Freedom and Equality for Women: The Forming of the National Organization for Women in 1966 - Research Paper Example

As a woman who is pursuing a career in sports with an emphasis on the science of nutrition, my life would have been far more difficult without the development of NOW. The events that directly affected my goals and dreams were developed more fully during the 1970s when athletics began to take a more central role in the number of rights that women were electing to pursue. As an example, the Bobby Riggs versus Billy Jean King event in 1973 allowed for the nation to celebrate this cause, rooting for the side that best represented their beliefs and creating a lighter side to the seriousness of the problems that women athletes had been plagued with throughout American history.

Athletics were not high priority for the official women’s movement, but it gained a specific committee within the National Organization for Women as Title IX of the Education Act of 1972 outlawed discrimination in dispensing money for athletics between male and female sports in the school system (Block & Umansky, 2005). This led directly to the rise of girls participating more in sports, giving those of us who had the ability to express our athletic abilities in an organized structure within the school system. . The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was intended to make it illegal to discriminate on the basis of race.

Representative Howard Smith (D-VA) opposed the bill and in order to both ridicule the bill and convince others to defeat it added sex as a premise through which discrimination in employment could not take place. The hope, it is believed, was that this radical inclusion would make the bill so controversial that it could not pass (Burrell, 2004). Unfortunately, the inclusion of this amendment to the bill was not taken very seriously in the early days of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC).

Advertisements for employment were specifically segregated, women referred to as ‘gals’ and ‘girls’, the jobs diminished for the required work through such phrases as ‘Gal Friday’ for assistants and ‘Figure Clerk’ rather than a mention of accounting skills (Burrell, 2004, p. 61). The cultural decision to not take the issue of equality for women seriously was the catalyst that supported the development of the National Organization for Women (NOW). Because the EEOC was not taking the issue seriously, it became clear that the development of a specific organization to address these issues was needed.

In what Burrell (2004) calls the second wave of feminism, the National Organization of Women emerged in order to take on the issues of equality that were holding women separate from the public sphere. NOW came into existence during the Third National Conference of the Commission on the Status of Women which took place as the sequel to the National Commission on the Status of Women which was assigned the task of looking into the social position of women. The