From Kitchen to Capitol

By the mid-1960s, the spark of second-wave feminism had already been lit in kitchens, classrooms, and coffee shops across America. Women were voicing their frustration with the limitations of domestic life, the persistent gender pay gap, and the unspoken expectation that they should give more and accept less — in their marriages, their jobs, and in the broader culture. But it wasn’t until 1966 that those frustrations took shape in a formal, institutional way with the founding of the National Organization for Women, or NOW.
NOW didn’t begin with picket signs or marches. It began in hotel lobbies and federal conference rooms, after a group of women attending a meeting of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) realized they shared a common anger: Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which had promised equal treatment regardless of sex, was being ignored. One of those women was Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, who had helped articulate the private discontent simmering among middle-class housewives in 1963. By 1966, she and others were ready to take their rage into the public square, straight into the halls of power.
Their idea was simple but radical for the time: if discrimination against women was illegal, then the federal government should be accountable for enforcing that law. But no existing structure was doing that effectively. The EEOC, created to address civil rights violations, was already flooded with race-based cases and was reluctant to take gender seriously. When a group of women asked the commission to ban sex-segregated help-wanted ads, the EEOC laughed them away. It was that moment, equal parts humiliating, and galvanizing, which led directly to the creation of NOW.¹

From Washington to the Workplace and Beyond

NOW’s founding marked a turning point: the movement for women’s equality was no longer just about consciousness-raising. It was about building a bureaucracy that could lobby, sue, and legislate. Within its first year, NOW drafted a mission statement calling for “true equality for all women” in American society. That meant stricter enforcement of Title VII in the workplace, and also affordable childcare, maternity leave, reproductive rights, and equal access to education.
These weren’t abstract demands. They reflected the compromises working women across the country were forced to make balancing paid employment with housework, navigating sexist bosses, enduring wage discrimination, and being denied promotions solely because of their gender. NOW understood that legal protections implemented in Washington meant little if they weren’t enforced in the institutions where women lived and worked. So, they organized, filed lawsuits, wrote position papers, and pushed federal agencies to apply and enforce the law.
In many ways, the organization mirrored the very structures it sought to influence. NOW was specifically designed to look and function as a professional entity: with officers, charters, chapters, and annual conventions. This was not a loose collective of disgruntled activists passing around flyers. It was a formal, dues-paying membership body, and it used the tools of institutional power to fight institutional discrimination.

The Kitchen as the Back Office

While NOW’s efforts focused on policy and law, its roots and its base remained grounded in the private sphere. Many of its members were suburban housewives who had grown weary of domestic confinement and yearned for purpose beyond the home. These were women who volunteered for PTA boards, managed household budgets, and ran community events. They had experience and skills, and they were ready to use them.
The irony was not lost on women that the very labor that had kept them isolated organizing birthday parties, coordinating bake sales, and keeping calendars also prepared them with the necessary skills to build the administrative engine of a national movement that aimed to liberate them. NOW’s mailing lists, fundraising campaigns, and local chapter meetings were often managed from kitchen tables. NOW was bureaucratizing feminism, but the organization was still being run from homes by women doing double duty.
This dynamic was both a strength and a challenge. On one hand, it gave the organization an incredible grassroots base. On the other, it exposed a deeper tension within the movement: only certain women had the time, education, and financial resources to participate. The rise of professionalized feminism meant that leadership often went to women with degrees, access to legal tools, and flexible schedules. Although NOW purported to speak for “all women,” working-class women and women of color were frequently dissatisfied with the organization’s heavy focus on the issues of white, middle class women. This tension would later bring about divisions within the movement.

Lobbying with a Legal Pad

NOW quickly established itself as a serious political player. By the early 1970s, it was effectively lobbying Congress, pressuring the Department of Labor, and testifying at hearings on gender discrimination. The group filed lawsuits on behalf of airline flight attendants forced to quit after marriage, teachers fired for being pregnant, and factory workers denied promotions. These were not symbolic actions. They were targeted efforts to reshape the rules of the workplace.
A key tool in this work was Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. Though originally written to combat racial discrimination, the last-minute addition of “sex” to the statute gave feminist lawyers a foothold. NOW pushed the EEOC to take its mandate seriously and used the courts to challenge employers who violated the law. The organization also published reports exposing disparities in wages, hiring, and promotions across industries.
Some of NOW’s victories came without fanfare. When a Fortune 500 company revised its maternity leave policy, or a federal agency updated its job posting guidelines, it was often because someone at NOW had lobbied behind the scenes. The group’s work wasn’t always visible, but it was deeply strategic.

Paper Trails and Pushback

The movement’s bureaucratic turn came with trade-offs. As NOW became more structured and policy-focused, some feminists criticized it for becoming too moderate, too legalistic, and too white. Radical groups like the Redstockings and the Combahee River Collective argued that professional feminism had left behind those still cleaning houses and punching time clocks. The shift from collective rebellion to legal advocacy struck some as a retreat or a compromise to make feminism palatable to corporate and political elites.
But others saw it differently. Institutionalization wasn’t a betrayal; it was a necessity. If the problem was systemic, then the solution must also be systemic. NOW’s leaders believed that challenging power meant engaging with it, even if that meant attending committee meetings or wading through HR policy. They weren’t abandoning radical change; they were embedding it into the very places that had long excluded women.
And it worked. Just not perfectly. Women gained access to professional jobs in greater numbers, and companies rolled back discriminatory policies. But the pay gap remained. So did occupational segregation and the assumption that women, no matter how successful, would still do the bulk of household chores and caregiving. Feminist legal wins didn’t eliminate the double standard, but they did make it increasingly difficult to justify on paper.

The Revolution Will Be Administered

The creation of NOW in 1966 marked a new phase of feminism. Women recognized that legal change wasn’t just about passing laws. It was about making sure those laws worked and were enforced. It was about turning abstract rights into real policies, in real offices, affecting real people. And that required infrastructure and bureaucracy. If women were going to fight the system from within, the revolution would need a paper trail. To fight fire with fire, feminism had to learn the language of bureaucracy: that meant rules and rosters, meetings, and memos.

Notes
Mary Frances Berry, Why ERA Failed: Politics, Women’s Rights, and the Amending Process of the Constitution (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 58–61.
Jo Freeman, The Politics of Women’s Liberation: A Case Study of an Emerging Social Movement and Its Relation to the Policy Process (New York: David McKay Company, 1975), 102–110.
Susan M. Hartmann, The Other Feminists: Activists in the Liberal Establishment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 87–93.
Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism from Suffrage through the Rise of the New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 144–147.
Dorothy Sue Cobble, The Other Women’s Movement: Workplace Justice and Social Rights in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 131–139.