International Year of the Woman

Identification The commemoration of the international progress of women in achieving full human rights

Date 1975

The United Nations officially dedicated this year to promoting three main objectives: equality between men and women, integration of women into international economic and social development, and increased participation of women in achievement of world peace.

Also known as International Women’s Year (IWY), 1975 marked the beginning of the Decade of the Woman as sponsored by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Pat Hutar, an American member of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), proposed holding a world conference as the focal point of IWY, emphasizing the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of CSW programs that had been implemented during the prior twenty-five years.

Held in Mexico City in June, the Conference on IWY attracted more than five thousand participants, including 133 national delegations. With forty-three members, the U.S. delegation stood as the largest in attendance. Rosalind Harris and Mildred Persinger, leaders of Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) based in New York, worked with the Mexican government in setting up an unofficial parallel conference in the same city at the same time. Known as the IWY Tribune, this conference drew more than six thousand participants—many from national women’s organizations, including well-known feminists such as Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Angela Davis.

The Conference on IWY was the first world conference of governments regarding the status and rights of women, and it produced the World Plan of Action, the first international public policy document specifically aimed at improving women’s conditions and opportunities across crucial areas of their development—economic, educational, legal, political, and social. By linking CSW commitments with the larger political agenda of the United Nations, the Conference on IWY achieved a monumental breakthrough in effectively advancing women’s progress toward full citizenship.

Impact

In the United States, IWY inspired the convocation of the 1977 National Women’s Conference, commonly referred to as the Constitutional Convention for American Women, in Houston, Texas, with two thousand members and twenty thousand guests. As the conference’s Declaration of American Women asserted, the power of federal, state, public, and private institutions had to be harnessed so that “everything possible under the law will (be) done to provide American women with full equality.” Acting on that goal, the National Commission on the Observance of IWY (appointed by President Gerald Ford) assembled the National Plan of Action—covering a wide range of concerns, including child care, the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), and the status of minority women—and presented it to President Jimmy Carter in 1978.

Bibliography

Allan, Virginia R., Margaret E. Galey, and Mildred E. Persinger. “World Conference of International Women’s Year.” In Women, Politics, and the United Nations, edited by Anne Winslow. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.

Bird, Caroline, and members and staff of National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year. What Women Want: From the Official Report to the President, the Congress and the People of the United States. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979.

Radin, Beryl A., and Hoyt H. Purvis, eds. Women in Public Life. Austin, Tex.: Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, 1976.