Push Back, Move Forward traces the history, work, and impact of the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO). Originally known as the Council of Presidents, this shifting coalition of more than 100 women’s movement organizations worked to coordinate efforts among member groups, as well as other civil rights, labor, and progressive organizations, as the NCWO from 1998 to 2015. Based on almost 70 interviews with NCWO leaders and attendance at dozens of NCWO meetings, demonstrations, hearings, and other events, this book offers a perceptive account of the internal workings, political agenda, and impact of the NCWO on politics and policy.

Laura Woliver first places the NCWO within the long tradition of women’s rights collaboration and coalition building in the United States since the nineteenth century and particularly since the emergence of the second wave in the 1960s. Using case studies of NCWO activism ranging from fighting the exclusion of women from the Augusta National Golf Club to supporting the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to challenging the position of women in a neoliberal global economy, she explores how the NCWO negotiated internal power imbalances, the challenges of coordinating a large coalition, a media determined to simplify and personalize issues, and an increasingly partisan policy-making environment.

Woliver highlights both the opportunities for and challenges to effective coalition efforts. The NCWO could be an important resource for member groups, providing training and advice (such as concerning the political consequences of having tax-exempt status—being a 501(c)(3) nonprofit—which were usually less constricting than groups thought) and opportunities to expand their scope and activism and maximize the likelihood of successful political action toward feminist goals. At the same time, coalition members had to negotiate over differing priorities and strategies, find ways to compete (but not fight) over scarce resources (money, people, opportunities) in the (progressive, feminist, civil rights) sectors, and face the reality of unequal power based on the unequal positions and resources of the member organizations and leaders.

The fight over the exclusion of women members from the Augusta National Golf Club, for example, highlights the ways in which women continue to be barred from the formal and informal arenas of power. Yet, many inside and outside the NCWO questioned whether access to a prestigious golf club was the most pressing concern for the vast majority of American women. In the fight over the ACA, the NCWO made a broad argument about how health care decisions affected women distinctively because of inequalities in wealth and income, their responsibility for children, and their role in reproduction. This meant, however, that the NCWO needed to balance its efforts to defend and even expand abortion access in the ACA (which ultimately resulted in a victory for pro-life forces) against the significant expansion in health care rights and access that the ACA represented for women, particularly poor, immigrant, and minority women.

Woliver demonstrates how the media were both a resource and a barrier to the efforts of the NCWO, as the media’s search for a simple narrative sometimes undermined the coalition’s efforts. For example, when the NCWO sought to convince sponsors to boycott the Master’s Golf Tournament because of the exclusion of women from membership in the Augusta club, press coverage soon framed the debate as “Hootie versus Martha,” centering the narrative around Augusta’s chair, William W. (“Hootie”) Johnson, and then-NCWO chair Martha Burk. The NCWO was put in a defensive position, forced to expend resources to counter conceptions that equal golf club access was trivial or elitist, and it was faced with a public defeat when the 2003 Master’s Golf tournament proceeded without change on a national TV network. Woliver sees glimmers of long-term impact in the successful sports-related boycott of North Carolina over H.B. 2 (the “bathroom bill”) in 2016, yet it was almost a decade before the Augusta National Golf Club extended membership invitations to a select few women.

The partisan policy-making environment offered its own challenges. Woliver argues that even though Democrats were considered natural allies during this period, partisanship was a double-edged sword. Even with a Democratically controlled Congress and White House, the NCWO was unable to achieve an expansion of abortion rights and access in the ACA in 2010. Not only was access not expanded but the ultimate outcome—in which President Obama signed an executive order confirming there would be no public funding of abortion—was actually more restrictive than the status quo, because it prohibited private insurers in public health exchanges from offering abortion coverage.

Woliver repeatedly emphasizes the efforts of the NCWO to conceptualize women’s interests in broad terms. In the chapter on Social Security reform, she shows how it understood the distinctive interests of women on this issue related to their longer lifespans, shorter paid employment history, and the unequal effects of marriage instability and children. The NCWO’s efforts to protect Social Security from privatization and other reforms during the presidency of George W. Bush also highlight the range of strategies employed by the coalition, including a Women and Social Security Summit that attracted policy experts and press, a series of carefully researched reports on the impacts of reform proposals on women, outreach to editors in the “women’s press” such as Good Housekeeping, and direct lobbying of members of Congress and administration officials.

Woliver’s engaging description of the role of the NCWO in many of the key political developments of the past two decades only leaves us wanting more. The first chapter is titled “Easier in Groups,” but that is not necessarily the conclusion every reader will reach. With the book’s many moving parts and meandering narrative style, it is not always clear how to evaluate the effectiveness of the NCWO in these cases and for the feminist cause more broadly. The NCWO helped avert Social Security privatization, but most of the cases—all-male golf club membership, abortion access in the ACA, and feminist challenges to neoliberalism—are hard not to view as defeats or stalemates, at least in the short term. How much credit or blame belongs to the NCWO?

In the final chapter, Woliver briefly describes the collapse of the NCWO in 2015. Future scholars should examine, in a comparative context, the internal and external dynamics that put an end to this organization. Which coalitions survive and why? The case of the NCWO also raises key questions about the changing interest group arena in Washington, D.C., the expansion and diversification of women’s movement organizations, the transformation of gender politics and women in politics over the past 10 years, and the exercise of political influence in the twenty-first century. In the meantime, Push Back, Move Forward provides unique insights not only into the functioning of the National Council of Women’s Organizations but also for gender politics, activism, policy making, and coalition dynamics in the contentious first decades of the twenty-first century.