Following passage of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964, the National Organization for Women (NOW) organized in 1966 to push the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to fulfill its responsibilities under Title VII, which provided a platform for gender equity. NOW quickly added to its agenda the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, child care, and other goals.

Philadelphia NOW launched in 1968 under leadership of Ernesta Ballard, and Pennsylvania NOW formed in 1971, calling its first convention in 1973. The Philadelphia chapter published the Philadelphia NOW Newsletter and worked toward a range of goals including ratification of the national ERA; adding an ERA to the Pennsylvania state constitution; ending sex discrimination in employment, politics, education, and public accommodations; repealing Pennsylvania’s restrictive abortion law; establishing government-funded child care; and improving women’s image in the media.

In 1968, the group New York Radical Women rallied feminists from New York, New Jersey, and elsewhere to demonstrate at the Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, New Jersey. They threw what they called “instruments of female torture” such as girdles, bras, hair curlers, and Playboy magazines into a “freedom trash can,” gaining national publicity that helped to ignite the feminist movement in many cities. Philadelphia-area women in 1968 started consciousness-raising groups in which they gained motivation for collective action through discussions of how inequality and sexism affected their individual lives.

On August 26, 1970, Philadelphia NOW, the Women’s Liberation Center, and more than twenty other organizations celebrated Women’s Equality Day on the fiftieth anniversary of the woman suffrage amendment. In Rittenhouse Square, thousands of women and men heard speeches and talked to representatives of Philadelphia NOW, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, Women United for Abortion Action, and other feminist groups. Media coverage energized the movement, leading to the growth of consciousness-raising groups throughout the region. 

While Black women helped to organize NOW, by 1973 feminists in New York City, including Florynce Kennedy and Margaret Sloan-Hunter, became convinced that a new organization, the National Black Feminist Organization (NBFO), was needed to address the challenges facing working-class women of diverse ethnic backgrounds. The NBFO established chapters in cities across the United States including Philadelphia in 1975.   

Adapted from the new book Greater Philadelphia and the Nation, Vol. 2, A New History for the Twenty-First Century (University of Pennsylvania Press): “Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights,” by Tamara Gaskell and Jean R. Soderlund.