On June 30, 1966, in Washington, D.C., Betty Friedan and twenty-eight other activists formally established the National Organization for Women (NOW), creating the first national feminist organization of the modern era. The group emerged from the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women, where delegates grew frustrated by the federal government's refusal to enforce equal employment protections for women under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Rather than wait for bureaucratic action, these activists decided to build an independent organization that could demand change directly. By year's end, NOW had grown to over 1,200 members across multiple chapters, signaling immediate hunger for a unified feminist voice.

Friedan, whose 1963 book "The Feminine Mystique" had already sparked national conversation about women's limited opportunities in postwar America, became NOW's first president. The organization's founding statement pledged to take "concrete action" to bring women into full participation in American society, rejecting the notion that biology was destiny. Unlike earlier women's suffrage movements, NOW embraced a broad agenda: equal pay, access to education and professional advancement, reproductive freedom, and freedom from discrimination in every sector of life. The group adopted "liberal feminist" tactics, working within existing legal and political systems rather than through radical confrontation.

NOW's impact arrived quickly and visibly. Within years, the organization pressured the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to investigate sex discrimination complaints, filed lawsuits challenging discriminatory airline stewardess policies, protested against the Miss America pageant as a degrading spectacle, and lobbied for the Equal Rights Amendment. By the 1970s, NOW chapters operated in all fifty states and the organization had become the public face of feminism in America. Over fifty years later, NOW remains the nation's largest feminist organization with nearly 500,000 members across 550 chapters, proving that the urgency women felt in 1966 only deepened with time.