The Women's Equity Action League, or WEAL, was a United States women's rights organization founded in 1968 with the purpose of addressing discrimination against women in employment and education opportunities. Made up of conservative women, they used the court system to facilitate enforcing existing legislation. They are most known for filing cases against higher education institutions across the United States to address discriminatory hiring and promotion practices. They also successfully litigated over help-wanted advertisements being sex-segregated, extending military spousal benefits to husbands of female service personnel, and over the extent to which the Department of Defense could involve itself in the lives of military spouses. History The Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) was founded in 1968, by Elizabeth M. Boyer, during the 2nd wave feminist movement. The organization was founded in Cleveland, Ohio and headquartered in Washington, D.C., as a "spin-off" of the National Organization for Women (NOW) by more conservative women. WEAL did not support the radical platforms of women's liberationists, nor controversial issues such as abortion, child care, divorce, violence against women, and sexuality. WEAL focused instead on equal opportunities for women in education, economics, and employment. Among their goals were to extend the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to ban sex discrimination in all programs which received federal funding and extend the equal opportunity employment provisions to educational institutions. They also pressed for the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 to extend to administrative, executive, and professional employees the provision of equal pay for equal work and worked to promote investigation by the Civil Rights Commission on discrimination against women. They were strongly supportive of the Equal Rights Amendment and worked with NOW in support of the ERA. In 1969, WEAL members discovered that Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, had been amended by Executive Order 11375 in 1968 to include language that federal contractors could not discriminate on the basis of sex. As there was no exemption for educational institutions, as there had been in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, WEAL launched a national campaign filing a class action suit against every college and university in the United States. It was their most successful campaign to reduce sexism, as it allowed them to compile statistics on the level of discrimination in academia and press the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, (HEW) to enforce the executive orders. The organization