for a moneyed white wife.” Collins (b. 1939) was raised in an Irish Catholic family that struggled financially, and after college, she worked in the corporate world, where sexism was rife. Turk traces the women’s careers and growing influence in NOW: Hernandez became its second president, succeeding Betty Friedan; Burnett led the organization’s international program; in the 1980s, Collins became one of NOW’s two vice presidents. The author also reveals the “smoldering disagreements,” internal rivalries, and financial problems that beset the organization from the start. Disagreements arose over NOW’s position on the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion; lesbian, transgender, and Black women felt excluded from NOW’s largely White, middle-class membership. Turk recounts NOW’s protests against sexism “in churches, law, employment, beauty pageants, Little Leagues, advertising, toys, and more,” and she sets the organization’s goals and strategies in the context of an increasingly polarized political arena. Admitting that she considers herself a beneficiary of NOW’s achievements, she recognizes that she lives in a world “where elite women can scale the heights of influence while their sisters suffer crushing inequality and insecurity; a world where sexism thrives, but often in disguise; a world whose backlash to feminism is evidence of the movement’s continued power.” The book includes 16 pages of black-and-white images.

A thoroughly researched and well-balanced history.