A Part and Apart: Lesbian and Straight Feminist Activists Negotiate Identity in a Second-Wave Organization
Civil Marriage is a Civil Right!" proclaimed a flyer advertising a Valentine's Day action in Toledo, Ohio, in February 2005. Penned by the Toledo chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the flyer announced that the event would involve gay and lesbian couples seeking marriage licenses while heterosexual allies demonstrated in support of same-sex marriage. The action also highlighted the chapter's opposition to Ohio's Issue 1, a successful referendum on the November 2004 ballot that had codified marriage as a legal union only between a woman and a man. This action was not unique to Toledo; same-sex marriage activists within and beyond NOW chapters across the United States held similar Valentine's Day demonstrations, including in Beverly Hills, California; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Portland, Oregon.1 California NOW encouraged its members to "ask legislators to 'have a heart' and support same-sex marriage" on Valentine's Day, while Chicago NOW and [End Page 95] Maryland NOW joined broad coalitions of civil rights groups and elected officials in their respective states to oppose the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment.2 Through local chapters and state organizations and at the national level, NOW members at the beginning of the twenty-first century have been unwavering advocates of same-sex marriage. On its website, national NOW also applauds its history as "a leader in the struggle for lesbian rights" since the early 1970s and has joined with other civil rights groups to push for same-sex marriage as a feminist issue.
Although NOW's support of same-sex marriage as a civil right in cities and states across the country may seem logical and consistent today, the history of publicly merging feminist and lesbian identities and activism within NOW is not a smooth or a linear narrative. Leaders and rank-and-file members disputed lesbian involvement and visibility in NOW shortly after the organization was formed. Twenty-six women founded NOW in June 1966; in October of that year over three hundred people attended NOW's first meeting. Within the space of five years thousands of women and men joined NOW in chapters across the country, making the "National Organization for Women" truly national and one of the largest feminist organizations of the second wave. Realizing, however, that NOW and the women's movement drew large and visible numbers of lesbians, NOW president and founder Betty Friedan commented in 1969 that lesbians constituted a "lavender menace" and suggested that they threatened the political efficacy of the organization and of feminism. In response to this epithet, forty-plus lesbians and heterosexual supporters, many from the New York City chapter of NOW, stormed the stage at the 1970 meeting of the Congress to Unite Women in New York City—wearing purple shirts bearing Friedan's words—and insisted that lesbians' rights were women's rights. Despite fears among some national board members that a strong and visible lesbian presence would diminish the organization's political clout, many rank-and-file members supported the protest and its message. At the 1971 national meeting of NOW members confronted the intersection of feminism and lesbians' rights as cultural philosophies and social movement goals by passing a resolution acknowledging lesbians' rights as part of the organization's national agenda.3 Since that time NOW has formed national task forces on lesbians' issues and rights; it has supported lesbian candidates for political office at the local, state, and national levels [End Page 96] of government; and in 1991 it elected Patricia Ireland, an openly bisexual woman, as its national president.
This article explores the history of lesbian and straight feminists within NOW and analyzes how activists negotiated the sexual identity of this organization in the earlier years...
