Join author Katherine Turk in conversation with writer, editor, and professor Deirdre English on Turk’s new book, The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization that Transformed America. In 1966, a diverse group of activists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW) to build “a civil rights movement to speak for women.” In The Women of NOW, the historian Katherine Turk chronicles the growth and influence of this foundational group through three relatively unknown core members: Aileen Hernandez, a federal official of Jamaican-American heritage; Mary Jean Collins, a working-class union organizer and Chicago Catholic; and Patricia Hill Burnett, a Michigan Republican and former beauty queen. The Women of NOW is the first full account of the largest and most expansive feminist membership organization in American history. By foregrounding NOW in the past half-century of American history, The Women of NOW reveals how mainstream feminism transformed the nation, clashing with conservative forces to create today’s social and political landscape.
Katherine Turk studies women, gender and sexuality and their intersections with law, labor and social movements in the modern United States. She is Associate Professor of History and Adjunct Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Turk’s first book, Equality on Trial: Gender and Rights in the Modern American Workplace (Politics and Culture in Modern America Series, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), examines how sex equality law has remade the world of work, eroding some inequalities and affirming others. In addition to many academic articles and book chapters, Turk’s public writing has appeared in Slate, Washington Post, and Public Seminar, among others.
Deirdre English is the former Editor-in-Chief of Mother Jones magazine where she worked for eight years, ending in 1986. She has written and edited work on a wide array of subjects related to investigative reporting, cultural politics, gender studies, and public policy. English was a co-founder of one of the first women’s studies programs in the US. She has contributed articles, commentaries and reviews to Mother Jones magazine, The Nation, The New York Times Book Review, and Signs: A Feminist Journal, among other publications. English has taught at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism since 2000.
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