The National Organization for Women, Sexuality, and The Right to Control One's Own Body

This paper reconsiders NOW’s reform agenda governing sex and sexuality. Departing from scholarship that focuses narrowly on the feminist sex wars, I place NOW’s proposals in the context of a larger social movement debate about the limits of a right to control one’s own body.

Within NOW, the idea of a right to control one’s body went far beyond abortion. Working with civil libertarians and early gay and lesbian rights groups, NOW members used the Roedecision and the right to choose it set out in unfamiliar ways. Creating a coherent agenda touching on sex education, rape reform, and lesbian rights, feminists insisted that the right to choose entitled women to state protection against private acts of sexual violence, not just freedom from government interference. Working with NOW, gay and lesbian rights activists used the idea of a right to choose to argue for tolerance for relationships and expression outside the home.

By the mid-1980s, NOW members found themselves on the defensive. But the stalling of the quest for sexual liberty also unearthed lingering ambivalence about the individualism that seemed ascendant in the 1970s. While promoting a right for adults to have sex, activists, attorneys, and lawmakers disagreed intensely about what made intimacy consensual. Erstwhile allies also defined private conduct differently, clashing about which forms of non-marital relationships should be seen in public or recognized by the state. These battles brought to the light anxieties that both colored and limited the culture of individualism emerging in the period.