The National Organization for Women (NOW) is in many ways the archetypal social movement organization (SMO), and it is unquestionably the premier SMO of the second wave of the women's movement. The story of NOW's founding has been told and retold many times, in part because it seems to embody many of the factors that scholars tell us are crucial for social movement (and thus, SMO) emergence: political opportunity (among other things, the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), communication networks (such as the U.S. and state-level Commissions on the Status of Women), patrons (e.g., organized labor), resources (via growing numbers of professional and working women), and so on.