Welfare Rights and Women's Rights in the 1960s

Abstract

The year 1966 is often cited as the start of the “second wave” of the organized women's movement, marked by the formation of the National Organization for Women (NOW). However, 1966 also marked the formal inception of another, less enduring group of women activists, the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO), linked to a separate but related social movement focused on welfare rights. From 1966 to 1975, NWRO coordinated welfare mothers' activism to shore up public assistance for the poor and to establish a federally guaranteed annual income. At its height in 1968, NWRO claimed twenty thousand members nationwide and dozens of local chapters from California to New York.