Three Quotes from
Karen DeCrow

Karen DeCrow was president of the National Organization for Women from 1974 to 1977. She is a constitutional attorney and a coauthor, with Robert Seidenberg, of Women Who Marry Houses: Panic and Protest in Agoraphobia. She was born in 1937, is single, has been married twice and has no children. She lives near Syracuse, New York.

  1. I saw a nice young man changing his child’s diaper on the floor… I went up to him and said, “You know, you have a federal case, because this is a public facility and there’s a wonderful changing room for women.”.. Then I wrote a newspaper column on the subject for Father’s Day 1984. Then the Fathers’ Rights Association of New York State approached me and said they wanted to bring a lawsuit… In the Syracuse airport right now, as a result of the lawsuit, there is a gender neutral changing room.. We held a press conference… We had not only one of the plaintiffs changing his child, but the lawyer who had represented the city in the lawsuit had become a parent… and he was changing his baby, too. We had two men at two different tables, former adversaries, simultaneously changing their babies. Everybody was happy.

  2. [I]n the last twenty-five years, [the idea of] man as “the enemy” has certainly emerged; the separatist wing of the feminist movement is definitely present, no question about that. But in the early days, I think sexism was considered more a general societal problem.

  3. I do a lot of college speaking… I talk about how unfair it is that usually the financial responsibility for dates is on guys… I would think men would object simply on the grounds that it’s unfair; why should they have to pay the bill? Lots of excuses are given. Men make more money, for instance. But college students don’t make very much money whether they’re male or female, and when people of the same gender go out socially, rarely do they prorate the bill to their IRS returns.

next woman
list of the 22 women
How to Order GWTM
GWTM home page