The National Organization for Women and the Channels of Legal Feminism

This paper reconsiders NOW’s legal agenda between the group’s 1966 founding and the 1982 expiration of the Equal Rights Amendment.  Departing from scholarship that presents NOW’s approach to the law between these landmarks as a simplistic push for equal treatment, I argue that NOW’s legal feminism was multifaceted and experimental, offering crucial ballast to the “new feminism” of the long 1970s and other contemporary social movements.  

Legal feminism in NOW worked from both the “top down” and the “bottom up.” Its federated structure enabled NOW to engage the law through many channels at once. At the local level, members reasoned from their own circumstances, fashioning rights claims and offering personal understandings of state-enforced sex equality.  These NOW activists filed sex discrimination grievances, demanded full economic citizenship, and built multivalent campaigns that sought to reconfigure and protect the rights of women of varied racial, class, and sexual identities.  Chapter leaders became quasi-legal agents, learning and teaching members to file claims and pressure employers and government agencies. 

NOW’s attorneys and leaders sought to distill this grassroots energy into a coherent legal feminist agenda.  They pursued the passage of new sex equality laws, advocated for favorable court opinions that broadly interpreted women’s rights, and sought the vigorous enforcement of new protections.  Considered together, the varied applications of NOW’s legal activism demonstrate how feminists merged liberal integrationist goals with radical demands to transform or abolish sexist institutions.  But these distinct approaches to the law also fostered competing visions and tensions over goals and strategies.