Kathryn Cullen-DuPont

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A national day of protest on behalf of women's rights, the National Day of Demonstration Against the EEOC was organized by the National Organization for Women (NOW) and held on December 14, 1967. Its purpose was to draw attention to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's failure to enforce the sex discrimination provisions of Title VII, including the commission's failure to ban sex segregation of help-wanted ads, that is, the once common practice of advertising for either male or female job applicants, as the employer preferred. Women picketed in at least six major cities, and NOW members stormed the EEOC's regional office in New York with armloads of sex-segregated classified ads.

At the press conference that followed, Betty Friedan, then president of NOW, announced that the organization planned to sue the EEO. When the EEOC agreed to improve the enforcement of Title VII, NOW's lawsuit, which had been filed immediately following the protest, was dismissed.

In August 1967 the EEOC released guidelines relating to the sex discrimination provisions of Title VII, and sex-segregated ads were declared discriminatory. The commission was powerless to enforce its guidelines, however; while most New York City newspapers continued the practice. NOW's Pittsburgh chapter sued the Pittsburgh Press over its discriminatory classified advertising practices in October 1969. When the Supreme Court ruled in NOW's favor in 1973, sex-segregated want ads finally were outlawed.

The first Asian-American woman elected to Congress and the first Asian American to run for the presidency, Patsy Mink was born on December 6, 1927, in Paia, Maui, Hawaii.

Willa Silbert Cather, the author of such well-loved novels as My Antonia and O Pioneers!, and other works, was born on December 7, 1873, in the Black Creek Valley of Virgina.

The poet Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Helen Frankenthaler, an important artist of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, was born on December 12, 1928, in New York City.

Margaret Chase Smith, the first woman to serve as both a congresswoman and a senator and the first woman to seek a major party's nomination for president, was born on December 14, 1897, in Skowhegan, Maine.

Margaret Mead, one of the foremost anthropologists of the twentieth century, was born on December 16, 1901, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Deborah Sampson, who served in the Revolutionary War as a soldier in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment of the Continental Army, was born on December 17, 1760, in Plympton, Massachusetts. Sampson, disguised as a man, served under the name Robert Shurtleff (which was also sometimes spelled "Shirtliff") and sustained saber and musket wounds in battle.

Henrietta Szold, founder of the Jewish women's voluntary organization Hadassah, was born on December 21, 1861, in Baltimore, Maryland.

Clara Harlowe Barton, Civil War nurse, founder and first president of the American Red Cross, and the first woman to head a U.S. government bureau, was born on December 25, 1821, in North Oxford, Massachusetts.

Rachel G. Foster Avery, a suffragist and officer of several women's rights organizations including the International Council of Women, was born on December 30, 1858, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

On December 2, 1828, the New York Court of Chancery in Peckford v. Peckford sets a precedent penalizing wives for conduct that is not "submissive." (Mrs. Peckford had taken a trip to England without the permission of her husband and, therefore, when she sued her husband for adultery, the court reduced her property settlement.)

On December 20, 1879, women in Cambridge, Massachusetts, exercise the right of municipal suffrage.

On December 8, 1886, the "Susan B. Anthony Amendment" (for federal women's suffrage) is debated on the Senate floor.

On December 6, 1902, the first postage stamp with a woman's likeness--that of Martha Washington--is printed.

On December 3, 1918, women win the right to vote in Oklahoma.

In December 1919, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Colorado ratify the Nineteenth Amendment.

The National Congress of Negro Women is established by Mary McLeod Bethune, Mary Church Terrell, and twenty-eight other women in December 1935 in New York City.

On December 14, 1961, President John F. Kennedy established the President's Commission on the Status of Women to investigate the "prejudices and outmoded customs act[ing]as barriers to the full realization of women's basic rights." The commission was originally proposed by Esther Peterson, President Kennedy's assistant secretary of labor and director of the Women's Bureau.

The National Day of Demonstration Against the EEOC, a national protest against the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's failure to enforce the sex discrimination provisions of Title VII, was held on December 14, 1967. The protest was organized by by the National Organization for Women under the leadership of Betty Friedan.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 18, 1979. It would achieve the status of an international treaty on September 3, 1981, when the twentieth country ratified it.