How Financial Strength Weakened American Feminism
By the time the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year, many Americans had already opened their wallets to protest. In the approximately 24 hours after the Court’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization leaked early, the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue raised $12 million, and Reproductive Freedom for All’s donations increased by 1,400 percent. According to one researcher, more than 300 crowdfunded GoFundMe campaigns drew in nearly $3.2 million in the seven months between the Dobbs leak and the 2022 midterm elections, and that’s just a small measure of the overall amount that flooded the cause.
Abortion-rights groups certainly need financial support. But the history of the National Organization for Women, second-wave feminism’s largest and most expansive membership group, reveals that when people engage with feminism primarily through their donations, the cause can suffer. Starting in the mid-1970s, NOW’s embrace of the then-novel fundraising technique of direct mail “change[d] the nature of” the organization, the longtime NOW leader Mary Jean Collins told me; the strategy ballooned NOW’s budget, but it also centralized power and narrowed the group’s focus, undermining the influence and involvement of ordinary members. The group’s size and clout have since declined, and American feminism has been diminished for it.
NOW was created in in 1976. As members discussed those “gripes” and took local action, they fused deep bonds that inspired trust and sacrifice.
