The northern branch was the Yemeni Women's Association, officially founded in 1965, though it already existed informally under the imamate.[14] In South Yemen the General Union of Yemeni Women (GUYW) was established in 1968, continuing the role of the Arab Women's Club and the Aden Women's Association before independence.[2] The project to merge these groups was supposed to take two months, but instead, it took nearly a year to merge into the Yemeni Women's Union.[15] Some of the difficulties in unifying the groups was due to political differences: the southern branch was Marxist and the northern branch was controlled by women who worked with the Islah Reform Party.[3] It wasn't until 2000 that the political differences between the members of the groups were resolved.[16]