Last mile walk to convention center at International Women's Year conference in Houston; Photograph by Bettye Lane, Harvard University, The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

Editor's Note: Jo Freeman's photographs of the 1997 National Women's Conference can be viewed at this location.

 by Jo Freeman

Coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977, are two recently published books about that conference;  either would make a good holiday gift for the feminists on your list. They are: 

Shelah Leader and Patricia Hyatt
American Women on the Move: The Inside Story of the National Women’s Conference
Published by Lexington Books,  Paperback 2017,  xxi, 169 pp, photos

Marjorie Spruill
Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women’s Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics
Published by Bloomsbury USA, 2017;  437 pp, 16-page black and white photo insert

Although they obviously cover some of the same ground, they are very different books. Leader and Hyatt write from an insiders' perspective, as they were both on the conference staff. Their book is short and descriptive. Although they rely on documents and press stories, it's their insider stories that make the book interesting. 

Spruill is a historian; she didn't attend. She puts the conference into the larger context of American politics in the 1970s, giving equal time to the "other" conference organized in opposition. She sees the division among women between those who wanted change in women’s roles and those who did not as emblematic of the widening division in American politics.

After the UN declared 1975 to be International Women's Year, President Ford appointed an IWY Commission and Congress voted five million dollars to hold a US conference to propose a Plan of Action for American women. Held November 18-21, 1977 this conference was preceded by 56 state and territorial meetings, which elected 1,442 delegates. Each book devotes a chapter to these 56 meetings, though an entire book could be written about them. 

The IWY Commission tried to avoid the feminist label, which the opposition used as a smear. Phyllis Schlafly, already well-known as a conservative Republican and supporter of Barry Goldwater's 1964 Presidential campaign, denounced the National Conference as the "Federally Funded Festival for Frustrated Feminists". 

Organizing the opposition was primarily done by several lesser-known women. They brought together mostly religious women who believed that the man was the head of the family and that women should defer to men in all things. After Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment in 1972 these women (and their men) thought the ERA would bring such horrendous practices as same-sex marriage and women in combat. The 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing most abortions scared them even more. They wrote Phyllis Schlafly and other women they knew, eventually leading to the formation of several organizations opposed to anything labeled feminist, or which (they thought) might undermine the traditional family.

Denouncing the IWY meetings as "anti-family", opponents organized the IWY Citizen Review Commission to stop the conference from going forward. When that didn’t work, they brought their adherents to the state meetings where they elected 15 percent of the delegates to the national meeting. While they dominated nine of these meetings and split two, feminists ran the rest. Feminist organizations adopted the same hardball tactics to win their resolutions and elect their delegate slates that political parties had long used.

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