The conference was perceived as a moment of collaboration and commemoration, during which the feminist legacy was to be appraised. In Houston, both activists and researchers assessed the 1977 event. The Women’s March in Washington D.C along with the Houston Conference of 2017 comforted women all over the United States that feminism was alive. This was all the more pressing that the Harvey Weinstein controversy had just become public. conference intended to assess the feminist struggle since 1977 by remembering the symbolic outreach of the International Women’s Year conference. In aims and scope, it resembled the Seneca Fall Convention, where, in 1848, first-wave feminists publicly gathered for the first time to discuss the condition of women and to make political and social claims for their sex. Both a political and a symbolic event, the Houston Conference brought together a wide range of attendees in terms of age, race, sexual orientation and political obedience, ready to debate on the meaning and purposes of womanhood and feminism. That same year, the Southern state of Texas was chosen as the site of a state-sponsored conference that attracted more than 20,000 people (Spruill, 2017, 2). This triggered national discussion on the advancement of the status of women and debates were conducted in every state throughout 1977. Anxious to honor the US commitment to women’s rights, American feminists lobbied Congress for funding in order to organize a similar gathering in the United States. Worldwide, the years 1975-1985 were designated as the United Nations Decade for the Women and an International Women’s Year Conference was held in Mexico City in 1975, leading to the adoption of a World Plan of Action in favor of women’s equality. Activists, artists, and researchers from all over the country gathered to foster a discussion on this pivotal 1977 event organized by American feminists at a time when the movement was in full force. 1 On November 6-7 2017, the University of Houston welcomed a commemorative conference sponsored by the Center for Public History of the University of Houston to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the International Women’s Year (IWY) Conference of 1977: “The National Women’s Conference: Taking 1977 into the 21 st Century”.
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