 I'm Elizabeth Sackler and it is a pleasure to have you here this afternoon for our presentation. In March we celebrated our third anniversary and of course many of you know you've been here over these years. We've hosted scores of wide-ranging programming both here in the forum and by extension in the auditorium. And we are as a center in exhibition space of course for the great dinner party by Georgia Chicago and we are an education facility dedicated to feminist art and indeed our mission is to raise awareness of feminism's cultural contributions and to educate what we say new generations and I realize that going into our fourth year we're actually probably bringing in another generation of people into the center and into our world. And today Miriam Fox is going to take us back and she's going to take us back to the origins of the modern women's movement and the formation of the National Organization of Women now and many of you may have been here when the current president Sonia Osorio was here a couple of years ago. She's been here a few times and was lecturing on trafficking and the work that now is doing and that she is doing against sex trafficking and the problems of sex trafficking in New York as a hub here. Miriam was a collaborator with the author of the Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan and many of you I'm sure know that the Feminine Mystique is regarded as one of the most influential nonfiction books of the 20th century and has sold more than three million copies and it catapulted in the 1960, Friedan as one of the chief architects of the women's liberation movement of the 60s which of course we now know would come to be called the second wave and we are now in the third wave and there's been a lot of talk about whether or not we have entered a fourth wave. I guess that remains to be seen history will let us know. When I graduated from high school it was that year in 1966 that Friedan and Fox founded now and I was thinking about that this morning and I imagine that without your work, without their work that life wouldn't have been what it was and what it is now that indeed without Betty and Miriam it's doubtful that we would have a center for feminist art today and then I got to thinking of course about Gloria Steinem who is a very good friend of the center and Bella Abzug whose daughter Liz is also a good friend and it's unlikely that without all of these women that Judy Chicago would have even done the dinner party. So we have so much to be grateful for the world would be really simply a very different place and I do not think a better place. I think we are far better and I thank you Miriam. So it's really an honor to have you. Muriel Fox is honorary board chairman of now legal defense fund and education fund now called legal momentum and board chair of veteran feminists of America which is how we connected and you have been here to some of our programming and it's been wonderful having you. She is a former executive vice president of Carl Bearer and associates one of the America's three largest public relations firms. She was a co-founder and public relations chair of the national organization of women in 1966 acting as the communicator who introduced the new women's movement to the media of the world. She chaired now's national board from 71 to 73. She is the founder of the international women's forum and was an early president of its New York chapter. She is senior editor of feminists who changed America for 22 years now she served as chairwoman of the equal opportunity awards dinner of the now legal defense fund and education fund and in 1991 now legal defense created the Muriel Fox award for communications leadership toward a just society and named her the first winner of its foxy. I love that. Muriel has many awards to her name including business week magazines list of 100 top corporate women Barnard colleges distinguished alumni award and she was the first recipient of New York state's now's Eleanor Roosevelt leadership award. She's lectured throughout the world on the American women's movement communications family trends networking for women and moving women up the corporate ladder. We need more ladder we need more women. Ms. Fox is a graduate of Barnard college she resides in Tappan has a son and a daughter and three I'm sure wonderful grandchildren. It is an extraordinary opportunity for us to have Muriel here today. She's been a leader in this movement for 44 years. She has titled today's talk how it began Betty Friedan and the modern women's movement. Please join me in welcoming Muriel Fox. Thank you Elizabeth and thank you Elizabeth for this wonderful Sackler wing. The feminist world is so grateful that you have given us this treasure to perpetuate women and feminists in the arts and feminists in the arts is different from women in the arts as we all know just to emphasize how important what we all did is Columbia professor of history Eli Ginsberg said in the 1990s the flood of women into jobs is the single most outstanding phenomenon of our century. The revolution in the role of women will have a greater potential impact than the rise of communism or the discovery of nuclear energy. So we can all be proud of ourselves. And the I just do want to go over what the situation was for some of you who are young you probably won't even believe what it was like in those days in 1966 when we founded now and started the modern women's movement incidentally. I think we're still on the second second wave. We haven't really got everything we needed but but we're all working together young and old in whatever way that is. But in 1966 of women working full time 89% earned under $5,000 a year. Women's averaged earnings were only 60% of what men were earning. And 75% of those women were in routine clerical sales or factory jobs or they were household workers or cleaning women. Only 7% of American doctors were women and only 3% of American lawyers. And how that has changed we're all happy to see. Women were getting only one out of three BAs from college. Now they're getting more than 50% I think it's 60% now. And only one out of 10 PhDs were women. So we had a long way to go and we've gone there. Employers in those days often told us outright often they would say sorry we don't hire women except as secretaries. Believe it or not time and news week would not allow women writers only researchers on the staff and they had good reasons which were of course terrible reasons. And as you know there were virtually no women artists represented in our museums and galleries. And again we're very grateful for the support we're getting to move ahead in the art world. There are numerous books there should be I think even more about the movement. If you wanted a recommendation my favorite is Gail Collins' book When Everything Changed. It's very well researched in addition to emphasizing what a change it's been and how dramatic it has changed women's and men's lives. The other book I would recommend is Feminists Who Changed America which is put out by veteran feminists of America and it has the biographies in their own words of 2200 leaders women and men who made the movement. You know we talk about Betty and Gloria and Bella and leaders. The truth is this movement succeeded because there were thousands of leaders 2200 in that book and we're still adding a supplement. And every one of these people what was a leader who made a big change in their community and their college and their labor union in their profession in every phase of life everything that made them mad they became a leader and changed it. And that's why our movement succeeded so fast really so fast and so dramatically because it was thousands and thousands of leaders who were angry and were smart enough and determined enough to make the difference. And incidentally well you're all too young well no you're not too young for veteran feminists of America because we're now admitting younger women and men to join but if you're interested in learning about how to join you can just Google veteran feminists of America just the way you can Google now and I hope you will for additional information and I hope to join the fight. So I'm going to give you a personal perspective on how it all started and how I got involved. I was working in the civil rights movement the workers defense league core the other organizations and like all my friends I wish that somebody would start quote an NAACP for women and I had all these experiences that made me mad and newspapers and broadcasting I was told we don't hire women or we have a woman in that department or we had a woman and she didn't work out all these rejections and when I went to the agency where I later ended up being executive vice president but when I went to them in 1950 with very good recommendations and a good scrapbook and a lot of experience I was told by the executive vice president by the way we don't hire women writers so I went away and took another job and then someone told me about a job in radio and television department and there was an enlightened man in charge of that and a few months later he hired me. My experience is also I remember going with a client and an associated press reporter to the oak room at the Plaza Hotel we made a reservation for lunch my secretary had made it for me and we were turned away sorry we don't allow women in the oak room for lunch well I'll talk about that later so like a lot of other women and men I was mad and then in 1963 when I was already vice president of Carl Beyer but told I'd gone as far as a woman could go I arranged for Betty Friedan to speak to American women in radio and television her book had just come out and of course she was hot and her talk was about television and the feminine mystique she talked about how women were totally invisible on television as experts or as interviews or as news reporters or other role models they were shown only as sex kittens or as housewives whose only thrill was to launder their husband's shirts whiter than white and whose only problem in life was ring around the collar that he gave a wonderful stirring speech and I thought she would get a standing ovation she deserved it but it's interesting because these women executives in American women and radio and television Beverly probably remember where we're a little cool and a little scared about all of this and they were also shocked because Betty used words like orgasm so but anyway before she gave the speech I greeted her and I spoke to her and we talked about the need for this organization and she said now she wasn't an organizing type but I wrote her a thank you letter afterwards and said if ever you're involved in an organization for women I'll help with the public relations so three years later in the summer of 1966 she replied by inviting me to join now now I'm not going to be modest I didn't do it you know I what I wasn't the only one by any means but I would say in the creation of now maybe I was one of the top three co-founders after Betty Friedan and the others were a woman who really people should know about Mary Eastwood she was a lawyer and a pioneer in the theory and in getting Betty Friedan to found now and then a woman named Dorothy Hayner who was an executive of the United Auto Workers who did all our mailings and our membership services in the early days so they were also co-founders definitely but as I say Betty was the founder I served two functions in the earliest days of now first I was public relations chair and I was the communicator who introduced the modern women's movement to the media of the world I did the press releases and the press conferences and the interviews and the stories and the ideas for forgetting the media out there and incidentally the media immediately treated this like big news sure some of them made fun of us and there are some columns that you know we're outrageous but mostly they recognized immediately that this was history and we were on the front pages of big city newspapers and my press release on the founding of now was carried by Associated Press thanks to a wonderful reporter named Joy Miller who wrote it up and then as I say it appeared in the front pages of papers throughout the country now my second function in the earliest days of now I was Betty Friedan's lieutenant in New York City where she lived and I hired Betty secretary and put her right there in my office at Carl Beyer at a typing table and a desk until Beyer finally kicked kicked her out about a month or so later but at the beginning there we were and I also composed the letters to the government officials under Betty's instructions which Betty signed and then in February 67 I organized the first chapter of now which was New York City at Betty's request and Sonia is the president of New York now and I served as a go-between between Betty and other people many of whom refused to work with her or threatened to quit and I would keep saying oh stick with it you know now is all we have and some of them say well it ain't worth it but most of them did stick with it so as I said some of us were co-founders of now but Betty Friedan was the founder she's the one who did it she provide the main strategies the main words wonderful words and the relentless drive that created our movement and she recruited most of the earliest leaders of now also when she made speeches around the country and people would come up to thank her she always say to them okay start a chapter here or if you don't like what that company is doing organize an action against them she got the leaders moving and and recognized leaders and and and made them work and once they joined now she drove them to produce results now as I say in 1963 women began to be awakened to the need for a women's movement because of the feminine mystique now other women had written about injustice inequality such as of course Simone de Beauvoir others but Friedan's book is the one that made millions of women say it changed my life she's the one who made women realize that there wasn't something wrong with them if they felt bored and unsatisfied with just taking care of a house all day and subordinating themselves to a life as somebody's mommy or somebody's wife through all the years every time I would be in a restaurant with Betty Friedan or walking down the street whether it was in Mexico or Miami or wherever people recognized her and they would come up to her and say you changed my life Betty herself was a housewife in Rockland County raising three children writing occasional magazine articles then in 1957 she was asked to do a typical class survey of her Smith College classmates for the 15th reunion of her class of 1942 Betty had majored in psychology at Smith and she wanted to get quotations for a magazine article to show that education didn't prevent women from adapting to their role as housewives so she created this questionnaire that asked some probing psychological questions but instead of backing up her thesis about happy housewives her survey revealed what she called in feminine mystique the problem that has no name 200 of her Smith class lights classmates replied to her survey and 89% of these women were housewise although they were all graduates of Smith College most of them regretted they said not taking their education more seriously to say they would say things like I never have found out what kind of person I am she wrote up her findings in an article and she submitted it to McCall's magazine was rejected then ladies home journal red book they all rejected her article red book said there was no interest in an article about a few disgruntled housewives but she persisted and then she decided that her discovery merited an entire book so in 1958 Betty talked Norton publishers into giving her a thousand dollar advance for a book on that subject the feminine mystique the term means the idealization of women's role as housewife and mother and also the commercialization of that role to sell more detergents and vacuum cleaners and other household products to really exploit the role of women as housewives now for her book Betty also interviewed 80 women in depth some of these were two hours some last two days at crucial points of their life cycle and nearly all of these women reported the problem I feel empty somehow I feel incomplete and Betty called us the problem that has no name simply the fact that American women are being kept from realizing their own potential their own selves as human beings our own community in Rockland County was called a cooperative community called Hickory Hill played a role in her research in 1956 which was a year before her Smith survey she published an article in red book called the happy families of Hickory Hill and she later interviewed these women all college graduates all with four or five six children and she learned that they weren't so happy so this is when and we're booked to it took her five years to finish the research and writing for the feminine mystique and her publisher was furious because it took so long and finally she finished writing it in July 1962 and Norton published the feminine mystique in 1963 by this time Norton executives were fed up with this irritable angry demanding writer and they expected to lose money on her book the first run was only a 3,000 copies and of course it sold millions and millions in hardcover and paperback throughout the world and I think 35 different languages and of course that changed the lives of women and girls forevermore and the feminine mystique Betty pointed out how women were portrayed by the media and by opinion leaders in the 1950s the term career woman became a pejorative the housewife was extoll strong movie heroines gave way to cuddly kitnish types who deferred to their man at all times in the 1960s it was a time of unrest and the magazines began realizing that housewives were not happy but they didn't understand why one magazine said it's because the women were getting too much education another said our education should prepare women better with more courses about housework some educators suggested seriously that because there was a shortage of college spaces they should admit only men to the four-year colleges men needed the education more urgently to do the work of our atomic age and education just made women restless and incidentally even today in Japan the big corporations are reluctant to hire women who graduated from a four-year college they think these women are going to be too restless about serving tea and being subordinate they really much prefer a woman who've been to a two-year college so that discrimination still exists now Betty Fudan attacked these attitudes she was also one of the first authors to attack dr. Sigmund Freud she caved and some of these quotes from Freud's views on women I mean I'll give you some of these quotes here's one the discovery of her castration is a turning point in the life of the girl she is wounded in her self-love by the unfavorable comparison with a boy who is so much better equipped Freud said some women get a masculinity complex refusing to give up what he called phallic activity such as usually characteristic of the male in other words women who want a career of their own are suffering from a castration complex I remember telling men I dated having men I dated say I had a castration complex Freud said the strongest feminine wish is the desire for a penis fulfilled only if she has a child and if the child is a little boy who brings along for a penis with him the mother can transfer to her son all the ambition she has had to suppress in herself and she can hope to achieve so Betty attacked this needless to say she also attacked marriage and family courses which were being taught in most of the colleges then many of these courses used a textbook textbook called modern woman the lost sex by Farnham and Lundberg which equated feminism with penis envy as Sigmund said and they said that feminism which did exist as a movement you know it goes way back but they said that feminism discourages quote just those traits necessary to the attainment of sexual pleasure receptivity and passiveness with the deep readiness for woman's final goal of sexual life impregnation these textbooks quoted an early Kinsey report study which interestingly enough this the first Kinsey report said that more educated women had fewer orgasms and this was quoted widely but you'll be happy to know that a much bigger Kinsey study which was published later said just the opposite that women's orgasms increased with education Betty for Dan interviewed Albert Dichter who was the he invented the term hidden persuasion in 1945 and the use of psychology he advised he advised companies and advertising agencies on using psychology and advertising Dichter said that American women needed identity and purpose and he taught corporations to exploit this sell products that make women feel modern and creative if a woman is using a cake mix he said you must require her to add an egg to the mix so she will feel creative now I remember wasn't that long ago that a friend of mine said she heard one woman say real real mothers don't use cake mix Dichter said advertisers must help the housewife quote justify her menial task by building up her role as a protector of her family the killer of millions of microbes and germs make housework a matter of knowledge and skill in one Dichter survey 28% of the women agreed with the following statement I like to try out new things I've just started to use a new liquid detergent and somehow it makes me feel like a queen now Betty for Dan's book was addressed mainly to college educated middle-class housewives that was what the book was about but there was a group of women lawyers and executives in Washington and New York and Chicago who began pressing her to become the main organized and the president of an NAACP for women and they were equally thinking about a different group of women about women who are out in the workforce and getting a rotten deal not getting the good jobs not getting paid enough not getting promoted and not getting any respect and incidentally and all our statements in the early days of now women we said should have the option of working inside the home or outside the home and we said women working inside the home are working they're working women but they should be treated right in both arenas and if they work in the home they should have financial security now the three main women who pressured Betty to found our organization should go down and women's history as our great foremothers I mentioned Mary Eastwood this government lawyer who I would say was the second most important co-founder of now after Betty for Dan but unfortunately very few people know her name and they really should and then Catherine East who was an executive in the women's bureau of the Department of Labor who kept feeding the founders information on discrimination against women and there was a brilliant black woman named Paulie Murray she was a lawyer and writer and later also an Episcopalian priest and they kept pressuring Betty to start this organization which later became now now the most important impetus for founding now was all about money and the need for employment rights and the lack of enforcement of a section known as Title Seven in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as it was originally written title seven banned discrimination in employment on account of race color religion or national origin there was no mention of sex discrimination but a group of women in Congress wanted to add sex to the banned discriminations and they persuaded a Virginia congressman Howard Smith a Southerner head of the House Rules Committee to add the word sex as a prohibited form of discrimination most experts believe that Smith did this because he was a strong opponent of the Civil Rights Act and he figured that adding sex would kill the whole bill and the congressional record records that when Smith introduced the word sex to title seven at the last minute he was greeted by laughter by the other congressman but the women in Congress knew that this was going to be all important so title seven established the equal employment opportunity commission the EOC to enforce these laws but this ban on discrimination against women was treated like a diversion from what they thought was the real need to fight race discrimination there was a lot of ridicule for title seven the New York Times said it was a mistake to add sex to title seven there were these jokes about playboy bunnies now men would have to be allowed to be playboy bunnies and the chair of the EOC Franklin D. Roosevelt Jr again and again in his public speeches said he thought that sex discrimination was unimportant now here's another name you should remember for history it's Congresswoman Martha Griffiths of Michigan speech after speech in Congress she attacked the EOC because it was not enforcing title seven for women now there was one other important law at this time the Equal Pay Act of 1963 but it wasn't being enforced and it did not cover women and professional executive or administrative jobs so now we come to the final impetus for the founding of now in 1961 President Kennedy had created the president's commission on the status of women and incidentally most people believe he probably created this to quiet down the movement to try to have a federal equal rights amendment so this was sort of the compromise have the commissions on the status of women instead of the ERA and then later all state governors appointed state commissions on the status of women all 50 states created these commissions so in June 1966 the state commissions met at a conference in Washington DC and Betty Friedan was persuaded to attend this conference as a journalist but as the conference progressed women activists there became increasingly disgruntled they were not allowed to introduce any resolutions regarding sex discrimination and they were not allowed to lobby for the reappointment of a wonderful man named Richard Graham as a commissioner on the EOC Graham was a Republican but he really believed in fighting against sex discrimination and he was not reappointed to the EOC so on the night before the final day of this conference a group of these unhappy women met in the hotel room of Betty Friedan in Washington and through hours of discussion they decided they must have a new organization to fight for women's rights so the next day at the luncheon ending the conference these women sat together at two tables and they plotted their new organization they threw down five dollars a piece for membership dues and Betty Friedan wrote the name for the new organization on a napkin now national organization for women and they all went back and started recruiting members for now and they planned an organizing conference in DC for the last week in October that summer Betty Friedan mailed out dozens of the same letter to recruit members for now I responded and I asked for 200 applications to send to my friends and radio and television and soon after Betty invited me to her apartment in the Dakota in New York City I said and she asked me if I would do the public relations for now and I said I was too busy I was working 60 hours a week I had two children and a husband and I would just advise them but you know what happens when you say you'll just advise I ended up stuffing envelopes working nights and weekends we all did and we all became dedicated now Betty and I often would say to each other that we never dreamed it would happen so fast so why did it happen so fast first because it was long overdue and the 60s civil rights movement paved the way for now and the communications caught on immediately but mostly it succeeded because of the sacrifices of many thousands of activists who endangered their jobs their health often their marriages for this dream of equality and they're the ones who made it happy and you notice that last paragraph mentioned partnership with men twice I've sometimes been asked how were men victims of the system if they've been given all the good jobs and power but now and Betty for Dan believed that just as women were limited to being sex objects men were set up as success objects they were responsible for their families entire standard of living and survival and their families status in life and that was a stressful burden for men to have to carry and my husband Shep once appeared on a television panel show with several other husbands of women who were active in the movement it was David Suskind who was who was a real male chauvinist and and he at one point he asked my husband he said but dr. Aronson how would you feel if your wife made more money than you do and my husband answered relaxed now now has been accused of working mainly for middle-class professional women but this was not true two of our most important early lawsuits were aimed at helping blue collar women working in factories first was a lawsuit against Colgate palmalo aimed to end the practice of separate seniority lists for men and women in factories and we did win that ultimately and incidentally we had to fight the labor unions on that issue as fiercely as we fought the corporations and the other lawsuit was called the mangle cock case and this ended the practice of prohibiting women from working overtime a woman named Velma mengle cock in California was prohibited from working overtime or late at night and therefore she could not be promoted to the job of foreman which of course was a better paying job so in this case now was fighting against the so-called protective labor laws that protected women out of all the good paying jobs and some of the big labor unions including the UAW still wanted to preserve these protective labor laws so that women didn't have to work nights etc but now said that the laws should be applied fairly to protect men and women from having to do work that was too strenuous and they should not be used to keep women down and incidentally there were no laws prevent preventing cleaning women from working late at night but night work was a big issue in the factories at that time I want to tell you about two other very early important cases of now at the founding conference we were visited by the presidents of the stewardess's union Colleen Colette Boland then it was called stewardess not flight attendant and she objected because at that time the flight attendant women had to quit their job at when they reached the age of 32 or with some airlines 35 or if they got married because it said that you know they would no longer be sexually attractive the truth of the matter is the airlines did it so they could the women they wouldn't have to vest the women in their pensions it was all about money and then the other case that we worked on very hard was the help wanted male help wanted female and this was a long and very bitter fight you know today some young women can't believe that the practice ever existed that newspapers had columns that said help wanted male and help wanted female but but they did and the EEOC refused to rule that those ads were a violation of title seven they said these ads were a service in telling men and women which jobs they should apply for of course all of us who you know felt we had executive capability always looked for the good jobs under help wanted male and now picketed the EEOC and we met with the EEOC commissioners and we did everything we possibly could we finally filed a writ of mandamus in court requiring the government to end the practice and years later we finally won I remember I wrote a letter signed by Betty for Dan to Catherine Graham who was the publisher of the Washington Post protesting against the segregated help wanted ads and Catherine Graham wrote back to Betty for Dan and said this was a service to women and men in other words that they were making the money because they were selling the ad twice once in the help wanted male and helping to help wanted female later Catherine Graham in her autobiography regretted her early stance but at that time she was no feminist and we picketed the New York Times and we picketed all the papers and in the early days the EEOC not only refused to outlaw the help wanted ads but they also said that certain jobs could be limited only to men or only to women if there was what they call a bona fide occupational qualification a BFO queue to justify this discrimination now now always maintain that there were only two jobs with the BFO queue one was wet nurse and the other was semen donor now another early goal for now was to get women included in the new government policy of affirmative action and I'm plop proud that I played a role in that I met with a group of women in the White House on that issue and then I wrote the letter which Betty for Dan signed urging President Lyndon Johnson to add women to affirmative action and in October 1967 we had our victory when LBJ wrote executive order 1 1 2 4 6 a historic executive order which put women in affirmative action and that executive order is the reason that millions of women got into the pipeline and could no longer be told that's a man's job and if someone tells you that affirmative action is unfair just remind them that white men have had affirmative action giving them all the good job for hundreds of years so we finally got around that now I want to talk about one other issue that was all important to us and that was title two of the Civil Rights Act which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and here again there was no sex was not written into title two and much later so from the very beginning of now we had to fight to end the practice of barring women from restaurants and bars and clubs now this may seem frivolous but it wasn't because these clubs and the restaurants were where business was transacted and where contacts were made this is where the old old boys network gave out the jobs and we wanted to be included I told you about being turned away from the oak room well I persuaded New York now to organize a demonstration outside the oak room and inside the oak room and on Lincoln's birthday 1969 was very successful and incidentally one of the reporters who covered it was Gloria Steinem who very soon became a big spokesperson for the movement and we finally won that but we still haven't won it completely you know for instance the Augusta golf club and masters tournament still doesn't allow women in and business executives still deduct millions of dollars and expenses from their taxes for money that is spent at the Augusta masters tournament but most private clubs have admitted women partly because their members say why not what difference will it make or also because they they cannot take the tax deductions unless they admit women and that's probably even more important and you notice that last paragraph mentioned partnership with men twice I've sometimes been asked how were men victims of the system if they've been given all the good jobs and power but now and Betty Ferdin believed that just as women were limited to being sex objects men were set up as success objects they were responsible for their family's entire standard of living and survival and their family status in life and that was a stressful burden for men to have to carry and my husband Shep once appeared on a television panel show with several other husbands of women who were active in the movement it was David Suskind who was who was a real male chauvinist and and he at one point he asked my husband he said but Dr. Aronson how would you feel if your wife made more money than you do and my husband answered relaxed now now has been accused of working mainly for middle-class professional women but this was not true two of our most important early lawsuits were aimed at helping blue collar women working in factories first was a lawsuit against Colgate Palmallo aimed to end the practice of separate seniority lists for men and women in factories and we did win that ultimately and incidentally we had to fight the labor unions on that issue as fiercely as we fought the corporations and the other lawsuit was called the mengelcott case and this ended the practice of prohibiting women from working overtime a woman named Velma mengelcock in California was prohibited from working overtime or late at night and therefore she could not be promoted to the job of foreman which of course was a better-paying job so in this case now was fighting against the so-called protective labor laws that protected women out of all the good paying jobs and some of the big labor unions including the UAW still wanted to preserve these protective labor laws so that women didn't have to work nights etc but now said that the laws should be applied fairly to protect men and women from having to do work that was too strenuous and they should not be used to keep women down and incidentally there were no laws prevent preventing cleaning women from working late at night but night work was a big issue in the factories at that time I want to tell you about two other very early important cases of now at the founding conference we were visited by the presidents of the stewardesses union Colleen Colette Boland then it was called stewardess not flight attendant and she objected because at that time the flight attendant women had to quit their job at when they reached the age of 32 or with some airlines 35 or if they got married because it said that you know they would no longer be sexually attractive the truth of the matter is the airlines did it so they could the women they wouldn't have to vest the women in their pensions it was all about money and then the other case that we worked on very hard was the help wanted male help wanted female and this was a long and very bitter fight you know today some young women can't believe that the practice ever existed that newspapers had columns that said help wanted male and help wanted female but but they did and the EEOC refused to rule that those ads were a violation of title 7 they said these ads were a service in telling men and women which jobs they should apply for of course all of us who you know felt we had executive capability always looked for the good jobs under help wanted male and now picketed the EEOC and we met with the EEOC commissioners and we did everything we possibly could we finally filed a writ of mandamus in court requiring the government to end the practice and years later we finally won I remember I wrote a letter signed by Betty for Dan to Catherine Graham who was the publisher of the Washington Post protesting against the segregated help wanted ads and Catherine Graham wrote back to Betty for Dan and said this was a service to women and men in other words that they were making the money because they were selling the ad twice once in the help wanted male and helping to help wanted female later Catherine Graham in her autobiography regretted her early stance but at that time she was no feminist and we picketed the New York Times and we picketed all the papers and in the early days the EEOC not only refused to outlaw the help wanted ads but they also said that certain jobs could be limited only to men or only to women if there was what they call a bonafide occupational qualification a BFO queue to justify this discrimination now now always maintain that there were only two jobs with the BFO queue one was wet nurse and the other was semen donor now another early goal for now was to get women included in the new government policy of affirmative action and I'm proud that I played a role in that I met with a group of women in the White House on that issue and then I wrote the letter which Betty for Dan signed urging President Lyndon Johnson to add women to affirmative action and in October 1967 we had our victory when LBJ wrote executive order one one two four six a historic executive order which put women in affirmative action and that executive order is the reason that millions of women got into the pipeline and could no longer be told that's a man's job and if someone tells you that affirmative action is unfair just remind them that white men have had affirmative action giving them all the good jobs for hundreds of years so we finally got around that now I want to talk about one other issue that was all important to us and that was titled to of the Civil Rights Act which prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and here again there was no sex was not written into title to and much later so from the very beginning of now we had to fight to end the practice of barring women from restaurants and bars and clubs now this may seem frivolous but it wasn't because these clubs and the restaurants were where business was transacted and where contacts were made this is where the old old boys network gave out the jobs and we wanted to be included I'm I told you about being turned away from the oak room well I persuaded New York now to organize a demonstration outside the oak room and inside the oak room and on Lincoln's birthday 1969 was very successful and incidentally one of the reporters who covered it was Gloria Steinem who very soon became a big spokesperson for the movement and we finally won that but we still haven't won it completely you know for instance the Augusta golf club and masters tournament still doesn't allow women in and business executives still deduct millions of dollars and expenses from their taxes for money that is spent at the Augusta masters tournament but most private clubs have admitted women partly because their members say why not what difference will it make or also because they they cannot take the tax deductions unless they admit women and that's probably even more important so now let's take a moment to talk about this unique leader who was Betty for Dan most of the things you've heard about her temperament were absolutely true Betty for Dan was impossible she was arrogant self-centered inconsiderate had a ferocious temper and treated most of her subordinates badly many people quit now and said it isn't worth it because they just couldn't stand having Betty for Dan hang up on them or yell at them she was an angry hostile woman but as I was quoted in People magazine after her death it's angry people who make revolutions and I do believe that her hostility drove her to drive all of us to wage war against injustice after Betty for Dan died I was the first speaker at her funeral and that year I spoke around the country quite a bit at memorials and there was a memorial up at Cornell University in Ithaca and Betty's son and daughter were sitting in the first row and I said Betty for Dan was not a good woman but she was a great woman she was the greatest woman of the second millennium she was the leader who created the movement that changed the lives of millions of women and girls forever more and she did mellow somewhat in her later years but she never outgrew her ferocious temper now I do have a video if we can turn out the lights it's about five minutes will which will show you Betty for Dan in 1999 now that's that she was getting pretty old at that time and was one of the many honors she was getting this was from veteran feminists of America and even the organizations that had fought with her some of the radical feminists like red stockings gave her carnations at this dinner and others who had fought against her honored her because we realized what she had done for her so here is five minutes of Betty for Dan in 1999 I'm very moved and honored that you all came here tonight and I also feel like you know that this is your life my god all the people that I've gone through so much with from all over the place come back out of here from the farm and you know what do you think about what we did see what they when they were saying this earlier today was the woman movement of course I have a lot to do with the woman you know grateful that my life coincided with history that enabled me to take that role in the women's movement but we did we transform the possibility of life for women and when you think about it what we were when we began all of us well I I say we were no ordinary American we relatively ordinary relatively extraordinary but nevertheless we I mean we've never done anything like this before you know and we somehow when you think about it as what my grandson would say it's awesome to think how our lives transacted with history and that somehow gave us the challenge of the opportunity of using the truth of our lives to make life different for the and you know I mean I wouldn't give up a minute of that and while we were doing it I mean this was a burden this is our show or this we didn't think of it as our necessarily our pleasure but it was my god it was exciting I mean when I my children my grandchildren the young generations that I talked to now and you know I feel sorry for them they don't have a movement to start or create or in this and then I think of our wonderful husband we felt the responsibility you know to change lives change the possibilities of life but now you get some of the flavor Betty for Dan in her later years and while we're talking about Betty for Dan I want to warn you about an academic writer named Daniel Horowitz who has made his career and actually gotten published with his doctoral thesis and then a book saying that Betty for Dan was really a Marxist she wasn't really a dissatisfied house why she she created the women's movement you know as a Marxist movement and of course he was totally wrong she was an unhappy housewife and and she knew how we felt so this may be a good time to combat some of the other myths that have been propounded about Betty for Dan and about now one myth which I've seen in several scholarly works is that Betty for Dan did not work hard to protect a woman's right to abortion actually she was one of the first to push the women's movement and now to protect this right she came out at now second annual conference in November 1967 and made this part of our now Bill of Rights and incidentally I spoke out and I said we should really wait on abortion I said it would be poor strategy we would lose a lot of people we should concentrate on employment rights and I was wrong after after now came out for abortion rights we got thousands and thousands of new members young members who join and at that conference a member of our board Betty Boyer stood up and said well if you're going to support abortion rights then I'm going to quit and found another organization that works only on employment rights and that was the founding of wheel so other organizations were were splintering off with their own ideas in addition to wheel we had all these organizations on the left women's liberation radical feminist red stockings which they all concentrated on what they considered important in our revolution and this was very healthy there was no way one organization could represent all the injustices and all the things that had to be done getting back to myth another myth which I see often in writings is that now had a lesbian purge in the early 1970s now never ever had a lesbian purge now it's true that Betty Ferdin opposed the argument by the lesbians who wanted now to fight for lesbian rights and in her usual colorful manner she once referred to them as the lavender menace and she believed that this issue created bad publicity for the young women's movement because we were all being called a bunch of lesbians but she later changed her mind on this and actually what happened was the the people who believe that it was a feminist issue got busy and and they they lobbied within all the now chapters and by September of 1971 which was the actually the conference where I was elected chair of the board now voted that lesbianism was a feminist issue and we would fight for it and that was the end of the debate there were never any more battles over this yes that's an issue we were going to work for but there are still I see again again books which mention a so-called lesbian purge another myth is that now was only white women first of all we had Paulie Murray the great Paulie Murray and our second president after Betty for Dan was Eileen Hernandez a black woman and we had other African-American men as well on our on our first board but it's true that the majority of our members were middle class white people because they had the time and the leisure they weren't just struggling to feed their families the truth is every revolution is led by middle-class people who have a little bit of time and leisure and money to do the work now there were many bitter arguments and now on many subjects as I said and no two people in the women's movement ever agreed on priorities or tactics each of us worked on the injustice that made us angry so Betty for Dan left Rockland County soon after the feminine mystique came out her family moved to an apartment in the Dakota apartment house on Central Park West which is where we had our first press conference for now she and her husband Carl for Dan had been battling throughout their marriage battling physically as well as verbally for our demonstration at the Oak Room Betty arrived late and she came with a black eye which one of our people covered up with cosmetics so that nobody noticed and so they divorced in May 1969 Carl soon married a beautiful model whom he also divorced but in later years Betty and Carl for Dan became friends and their three children remain close to both of them and the children were always loyal to Betty I'm sure they had thousands of hours of psychoanalysis but they always they loved her and supported her now a big turning point how we doing with time a big turning point for for the women's movement was the series of women's marches throughout the country on August 26 1970 and here's how that happened Betty for Dan was going out of office this was I think March 1970 at our conference of now as president of now she'd serve four years and frankly she was not urged to serve anymore and we had elected a new president Eileen Hernandez and so Betty gave a two-hour speech but it was a good speech but long and at the end she surprised us and said we are going to have a march on August 26th the anniversary of the of the women's suffrage and we're and we're going to march for women's rights this was the first any of us had ever heard of it and Eileen Hernandez who happened to be standing next to me said oh my god we're gonna have to do all that work but of course it turned out these marches were great I mean it was these marches that really were a turning point throughout the country and making millions of women realize that they wanted this women's movement and many of them joined and this was the beginning of consciousness raising and politicians began to take us seriously so I'm just going to give you a short list of some of the modern women's movements accomplishments since now was founded in 1966 first tremendous attitudinal changes everywhere achieved through our work with the mass media and also achieved by working one-on-one with those consciousness raising groups that helped individual women realize how they needed to change their lives then we had the passage of title 9 prohibiting sex discrimination in educational institutions and title 9 is not just sports it's promotions it's tenure it's hiring it's salaries everything that has to do with education in high school as well as in colleges some people think title 9 only refers to athletics of course the legalization of reproductive choice through the Supreme Court decisions such as Roe v. Wade which decriminalized abortions in 1973 and less we forget you know there was a ban on contraceptives for single people which was not removed until 1972 so so this again was a dramatic change then the abolition of most discrimination against women in pensions and social security then the inclusion of women though the numbers are still too low in government and politics judgeships police and fire departments the armed forces and slowly in religion and women artists and writers began to be taken seriously and we know how much progress has been taken and we can see it right here and in the Sackler wing and then long overdue action to combat violence against women rape domestic battering incest stalking other violence against women these no police forces were acting on this until now and their allies took the lead and this was really in the 1990s so this was later and including more humane treatment of victims by police and hospitals and the federal government now helps to fund shelters for women and children who are fleeing from violence the violence against women act that was the late 1990s so you know we didn't win all the victories in the 1970s then there was the recognition that sexual harassment must be prevented in jobs schools religion this was a new phrase sexual harassment and again this was not taken seriously until much later then the equal credit opportunity act of 1974 outlawed discrimination against women in credit cards loans and mortgages you know in the old days when a bank was deciding whether to grant a couple a mortgage for a home they completely ignored the earnings of the wife and that has certainly changed then the fair housing act was extended to prohibit sex discrimination so that landlords could no longer say I'm sorry we don't allow women to rent an apartment here and we finally have public and private funding for child care centers but we still have a very long way to go and I'm hoping maybe now we're going to have some progress and I'm very happy to see that president Obama instead of talking about child care is talking about early childhood education so everyone realizes this is something that's good for society then the marriage and divorce laws have been revised to recognize the value of a homemaker's work although here again women are really very much being deprived for one thing the men can usually hire better lawyers or and in some cases bribe the judges but the governments are beginning to enforce child support laws that we still have a long way to go so that's where we are today and despite all our problems we're never going to go back to the bad old days and incidentally the leadership of now today is wonderful again they're hard-working professional dedicated people the president Terry O'Neill is a lawyer marvelous person and it has hundreds of thousands of members and I'm not going to ask how many of you are now members but I hope you all are or will be and incidentally some people say I'm a member of now but they haven't paid their dues since 1985 so I want to encourage everyone to encourage this movement that is still the movement our greatest problem is still today an attack by the religious right and the growth of fundamentalism all over the world women are the first targets of fundamentalism everywhere and certainly that's true of the United States the attack on the right to abortion rights we all know about that and that's very again very well organized and our greatest need today of course still work on child care our daughters and sons tell us we cannot have women really moving up the ranks unless we have society take its responsibility for child care you as you know the America is far behind nearly all other countries and the developed world in child care then another big problem we have and I'm glad to see so many young people here but we do have a problem of complacency among young women we can't get enough of them fired up to be active in the women's movement that's partly because some of them we've achieved many of our goals and the women are busy with executive careers as well as working home and we don't have child care also some of the problem with recruiting is the result of a deliberate campaign to discredit feminism it's well organized it's well financed it's very sophisticated and you see these women interviewed all the time on television and radio attacking feminism and incidentally one of the most effective organization is the independent women's forum which took a name similar to the international women's forum no accident and Dick Cheney's wife Lynn Cheney is one of the organizers of that and feminists are their outstanding target so it's not an accident that in some circles feminism has become a four-letter word and people say I'm not a feminist but I want to be CEO of General Motors or whatever so we do have to work on this and then another serious problem is how today's boys and men are being influenced but our society by the media by the machismo culture by the video games as Gloria Steinem said recently it's taken us 40 years to demonstrate that women could do what men do now it's time to demonstrate that men can do what women can do so we still have a long way to go but we've changed the world after thousands of years when women's suppression was taken for granted as the way things are we will never go back to the way things used to be we've accomplished miracles in our lifetime but we can't give up there's a lot more work to do so I say good luck to all of us we can't relax we need to continue the fight and we owe this to millions of women and girls who still need our help thank you we're happy to answer questions Mary Eastwood some of the books like Moving the Mountain you know we'll have something about Mary Eastwood but really not enough uh or Dorothy Hainor or but well Paulie Murray has had a book written about it there's never been a book written about Mary Eastwood maybe somebody should write that book yes what did you say yes why well uh because the women's colleges and there are fewer now feel that women are still discouraged by colleges where the men are the mostly the professors and call on the boys or the men and that in a women's college they can really be themselves they have women as role models they aspire also frankly they're hotbeds of feminism which which ain't a bad thing and they just feel that it encourages women more and that when you get into the co-ed school still today the women's students are not encouraged the way they are in the women's colleges yes well yeah feminism feminism is working to make sure that all people are treated as individuals and not as 50% of the human race or the other 50% of the human race that's it people are are individuals and that's what feminism is about it's not special privileges it's just partnership between women and men boys and girls yeah well I did get permission from the president and said there's going to be an organization founded in Washington next week and I've been asked to be on the board of directors and I promise I will never embarrass you but it'll give me some insight into this important new movement that will be helpful to our clients and and and they they let me get away with it I I didn't I didn't march I did not march in that august 26th march I didn't march I didn't do some of the the things and I always signed Betty for Dan's name to those letters so I tried not to embarrass the clients but yeah I mean there were some people who thought it was embarrassing there were others who thought it's wonderful we have this important woman in the women's movement at Carl Bayer who can advise our clients you know on how to work with women so I'd say certainly in the later years especially they considered it an asset that's absolutely we haven't used the word the term the glass ceiling that would be another whole discussion because men are comfortable with other men who are just like them which means usually white men and so women are the other and and it's still a problem you're absolutely right or someone just asked me I think yesterday how come the women who became CEOs made so many mistakes I said well the men who were CEOs made so many mistakes too there were two or three women and you know practically all CEOs made mistakes but to say we had a woman and she didn't work out it's still you still hear that yes well you know Lisa Belkin wrote that article in The Times about that and she has said she did not mean the majority of women are dropping out she was talking only about elite women with husbands who are making scads of money and they could afford to drop out it's a very small number of women but they get a lot of publicity and that's not an accident either but and actually some of those women who dropped out and now their husbands are out of jobs are very sorry and glorious dynamo once said you know women would think that they can afford to have their husbands support them but they're really one man away from welfare so it's not that predominant is what I'm saying there were a group of women they were mostly women whose husbands earn a lot of money yes well thank you and please as Betty for Dan would say please go and work on that become a leader we we we've got to work on the man we've got to work on the boys for their own sake it's really a very serious problem yes now does have a lot of young young women who have joined especially from the campuses and and now adopted an affirmative action program which said that a high percentage of now's board of directors and officers had to be women of call people of color so they recognize this was a need but I think more can still be done and we have to get the young women and as I say there is a campaign to discourage them from joining the women's men plus they're all hassled you know they're they're working and they're trying to raise a family and and there's no there's no household help now that's one thing at least I did have to and help when my children were very little that doesn't exist today so it's hard for the young women but they have to do it for themselves I mean they have to realize that the doors have been opened by those sacrifices so that they can make it all the way to the middle but if they really want to conquer the glass ceiling the only way to do it is by organized action together yes well thank you yes I'm proud of that and there were others too other professionals in the movement you know Dolores Alexander of Newsday became executive director and she was a journalist and there were others and also the the journalists especially the women in those days Enad Nemi a great reporter on the Times they did whatever they could it seems to be harder today I don't know why and the now people tell me it's very hard to get attention today even you know for big marches and big actions then I guess we were new and that was another reason Beverly yes that's right but but I think the media doesn't realize how important a story this still is and some of that as I say is because we have been attacked skillfully yes there are people with something to gain I mean Phyllis Schlafly you know became a very became a politician became a very successful writer they they got a lot of attention a lot of them were wives of men like Dick Cheney who had a lot to gain by keeping the status quo sure they sure they most they mostly use women they're smart enough to use women right as a front absolutely and the women are happy to do it because they get the attention they make the money their their books get published their their books get sponsored by foundations their research is sponsored you know it's a good money deal for a lot of these women too I'm sorry I didn't quite understand the question yeah well the the media I mean have a lot to answer for they really do I mean it's not only feminism it's other issues where where they've been frivolous and you know concentrating on the football game and not under and really not educating people about the issues and that's a serious problem in our society yeah aging sure incidentally Betty Friedan wrote a book called the fountain of age which was the first major book that said older people are not senile and doddering and helpless they are active and making contributions and she's the first person who said that it's a wonderful book so she really was a pioneer in that field too Marjorie Rosen here wrote wrote a book called popcorn venus about the movie industry and how women were treated in the movie industry you may want to just say something about that oh okay come up here Marjorie this book I talked about movies from the beginning of the 20th century through 1973 when the book was published and I tried to kind of analyze in a sociological way the images and what movies told us about women how we and how women in turn went to the movies and bought into these ideas of happily ever after these happily ever after notions of beauty and youth and marriage and I tried to I tried to analyze that in some way and of course to call for more women in film because by the mid 1970s women were disappearing from the screen in in in droves so you know and of course there were no women executives back then there were no very few you count on your hand the number of women directors who existed back then and while they've made in in the subsequent years they've made a lot of progress there are a lot of women executives now there are still very few women directors and surprisingly there are still very very few women writers when you get the list every year of the of the movies that have come out for that year and who's written them less than 10 percent have been written by women so there are a lot of fields where we haven't made so much progress yet thanks for you in other words we've still got a long way to go and there's plenty of work you know when Betty for dance that I feel sorry for people who don't have a movement they can work for today I disagree with her there's plenty of work we can all do and it can be exciting and fulfilling and it's necessary it was wonderful it's great to go back and come forward and I'd also like to share a little bit of my experience with the center um before we opened I was at many panel discussions and so on where there was this great divide between younger women and older women and some of it I began to realize had to do with vocabulary as well as life's experience and um as the center opened and the more we've had intergenerational opportunities here the more I have discovered that indeed young women are very active feminists sometimes they don't call themselves feminists but the philosophies and the principles are the same and that there are many many thousands of young women who are really doing frontline work so I just want to congratulate them and thank you for laying the groundwork for all of us so thanks very much