Aileen Hernandez

Aileen Hernandez: A Unique Girls' School

Hernandez remembers her high school as a unique place where girls were taught to dream big.

Aileen Hernandez

Former President National Organization for Women

Aileen Hernandez on how her experience advocating for women's equality in government turned her into a grassroots activist.

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Aileen Clarke Hernandez has been fighting against discrimination in all of its forms for over six decades. She has been President of the National Organization for Women (NOW), Commissioner of the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and Founder and President of the consulting firm Hernandez and Associates. Aileen Clarke was born in Brooklyn in 1926, to a father who made painter’s brushes and a mother who was a homemaker. Clarke excelled in school and attended Howard University, where she was drawn into politics and the NAACP. In 1951, she took an organizing job with the West Coast division of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. In 1965, she was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to be the only woman on the first established Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Frustrated by her fellow commissioners’ lack of attention to women’s complaints, she became a charter member of the NOW, and became the group’s second President when Betty Friedan stepped down in 1970. Under Hernandez’ guidance, NOW organized the Strike for Equality in 1971, an event that heralded the arrival to national prominence of the women’s movement. Hernandez is celebrated for having played a key role in ensuring a voice for minorities in the women’s movement. In 1973, she founded the group Black Women Organized for Action. Now in her 80s, she chairs the California Women’s Agenda, a state alliance of over 600 organizations, and is the founder and coordinator of Black Women Stirring the Waters, a discussion group in the San Francisco Bay Area which, in 1998, published a book of essays by forty-four of its members.

- I met Martin Luther King. He intrigued me for a lot of reasons. He didn't just do one thing. When he opened up in terms of doing the civil rights movement related to African Americans, it took him to all kinds of other places. When he was killed, he was working for people who were poor. He was doing it all, and it was not that he changed, he kept doing it, but there was always something that got added. He did things that I hope everybody does. Just don't look at yourself, but look at all of the things around you that you can be part of.