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tijd August 14 2024, 03:23:47 UTC
In 1966, Friedan, by then a national celebrity, went to Washington to attend a national conference for women in politics. She was not impressed. On a visit to the White House, she listened as President Johnson welcomed the conference-goers by addressing “the distinguished and very attractive delegates.” It was as if the President “figuratively patted our heads,” Friedan later remembered.
For some time, Friedan had resisted the pleas she’d been receiving from Murray and others to lead a proposed new organization, which some activists had begun to call the “N.A.A.C.P. for women.” Friedan, with an unusual degree of self-awareness, had been initially skeptical that she had the temperament to lead it. But at the time there was no other feminist with either her national profile or her political credibility. If Betty didn’t do it, it wasn’t going to happen. Her experience at the conference convinced Friedan that the federal government would not act on women’s rights on its own. It needed external pressure.
The night after the White House visit, Friedan invited several conference attendees to an informal meeting in her suite at the Washington Hilton, where the conference was being held. Those women brought along others; in all, about twenty women were crammed into the room. Retellings of the meeting use varying euphemisms to convey the fact that many in attendance were drunk. A number of the women had just returned from a boozy reception at the State Department. “Everybody was feeling rather good by this time” was how Catherine Conroy, a union leader, put it, because their State Department hosts had been “very generous with the liquor.” At Friedan’s meeting, the women kept drinking, filling paper cups with alcohol from the suite’s minibar.
Murray spoke first, clutching a yellow legal pad. They had gathered the women here for a purpose, she said. She proposed “an independent national civil rights organization for women” with “enough political power to compel government agencies to take seriously the problems of discrimination because of sex.”
The proposal did not go over as well as Murray and Friedan had hoped. Some women thought they could still effect change from within existing structures. Others were miffed at what they perceived as Murray and Friedan’s presumptuousness. A woman named Nancy Knaak spoke up: “Do you think we really need another women’s organization?” At this, the room exploded into shouting. Friedan’s voice rose above the din. “Who in the hell invited you?” she yelled at Knaak. “Get out! Get out!” she continued. “This is my room and my liquor.” Knaak refused to leave; Friedan locked herself in the bathroom. Thus, amid a drunken fight, the National Organization for Women came into the world. “Women,” Friedan would later write of the scene. “What can you expect?”
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/09/18/the-women-of-now-how-feminists-built-an-organization-that-transformed-america-katherine-turk-book-review-betty-friedan-magnificent-disrupter-rachel-shteir

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