Founding Mother

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In a new book that’s part memoir and part historical chronicle, Muriel Fox ’48 makes reading feminist history feel like curling up to listen to stories of a beloved relative. In a sense, that’s exactly what’s happening, since Fox, now 96, tells a first-person tale of the origins of the second-wave feminism movement and its main players, with an emphasis on how much our current society was shaped by their efforts.

The Women’s Revolution: How We Changed Your Life (New Village Press) documents the 1966 founding of the National Organization for Women (NOW) by the women who helped turn feminism, a movement largely stalled after the 1920 suffrage victory, into a formidable bloc that sought to advocate for gender equality as the Civil Rights Movement was doing for racial justice.

Fox (in photo above) — herself a founding member of NOW and ghost writer of many of Betty Friedan’s official missives — organizes the book by focusing on people she believes were central to the movement. She includes 30 people, including one fascinating figure, Pauli Murray, who suffered from gender dysphoria, which Fox speaks about with moving compassion. Writing about both the legendary, like Betty Friedan (NOW’s first president) and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and the previously overlooked, Fox makes a valuable contribution to the annals of feminist history while arguing that today’s activists have a steep climb ahead.

“We must work for fairness and equality. It’s now or never,” she said on a recent video call. “I just want Barnard women to know that we can get it done. We have changed the world, and now it’s up to you, the next generation, to continue the fight.”

Fox writes with candor while responding to longtime critiques that early NOW members lacked an intersectional lens, skewing white and straight; Betty Friedan famously called lesbians “the lavender menace.” Friedan did say this, but she later apologized, Fox writes, noting that everyone was learning as they worked.

“We were breaking new ground. We didn’t know what was going to happen,” she says. “We didn’t do everything right at the beginning. We had to learn, we had to evolve.

“We’ve been criticized by historians because we didn’t [emphasize abortion rights] in the first year,” she continues. “We were changing the world and undoing thousands of years of tradition, so we didn’t get it all right.”

Since collaboration was core to NOW’s efforts, the book is structured around key people who resurface throughout its pages. Though it’s often nonlinear in its storytelling, that oral history flavor is part of the memoir’s charm.

“I have five file cabinets full of material. Letters, carbon copies, little scraps of paper. I made these available to writers and historians for many years,” Fox says. “In the year 2022, at the age of 94, I finally decided, I’m going to write a book. I took all these pieces of paper, all these scraps, all these copies, and I divided them into chapters of all we did.”

Accomplishments such as the elimination of sex discrimination in hiring practices, the introduction of the (still unpassed) Equal Rights Amendment, and the push to enact Title IX as federal law are contributions well worth honoring.

“We were the trunk of the tree, but there are so many branches now,” Fox says. “We’re still in a revolutionary stage.”