Neither America’s Continental Congress, nor the Constitutional Convention, nor any Congress since our nation’s founding has achieved such a level of inclusiveness. Elected delegates to the Houston Women’s Conference represented all income levels, religious, racial and ethnic groups, and political party...

Each of the authors received separate help from archivists at various academic libraries including Radcliffe’s Schlesinger Library; Vassar College; Hood College; Hunter College; Columbia University; the University of Wisconsin Madison; the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College; the Carey C. Shuart Women’s Archive in the Marjorie Rendall National Women’s Collection at the...

January 30, 1974: President Nixon issues Presidential Proclamation No. 4262 which called for the U.S. Government and the American people to observe International Women’s Year.

This is the inside story of the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (IWY), which existed from 1975 to April 1978. During that period, the IWY Commission was chaired by three different women; it changed from a group of predominantly liberal Republicans to a more liberal, mostly Democratic commission. Over time it carried out two very different missions. Its...

Inspired by her experience attending the Mexico City UN Conference as an observer, Congresswoman Bella Abzug determined to seize the opportunity to transform the work of the IWY Commission into a national movement. In September 1975, as IWY committees were in the midst of developing initial recommendations to President Ford, she introduced a far-reaching bill—HR8903—to extend and...

By autumn 1976, the IWY staff and the remaining Ford-appointed commissioners were hard at work carrying out the mandate of Bella’s law. An important debate again arose over the definition of women’s—as opposed to human—rights issues. Specifically, the question was: What topics might be appropriate for inclusion in the state and national meetings authorized and paid for by...

The IWY staff and commissioners took very seriously their mandate to recruit state organizers from all economic levels, ages, and ethnic groups. Even before President Carter’s inauguration in January 1977, the IWY had named fifty-three of the required fifty-six state and territorial coordinating committees, and nine...

The state meetings leading up to the National Conference had served a number of worthwhile functions: they’d educated great numbers of men and women on the contemporary facts rather than the myths of women’s lives. Participants voted on a National Plan of Action, proposed additional remedies to present to the...

Several IWY staff and commissioners arrived in Houston days before the official start of the conference to oversee last-minute details. They had their challenges. On November 15, the Media Committee was briefed on the torch run by its tireless relay coordinator Pat Kery, recruited by Commissioner Lenore Hershey from the Charter Company of Jacksonville, Florida. Kery reported, “We’re...

Immersed in reporting day-to-day crimes, celebrity puff, or sports coverage, general news reporters were mostly unprepared to explain a complex sociological event like the Houston IWY Conference. Like many of their editors, deadline-wary journalists looked for the easiest, largest headline, and for that essential element required of all good theater scripts: CONFLICT.

Bella wrote to all of the Houston delegates on December 5, 1977, to thank them “for making the National Women’s Conference an outstanding achievement.” She took note of Time magazine’s December 5 cover story on the event: “What happened (in Houston) was an end to the psychological isolation that had constrained women’s activities and ambitions. They...

The delegates to the Houston Conference adopted a Plan of Action containing detailed recommendations on twenty-five topics. The content of each plank reflected the deliberations by some 150,000 women and men at the preceding fifty-six state and territorial meetings as well as the compromises forged in Houston.

Other essential sources for this book are: Bella S. Abzug papers, in the rare book and manuscripts division, Butler Library, Columbia University, New York City; Caroline Bird papers, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York; Kathryn F. Clarenbach Papers, 1960–1989, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Archives and Records Management Services; Catherine East papers, Schlesinger Library,...

Abram, Ruth,3.4-3.5 , 3.9 , 3.38 , 3.41 , 3.116 , 4.115 ,

Patricia Rusch Hyatt, a journalism graduate of the University of Texas, Austin, has worked as feature writer at the Houston Chronicle, and as a freelance writer/editor and a consultant. She chaired the NOW Education Task Force in Fairfax County, Virginia, and founded the Nelly Bly Clearing House on nonsexist textbooks. Pat wrote Coast to Coast with Alice (1995), on the...