The Women of NOW - How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America

"A clear blueprint for change . . . A must-read." -Clara Bingham, The Guardian

The history of NOW-its organization, trials, and revolutionary mission-told through the work of three members.

In the summer of 1966, crammed into a D.C. hotel suite, twenty-eight women devised a revolutionary plan. Betty Friedan, the well-known author of TheFeminineMystique, and Pauli Murray, a lawyer at the front lines of the civil rights movement, had called this renegade meeting from attendees at the annual conference of state women-s commissions. Fed up with waiting for government action and trying to work with a broken system, they laid out a vision for an organization to unite all women and fight for their rights. Alternately skeptical and energized, they debated the idea late into the night. In less than twenty-four hours, the National Organization for Women was born.

In The Women of NOW, the historian Katherine Turk chronicles