[2][page needed] She was an early member of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and presided over the New York chapter in 1967–68, though she quickly grew disillusioned with the group.
Atkinson has been largely inactive since the 1970s, but resurfaced in 2013 to co-author an open statement expressing radical feminists' concerns about what they perceived as the silencing of discussion around "the currently fashionable concept of gender."
[9] She later moved to New York City where, in 1967, she entered the PhD program in philosophy at Columbia University, where she studied with the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto.
[15] Her time with the organization was tumultuous, including a row with the national leadership over her attempts to defend and promote Valerie Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto in the wake of the Andy Warhol shooting.
[16] In 1968, she became critical of the organization's inability to confront issues like abortion and marriage inequalities; she also felt it replicated patriarchal power structures, and resigned from her presidency after her proposal to abolish NOW's executive offices was defeated in a vote.
[18] Atkinson led and participated in protests against Richard Nixon, the Manhattan Marriage Bureau, and gender-segregated classified ads in the New York Times.
[31] In August 2014, Michelle Goldberg in The New Yorker described it as expressing their "alarm" at "threats and attacks, some of them physical, on individuals and organizations daring to challenge the currently fashionable concept of gender.