Maryann Barakso, Governing NOW: Grassroots Activism in the National Organization for Women (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005).

Review by Stephanie Gilmore, April 2006 

 Political scientist Maryann Barakso has penned the first monograph on the National Organization for Women (NOW) - quite surprising when we consider that NOW was one of the first and the largest feminist organization during the heyday of the women's movement in the 1970s and early 1980s. The eight chapters of Governing NOW are organized chronologically, offering detail on the formation and early years of NOW in the mid-1960s to "The Clinton Years and Beyond," and as a historian, it is useful and enlightening to see the changes and continuities within this organization. However, this book is not a history of NOW; instead it is an analysis of the governance structure, or political system, of this social movement organization. As such, it traces the foundation of NOW's principles, explicated in the organization's statement of purpose and other early documents, and analyzes how national leaders have worked in concert with chapter members, why the organization has chosen certain tactics and goals over others, where they have invested their financial resources, and with which other social movement organizations and movements it has aligned and why.

Although Barakso briefly situates this organization within the context of the larger women's movement and contemporaneous social movement activism, she directs most of her attention to NOW's internal political dynamics -- its guiding principles and its formal decision-making process -- what she calls throughout, NOW's governance structure, which holds the key to NOW's longevity. Five principles guided NOW's strategies and actions: NOW sought to remain a vanguard of the women's movement, be an activist rather than educational group, maintain political independence, focus on diverse issues and tactics, and mobilize activists at the grassroots (2). Barakso demonstrates that throughout its nearly forty-year existence, NOW members and leaders have remained committed to these principles, even when the organization suffered internal conflict and external pressure to change. By centering her analysis on members' and leaders' adherence to these principles, Barakso reveals how NOW is a much more complex organization than many scholars have assumed it is.

Chapter two provides a useful overview of the founders, indicating that "participation in other organizations by NOW founders and other early activists directly influenced the form that NOW's own principles, bureaucratic structure, and strategic choices would take" (13). She acknowledges that no social movement organization emerges sui generis, and at points throughout the book, she traces various networks of feminists and sympathetic activists in place when NOW forms in 1966. But by the end of chapter two, when NOW is founded and becomes a vital feminist organization, NOW seems to be autonomous in the larger social movement milieu. Although Barakso does not set out to place NOW in a larger context of social movement activism, it would be fruitful for future scholars to do so in order to allow an even greater understanding of the reach of this largest second-wave feminist organization and the ways in which social movements adapt to their political context.

NOW developed "targets for action," which included poverty, employment, education, legal and political rights, mass media images of women, and so on, and it is refreshing to see a scholar acknowledge that the organization's leaders and members devoted themselves to a broad range of issues that women in the United States faced. By highlighting NOW's wide-reaching agenda-- and its broad tactical repertoire that included, from its beginning in 1966, direct action, lobbying, sit-ins, consciousness-raising, even fasting (see p. 43). Barakso effectively and convincingly dismantles the idea that NOW was just a liberal feminist organization looking to effect formal political change only and improve the status of white, middle class women exclusively. Although some have suggested that NOW becamse radicalized via the impact of radical feminist activism, Barakso points out that NOW's own roots evince a philosophical commitment to overhaul of American politics, society, and culture. By the early 1970s, as NOW moved "out of the mainstream [and] into the revolution," the organization's 1975 slogan -- and solidified itself as a "fixture in American politics" (50), the organization became more institutionalized. In doing so, it gained rather than lost membership because NOW maintained its focus on its guiding principles, to "remaining at the forefront of women's rights issues, to sustaining grassroots activism, to pursuing a multi-issue and multitactical strategy, to the preservation of its political independence, and to action" (52).

Barakso traces NOW's full commitment to the ERA from 1978 to 1982, but rather than reiterate the details of the ERA campaign that have been discussed elsewhere, she explores how leaders negotiated a commitment to the federal constitutional amendment while also trying to maintain their commitment to grassroots activism and multi-issue strategies. She effectively points out that although the ERA was at the top of the organization's agenda, NOW was grappling with many issues in the face of mounting conservative opposition to feminism and many feminists issues, abortion and reproductive rights and welfare among them---and we see how NOW never was a single-issue organization at the national level.

With the defeat of the ERA, NOW committed itself -- and its members -- to electoral politics, which some have viewed with skepticism but Barakso effectively defends as a strategy for maintaining relevance and a feminist voice in the face of extreme opposition to feminism and progressive politics in general. NOW promised to support feminist (not necessarily female) candidates for office, putting its full support behind the 1984 Walter Mondale and Geraldine Ferraro run for U.S. president and vice-president. Barakso notes that "the failure of the Mondale-Ferraro ticket to win the presidential race in 1984 proved a difficult pill for NOW to swallow" (99), but the organization persisted in drawing attention to formal politics -- the process, the candidates, and the issues -- and drew up various electoral strategies to create feminist change.

The growing clout of the religious Right and threats to Roe v. Wade endangered the organization's livelihood, but rather than cave to shifting cultural tides, NOW members developed a stronger, more oppositional voice, most notably on the issue of abortion. On this issue and at this time in the mid-1980s, Barakso suggests that "NOW found itself outside the 'mainstream' of liberal groups because it was more vocal, more demanding, and less willing to compromise" on its stance of abortion on demand and accessible birth control (118). Internally, some members complained that NOW paid too much attention to the issue of abortion, threatening to become a single-issue group or focusing too much on clinic defense at the expense of other important feminist issues. Externally, other prominent feminists argued against NOW in the sense that abortion was not the only issue women faced; instead, they protested that feminist groups must attend to economic, family, and child-care issues. As a result, Barakso suggests that the organization has become isolated from coalition work, at least at the national level. The shift to a focus on electoral politics and the unwavering commitment to abortion rights raised questions about the principles that had guided NOW's philosophy and action -- most notably maintainnig poltiical independence and focusing on diverse issues--but the organization has survived through four tumultuous decades.

Although Barakso insists that NOW survived because of its commitment to its guiding principles, she does not reveal how NOW has done so, most notably in its commitment to grassroots activism. This becomes the greatest weakness of the book. For example, when she discusses the mid-1970s "leadership crisis" in which some NOW leaders sought to implement a delegate system that other leaders saw as a violation of the democratic spirit of the organization and of feminism, Barakso misses an important opportunity to explore how chapter members responded to the issue, choosing to focus instead on the way the crisis played out at the national level (see pp. 59-63). Here and at other points, this book lacks the voices of NOW activists at the grassroots level.

That said, however, Barakso issues an important call for further research on grassroots activists in NOW chapters -- I have benefited greatly from Barakso's work in my own study of NOW chapters across the country -- and I look forward to other scholars' work in this area. She goes a long way toward explaining and analyzing the dynamics of this feminist activist organization, and Governing NOW gives us a wonderful analysis of this largest second-wave U.S. feminist organization.