that time, the NACW expanded to include city and county commissions. PCSW influences the creation of the National Organization for Women The PCSW research on women's status, as well as the research conducted by state commissions, demonstrated that discrimination against women was a serious problem. In 1964, the U.S. Department of Labor began to bring members of state commissions to Washington annually to discuss best practices to combat such discrimination. At the 1966 meeting of commissions in Washington, several of the attendees began talking with each other about their frustrations with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's (EEOC) failure to enforce the provision barring sex discrimination in employment. Howard W. Smith (Virginia) had added "sex" into the employment provision (Title VII) of the 1964 Civil Rights Act at the request of the Virginia branch of the National Woman's Party so that white women would be protected by the Civil Rights Act. Smith, a long-time supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment, noted in his campaign literature in November 1964 that he was responsible for this amendment. The Act passed into law without additional floor debate. For the first time, the United States had a law against all sex discrimination in private employment. Because the women interested in pressuring the EEOC were not allowed to pass such a resolution at the 1966 meeting of the state commissions on women, they decided they needed to create an independent organization—an "NAACP for women" which would press for enforcement of this law and for achieving other objectives. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was founded by conference attendees in October 1966, the first new feminist organization of the "second wave" of feminism. A former EEOC commissioner, Richard Graham, was on NOW's first board as a Vice President. See also Equal Pay Act of 1963 Civil Rights Act of 1964 Wage gap Economic inequality US labor law References Further reading Davis, F. (1999). Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America since 1960. Chicago: University of Illinois. Harrison, C. (1988). On Account of Sex: The Politics of Women's Issues, 1945–1968. Berkeley: University of California Press. Martin, J. M. (2003). The Presidency and Women: Promise, Performance, and Illusion. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M. Cobble, Dorothy Sue. "Labor Feminists and President Kennedy's Commission on Women". No Permanent Waves. Newark: Rutgers University, Press, 2010. External links Records, 1961-1963. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Establishments by United States executive order