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Passionate about modern feminist issues? Want to learn more about how today's political, academic, and cultural leaders strive for a future of universal equality and justice?
Join NOW in a podcast dedicated to intersectional feminist discussions in American society with leaders in entertainment, sports, politics, and science. From conversations on constitutional equality, to economic justice and reproductive rights, listeners will find new ways to learn, engage, and get empowered.
Listen for new episodes released every other Wednesday.
Speaker 1 (00:02.124)
Feminism is so personal. mean, who doesn't want to be free? Who doesn't want to define their own life? Who doesn't want to control their own body? It is such a sensible orientation that I think it will always appeal to every generation.
you
Speaker 2 (00:26.008)
Hello and welcome to Feminism Now. I'm Kim Villanueva, the president of the National Organization for Women. When you look at the issues facing women across the country today, it seems like many of them are designed to drive us apart. Pro-choice or not, whether someone is anti-racist, the religions people practice, and particularly political parties seem more divided than ever. This makes the work of now seem almost like a dream. We're so divided, can we possibly all get behind one thing? The rights of women?
National Vice President Rose Brunach and I firmly believe that we can. And so did the founding members of NOW. But how do we gather everyone together? How do we make sure everyone is included? I think here we can learn from our history. And that's why Rose and I are excited to hear today from Catherine Turk, a historian and author of The Women of NOW, How Feminists Build an Organization That Transformed America. We can't wait for you to hear that conversation.
Speaker 2 (01:22.456)
I'm so happy to be here today with Dr. Turk, a professor of history and adjunct professor of women's and gender studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She specializes in the history of women, gender and sexuality, as well as in the history of labor and social movements. So that basically means she's the ideal person to have written the book, The Women of Now, How Feminists Build an Organization That Transformed America. Rose and I were both excited to read this book and we're excited to have Dr. Turk here to talk with us about Now.
its history and what we can learn from the past. And I just want to say personally, when I was considering running for president of NOW, I studied your book for background information. So Dr. Turk, welcome.
Well, what a pleasure and an honor to be here with both of you. I'm so excited for our conversation today.
Well, let's get started. I want to make sure our listeners have some background as we get into this. So obviously Rose and I are both interested in the history of NOW, but what made you want to learn more and write a book about NOW's founding?
For me, it felt like so many doors were open to me that were not open to my mom and certainly not my grandmother and the earlier generations of women in my family. As a historian or a historical thinker, I was really curious about what changed and why. As historians, we push against the idea that rights are just handed to people, that there is an arc of change where things always get better, where progress just inevitably happens.
Speaker 1 (02:47.69)
And so these are the kinds of questions I brought to thinking about the past in my family, in my life, about how did things get this way and what people, what organizations are responsible for making the kinds of change that I and other women in my generation could benefit from. And I kept coming back to now. And as I took women's history courses and read and studied the second wave feminism, I was just really intrigued that every account
included now that now is founding in 1966 was a pivotal moment in women's history and in certainly the history of feminism. But then those accounts tended to pivot away from now very quickly to look at other kinds of organizations, other currents and intellectual traditions among women. But I thought, you know, a lot of those organizations fizzled out very quickly. Now is still here.
And when you look at the key victories that second waivers made, which women in future generations were able to benefit from, was always there, if not at the forefront, then in the mix. And I wanted to understand this puzzle that there was this universal sense that now was really important, but then this sense that we already knew what now was, that now was liberal, white, middle-class feminists advocating for themselves and women like.
wanting a seat at the table as opposed to systemic change. And that was another aspect of Now's history that just didn't quite make sense to me as it was being told. That Now seemed to be this fluid, living, dynamic entity that made so much change. And yet I wanted to read about that change in a book. And when I couldn't find it, I thought, well, maybe I'll try to write that book. And so that's how The Women of Now came about.
So, now it was founded in 1966 at an annual conference of the State of Women's Commission. In what way were the 28 founders inclusive?
Speaker 1 (04:46.03)
So, now's first group of founders was about two dozen women, as you mentioned, Rose, who were at this conference in Washington, D.C. in June of 1966. And because the women at the conference all came from various state commissions on the status of women, they were representative in the sense that they were geographically diverse. They were representative in the sense that they worked on different women's issues in their states.
So there were activists who came from the labor movement, who came from religious circles, who worked on daycare, who worked in war on poverty efforts, who worked in education. But these were relatively elite women, just given the status that they had to have been invited to the commission on the status of women. But then there's a second group of founders who are at NOW's first conference in Oc...
1966 and together that's a group of 49 women and men who now considers to be its founders and this included an even more diverse group of activists. And now as first founders we're really excited about the idea that men be involved in the organization to to show that feminism is for everyone and it's not scary, it doesn't alienate men or anyone. But still this is a pretty elite group of women who have the
time and the motivation and the energy and the resources to get themselves to the Capitol to dedicate their time to work on this issue on top of whatever career that they have. And these were career women at this point in time. So, with the Democratic Party, but now has always not been affiliated with one particular party and there's early Republican members. Can you talk about that for a bit?
Recently feminism has been a
Speaker 2 (06:31.916)
and Republican.
So now's founders were quite adamant that the organization be nonpartisan. They didn't want to be seen as being in the pocket of either major political party. And frankly, if we can take ourselves back to this moment that feels a long time ago in the mid 1960s, there were feminists in both parties. There were feminist women and men among the Democrats and the Republicans. And as now's earliest leaders pointed out, neither major party had done much for women specifically.
So they saw remaining nonpartisan as a way to stay flexible and nimble while building their clout to show that they were open to any politician from any ideology that was going to advance the rights and needs of women. And so that starts to change across the 1970s as American politics becomes more polarized and feminism becomes an ideology that
that really splits along party lines. Whereas today, I don't think you would see a feminist Republican who necessarily embraces all of the tenants that now stands for. But I think there are important lessons we can draw from this early insistence that refusing to take a partisan side can give feminists more clout, more ability to reach to both sides of the aisle, to talk about its issues in terms of what will make women's lives better. I mean, that should be.
a nonpartisan issue that every political leader gets into office to try to advance.
Speaker 2 (08:10.958)
OK, just following up on that discussion, one of the women that you featured in your book was a Republican. And she was actually a very wealthy Republican. But you also focused on a Labor Democrat and an attorney from Harvard. So in a way, now it was very intersectional. But yet, it wasn't. So how did now try to address that?
So I think one of the major tensions that we can analyze in now's history that helps us understand what these activists were trying to do was the tension between going broad and going narrow. And for many of these women who come to now, this is the first time they've experienced real power. This is the first time they've had an opportunity to lead. And feminism is so personal to them. And so we see a lot of these now activists in the early years
imagining this organization as a vehicle that will advance their interests. And they don't yet have the concept of intersectionality. And many of them don't quite understand that they need to advocate for an inclusive feminism, right, for issues that may not on their face sound like they are only about women, but that would actually help bring women who are less privileged along, help them to advance. And I would say one thing that struck me in researching and writing this book
is just how patient some of the early leaders of color in now were. mean, women like Pauli Murray and Eileen Hernandez had spent decades trying to build coalitions, effectively building coalitions, reaching across lines of identity. And you can see in Now's archive just how patient they are with more middle-class white feminists who don't understand, but who sometimes want to try to understand.
why an issue like mass incarceration or the war in Vietnam or access to food and housing, like why these are feminist issues. Some white feminists in now understood that from the beginning, many others did not. And so we do see though in now's archive successive generations of women and activists who are not white and middle-class coming to now with the
Speaker 1 (10:25.486)
expectation that now will advocate for their issues because this is an organization that claims to be for all women. And so it needs to live up to what it claims to be. And we see that generation after generation. another, I guess, question I had, I brought to this project was why if now is so often dismissed since its earliest years as a white and middle-class liberal organization, why did so many women who did not have that orientation spend their time?
in now. Why did they see now as this vehicle that could advance their interests and the interests of others like them? And I think this is the dynamic that we can see from now's origins more than 50 years ago, all the way up to the present. I mean, it's so exciting that now is still here and that now has new leaders and it is this vehicle to drive feminism into the 21st century. It's amazing. And our color ticket. I'm so glad you're here.
First woman.
Thank you. Just to follow up on something you mentioned, now was created to really bring women together and to bond women. But yet early on, there were divisions. Could you talk about some of the divisions and some of the issues that divided the founders?
Well, certainly questions about what counts as a feminist issue, which issues should be given priority, issues of sexuality, questions about whether to advocate for lesbian rights. And folks who are listening to this podcast may know the story of Betty Friedan, one of NOW's founders and NOW's first president, who publicly called lesbians a, quote, lavender menace, was worried that open lesbian involvement in
Speaker 1 (12:04.846)
groups like now or in the movement more generally would set the movement back. That said, Friedan, her view does not win out. A group of lesbian members of now in California come together, they press their case that lesbian rights are women's rights and the same issues that affect straight women affect lesbians and vice versa and that the movement has to be broad if it's going to be effective. And now openly and proudly endorses lesbian rights as early as 1971. That said,
there are longstanding tensions about which issues to prioritize. And as now moves into the 1970s, as conservative political headwinds start to force the organization to make difficult choices, now as leaders decide to give priority to pursuing the Equal Rights Amendment as it starts to look like it's going to slip away. And that decision has implications for now's messaging, for which priorities it funds, for how it
builds its own organization and imagines its feminism. But now is also flexible enough that it is still here, that it can survive that battle and win another day and serve a new generation of feminists. And here it is serving another generation of feminists. Maybe one more issue that I'll just mention that has less to do with identity is the question of work. Who is going to do the work to make this organization run? And now as founders,
most of whom, as I mentioned, were professional women, women who might have had their own secretary. They did not want to be mimeographing letters, typing letters, putting together newsletters, sitting on long-distance phone calls. I mean, this is the kind of grunt work that they hoped a group like now might liberate them from. And so even from now's earliest days, there is always way more clerical and organizing work.
to do than there are people to do it. And certainly than there is money to fairly pay people who are going to do it. It's not just that ideas naturally went out and movements naturally get built. People have to do the work to get the word out, hold the meeting, to put up the advertisement for the meeting, to make the newsletter, to tell everybody what to do, where to be when. All of that is work.
Speaker 2 (14:20.3)
You have a wonderful point about the fact that infrastructure is just as important as identity within an organization. I think personally being in NOW, I've learned so much about how to organize, Robert's rules, parliamentary procedure. mean, things like that are so important in terms of just being an activist. And I did want to follow up on your discussion about Betty Friedan. I I regularly see lavender menace t-shirts at NOW conferences now. And I'm very proud to say that I'm the first out lesbian president of NOW.
That's so wonderful and it's well past time. It's the perfect time for now to have an out lesbian president. And I think it is through groups like now that, you know, maybe we take for granted as having been always been in the mainstream, having always sort of held down the center. But what now was doing when it was founded in the mid 1960s was quite radical for its day and now has moved the needle, even if it sometimes feels like the broader feminist movement or broader culture.
pushes ahead of now sometimes and now has to catch up. As I mentioned, now is still here and doing this amazing work and it's the infrastructure. The women who built now understood that having come from institutions and built institutions in the civil rights movement, in the labor movement, in higher education, in churches, they understood the importance of building infrastructure, having systems to outlast and live beyond any one generation of leaders.
ways to resolve disputes, ways to foster internal democracy in the organization. And these systems, of course, are not perfect, but they are essential. And I really credit now's founders for understanding that.
You said earlier...
Speaker 2 (16:04.398)
and we're patient, but in the end now ended up pursuing and several movements rather than intersectional.
doing race and sex as parents.
Why do you think that happened? I think now is and has been at every moment in now's history, the amalgamation of the aspirations and hopes and visions and priorities of the bulk of its members. Of course, now has never existed in a vacuum outside of broader American politics and culture. I mean, I think for many of the women who built now and who were its first couple of generations, many of the white women,
They were in sympathy with the civil rights movement. Some of them had participated in the civil rights movement, but they saw feminism as something that was for them. And women of color could come along too, but that feminism was going to be about women fairly narrowly defined. The idea of an organization that is for women, it's such an inclusive idea, but if it's defined narrowly, then it becomes narrowly implemented.
question to piggyback on conversation now about race and sex shape.
Speaker 1 (17:11.328)
is have the questions.
and United States broadly? I would say certainly in the 1980s. Now is working quite productively with figures like Coretta Scott King, with organizations like the NAACP and others. And so we can see examples in now's past of really broad and effective coalition building. But I think this question of what counts as a women's issue, which women should be foregrounded? How can one organization speak for all women?
We do see in now's past, at least in the parts that I've studied, a tendency for those women whose only disadvantage had to do with sex. Otherwise they could get ahead, otherwise they could advance. Those women tended to have their concerns prioritized, to have their concerns at the front of the line. It has been an educational process for now to make sure its members understand that if now is going to be for women, it needs to think about the broad array of circumstances that women.
experience and how to lift all boats.
We're gonna take a quick break to speak to members of our chapters. But when we get back, we're gonna follow the money.
Speaker 1 (18:21.123)
you
Speaker 1 (18:25.176)
My name is Cora Trimbo and I am the founding chapter president of LaSalle County now. I'm so proud that my chapter has begun building events and safe spaces for women, people of color and the LGBTQIA community in the middle of a very Republican area. The issues that are most important to my chapter include advocating and filling in gaps for women's healthcare. This comes as our Planned Parenthood closed down.
and we don't have any women's clinics in our area. Alongside being a rural area and having the normal struggles of rural healthcare, we try to fill in as much as we can in getting women what they need to feel not only comfortable, but have dignity during administration and other important events in their life. In 2026, we are tackling the topic of the cost of being a woman.
by showcasing several women artists and women businesses in our area. We plan to have a passport that'll go all throughout LaSalle County to kind of showcase women owned businesses. And then alongside that, we also plan to kind of take in and have more of a voice in the community as far as being a place where people can go and get connected with these women and get connected with the community as much as possible.
You can find us at LaSalle County now, both on Facebook and on TikTok.
Speaker 2 (19:58.156)
And we're back with Dr. Catherine Turk, historian and author of The Women of Now, How Feminists Build an Organization That Transformed America. Dr. Turk, we've talked about some of the issues with now and women of color, but much of your book is also dedicated to economic equality and labor. So now is devoted to economic justice for all women. And in theory, that's been the case. But in history, it's played out a little different. Now members in the past have been more middle class and even upper class.
So what does this mean for the issues that they pursued?
We can look to the era when NOW was founded, the late 1960s, and we can see how NOW's envisioning of women as a class, as a subordinate class, did make a kind of sense. Women had very little access to earning a salary that could support them on their own. There were so many legal inequalities. Women could not get credit cards in their own name. Women could be fired for becoming pregnant. So by treating women as a single
subordinate class, now was able to lead the way on some real reforms in the law to get rid of sex as an identity that could, women could be oppressed in the workplace for that reason. That said, that helps some people much more than others. That does not reach the nurse who gets paid so much less than a doctor or the childcare worker who gets paid so much less than a zookeeper.
So there are systemic economic inequalities in our country that go all the way back to the founding days that tend to value certain kinds of work more than others. And by virtue of who the founders and early leaders of now were, those reforms which they continued to pursue did tend to benefit women who were already best positioned to take advantage of new opportunities.
Speaker 2 (21:50.818)
these issues that we've been talking about, race, gender.
sexuality, equality, what we call intersexuality
They are with sexuality now. Based on your research, issues have been divisive. And how can we get that knowledge to come together in the present?
Use that.
Now's first African-American president, Eileen Hernandez, brilliant organizer, comes out of the labor movement, really understands in the early 1970s and is, as now's president, and is pushing the other members to see we have to, for women of color, for us to meaningfully get ahead and have improvements in our lives, we have to push forward on issues of class, issues of race, issues of sex too. And for some of the white women in the organization,
Speaker 1 (22:35.778)
They had a hard time understanding why some of those issues that didn't have women explicitly in them, they saw those as side issues. They said, we're not against that stuff, but that's not what now is for. Now is here to advocate for women. And I mean, the concept of intersectionality has been so revelatory for the feminist movement. I mean, of course, black feminists like Pauli Murray, you can go all the way back to Sojourner Truth and probably further back too. They understood and talked about how
injustices and oppression, forms of oppression are overlapping and mutually reinforcing. But for a lot of white feminists, was hard to understand.
Could you talk about?
some of the spin-off groups, know, like Weel, organizations like that. So, you know, again, we might think of now's founding charge and some of its earliest priorities as being so mainstream now. But when now was founded in 1966, some of its first stands were quite radical. So now comes out in favor of abortion rights in 1967. mean, this is six years before Roe v. Wade, well before
and
Speaker 1 (23:46.35)
the states are doing much of anything to reform reproductive rights. And that is quite alarming to some of the Catholics who founded now. And so some of them actually get up in that meeting and walk out and form wheel to pursue some of the same goals that now has, but they don't touch abortion rights. The founders of the National Black Feminist Organization in the early 1970s include really
storied black women organizers from Eleanor Holmes Norton to Shirley Chisholm to Pauli Murray, some of whom were founders of now, early leaders of now, felt that some of their earliest hopes for now, that it would be an organization that would conceive of women's oppression broadly and that it would conceive of workplace harms broadly. When those hopes did not seem to be advancing, they said, well, let's take the same idea and we'll organize black women expansively.
but we'll make sure that black women's perspective is sort of stamped onto this organization from the beginning. So now it's important as an organization, we should study it, we should understand it, but I think it's also important as a kind of political and cultural touchstone that the fact that it is there and it exists and it persists sometimes inspires other groups to take some of its ideas or to use some of its tactics.
but to organize in a different direction, in a different way. And now it collaborates with the National Black Feminist Organization in the time that it existed. I think now as leaders generally thought, this is what we're doing, here's our agenda, here's how we're going for it. But we're happy to work with other groups too, if they feel that they need to organize in a different way or a different constituency.
As you mentioned, NAL was formed in 1966 and we're celebrating our 60th anniversary. And so that means as with many organizations, the early leaders were succeeded by younger activists. But we still have an aging membership in NAL. And it seems that many young people today don't really identify as feminist. So why do you think that is?
Speaker 1 (25:53.602)
Well, I would say in some ways, now has been a victim of its own success that now accomplished so much, especially in its first 15 years, that for successive generations of women who want to have careers, who want to control their own bodies, they may not see the need. They may feel that they can take for granted a lot of the victories that were so hard won by now. Unfortunately, that is probably starting to change.
I see NOW's intergenerational membership and longevity as such a potential advantage for the organization. I mean, so many of the women I interviewed for this book who are in their 70s and 80s are just so eager to pass the torch to younger feminists. As a historian, of course, I'm oriented to thinking about lessons from the past that we can bring to the future. But I think NOW's history is just so rich with lessons about the benefits of having
a broad coalition of having many definitions of success and many issues that you're working on so that if there's one issue or one front that you're sort of pushed back on, there's other avenues. I mean, now is grassroots driven structure, which allows the local members to really sort of have a hand on the wheel, steering the organization, innovating ideas, trying different things in different communities.
The kind of feminism that is going to be really effective in a rural part of a red state is probably not the same as the kinds of tactics and priorities and approaches that will be effective in an urban area of a blue state. And the brilliance of now is that it is flexible enough to accommodate those different kinds of feminism, but all under the umbrella of a strong national organization. so I think
It's so exciting that now is still here. It is more necessary than ever. I mean, as someone who interacts with young women all the time in my classes and on my university, I mean, I think they are so eager, not only for this history, but to understand what this history can offer them as they peer into their own futures, into the future of our nation.
Speaker 2 (28:07.246)
All right, as a student of history and after your years of research, do you consider yourself a feminist?
absolutely. How could I not? We can see it in women's history all the way back to before there was a United States of America. And when you take a historical view, you see all of the victories that have been won, but also all of the road that there still is left to travel. And I think feminism has been so transformative for our nation. has offered routes to organize, routes to imagine, routes to power, to claim power that
women certainly would not have without it. And so I think we need feminism more than we ever have. And I'm so glad again, that now is still here pushing the movement forward.
about conservative headwinds that changed. We are facing
in the seventies, priorities at now, conservative headwinds now. What do you think?
Speaker 2 (29:05.916)
feminist movement will pursue.
What now is trying to do is not, it shouldn't be especially controversial. again, I mean, think the certainly now has a long track record of lobbying at the national level, lobbying Congress, pushing in the capital for big national changes. But a lesson we can draw from now's history, another one, is that when the fact that now has these different levels of power from the local to the state to the national, now can...
move along different tracks at the same time. when in moments where there's a lot of national political headwinds, like maybe Washington is not the place to try to really advance. Like maybe the advancements are going to be made at the grassroots in people's towns, communities in different states, right? I mean, now has the capacity to accommodate all kinds of creativity. I mean, what are the pressing political issues right now that people can agree around? you know, history does also offer us the lesson that
things can change very quickly. But to have a permanent, semi-seemingly permanent organization like now on the landscape as a vehicle to sort of hold back the floodgates on conservative resurgence when that's really happening, or to press forward at moments of more opportunity. I mean, it's hard to think of other organizations in the American national landscape that can do that, that have that track record and that are still here as nimble and as flexible, but also as strong as now is.
despite all the national headwinds and floodgates that you mentioned, what makes you hopeful for feminism?
Speaker 1 (30:39.468)
It just makes so much sense. You know, I teach so many young women and people of other genders too, and they really wanna know the history. They really wanna understand, like, what was it like for women a long time ago? What opportunities did they have? What limits did they have in their lives? mean, feminism is so personal. I mean, who doesn't want to be free?
who doesn't want to define their own life, who doesn't want to control their own body. I think it is such a sensible orientation that I think it will always appeal to every generation. And so I see part of my job as an author who writes about the history of feminism, but also as a teacher, is just to tell the truth, to tell my students or my readers as plainly as I can. This is what things were like before the second wave, before, and not that,
the second wave did everything right or that there aren't still problems, but just the second wave brought about an undeniable sea change and now was a huge part of that. And would you have really wanted to live in a time when you couldn't have a credit card, when you could not really have imagined a life as an independent woman unattached to a man? mean, the more that you tell young people about why previous generations have spent so much time and energy and money and
blood, and tears to build a feminism and to bring as many people as they can find along, the more it just makes sense and the more, I think, motivating young people find it. so I think feminism has a very bright future.
This has been such a fascinating conversation.
Speaker 1 (32:24.45)
Thank you so much, Kim and Rose. That was wonderful.
Speaker 1 (32:31.15)
This is
It's now 60th anniversary of our birth. With four major topics are important to feminism. Learning opportunities and ways to get involved in person and online. Our four capsules this year are the cost of being on phone protecting care, protecting choice, securing rights,
woman protect
Speaker 1 (32:54.774)
...aping the future and ending... ...for the cost of being a woman.
gender violence. We're talking about expanding the fight for intersectional justice, protecting choice. We're talking about reproductive rights nationwide in a post pro and securing rights and shaping the future. We'll focus on the equal rights and for ending violence. We'll talk about gender based violence and online harassment. Coming to you with more. But meanwhile, check it out and get involved at N.O.W.
for protecting.
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era.
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to my
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I will be co-
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dot org.
Speaker 2 (33:29.762)
Thank you so much for joining us as Rose and I talk feminist history and feminist future with Catherine Turk. We learned so much from her book and I hope you learned from our conversation. If you did, we'd love for you to share the show with your fellow feminists. We want to come together for our rights and we can't do it without you. Please spread the word about our show. We'd love to hear what you thought about the show, if you've read Catherine's book and what you think. Get our number from the show notes, give us a call and send us a voice message.
or email us a voice memo at feminismnow at n-o-w dot o-r-g. We might even put your memo in the next episode. We always want to hear from our members because we know that only together can we make a difference. Thanks for listening and stay tuned for our next episode in two weeks.