Liberal Feminism and Formal Equality Debates

American liberal feminism found its principal organizational vehicle in the National Organization for Women, founded in October 1966 by twenty-eight women, including Betty Friedan, who became its first president, at the third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women. NOW's founding statement of purpose committed the organization to "full equality for women in America" through legal and institutional reform, positioning it within the reform-liberal tradition of Wollstonecraft and Mill rather than the more structurally revolutionary aims of contemporaneous radical feminist groups. Its early legislative priorities included enforcement of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibited employment discrimination on the basis of sex — a category added to the bill during House debate through an amendment proposed by the segregationist Representative Howard W. Smith, whose motives historians continue to debate, but which nonetheless created, once enacted, a durable legal tool that liberal feminist litigators exploited energetically in the following decades.