Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from Radiotopia.

My name is Jody Avergan.

This day, Octoberth, 1966, a conference is being held in Washington, D.C. to establish a new group.

It is the National Organization for Women. N-O-W Now.

Now had been dreamed up just earlier that summer, literally on the back of a napkin.

We'll tell that story.

But by this moment in the fall, there are 300 chapter organizations around the country

though at this first convention things are relatively small.

Betty Fredan, one of the founders, wrote about that initial conference and I'm quoting

here, she said, we wasted no time on

ceremonials or speeches gave ourselves barely an hour for lunch and dinner at times we

got very tired and impatient but there was always a sense that what we were deciding was not just for now, but for a century.

So I think that sense that they had then was justified now would of course go on to become one of the biggest and most influential

women's rights civil rights organizations in the country. Let's go back

though to that moment fall 1966 the roots of now here as always

Nicole Hummer of Vanderbilt and Kelly Carter Jackson of Wellesley.

Hello there.

Hi Jody.

Hey there.

This is a really interesting moment, really an interesting subject. We want to do this on its own rights but one of the

motivations for doing this story is that we were chatting with our researcher Jacob Feldman

recently about the sweep of episodes we've done and he pointed out that the one

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