(White) women on the move: Suffrage memory and the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference

ABSTRACT

This essay examines how the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference (IWY), a historic gathering of women in Houston, Texas—tasked to put forward a series of policy recommendations, many informed by a feminist perspective—undercut its own intersectional impulse by leveraging collective memory of U.S. suffrage activism. I analyze the conference program, a document distributed to every conference attendee, that called up early woman’s movement history and suffrage memory in its language, ephemera, and image to constitute a certain narrative for the 1977 IWY audience. I argue that by linking the IWY conference to a specific narrative of women’s rights and suffrage activism, the planners made the conference more explicitly political and feminist, and imbued the event with historical significance and legitimacy. At the same time, the deployment of suffrage memory ultimately positioned white women as mobile and engaged in social movement while effacing Black women and women of color who had been involved in suffrage activism, thus rendering them immobile, invisible, silent, and locked in the past. I conclude by examining a concurrent counter-narrative, one not included in the program, as a productive, intersectional rupture in suffrage memory at IWY.

KEYWORDS:

• Black suffragists
• social movement
• mobility
• racism
• feminism

Notes

1 Bella Abzug, “Welcome to the National Women’s Conference,” National Women’s Conference Official Program, November 18–21, 1977, 3. Lillene H. Fifield Papers, Coll2007-014, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives, Los Angeles, California. Box 5, Folder 1.

2 Abzug, “Welcome to the National Women’s Conference,” 3.

3 Alyssa A. Samek, “Mobility, Citizenship, and ‘American Women on the Move’ in the 1977 International Women’s Year Torch Relay,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 103, no. 3 (2017): 207–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630.2017.1321134

4 See, for instance, Lisa Flores’ recent work on immobility and people of color. Lisa A. Flores, “Stoppage and the Racialized Rhetorics of Mobility,” Western Journal of Communication 84, no. 3 (2020): 247–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/10570314.2019.1676914

5 Judy Klemesrud, “At the Houston Meeting: A Kaleidoscope of American Womanhood,” New York Times, November 19, 1977, 47.

6 National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women’s Conference (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), 9–10.

7 Executive Order 11832, Establishing a National Commission on the Observance of the International Women’s Year, 1975. See Cynthia Harrison, “Creating a National Feminist Agenda: The Women’s Action Alliance and Feminist Coalition Building in the 1970s.” In Feminist Coalitions: Historical Perspectives on Second-Wave Feminism in the United States, ed. Stephanie Gilmore (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 19–20; Ruth Rosen, The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America (New York: Viking, 2000), 66–7.

8 Executive Order 11832.

9 Public Law 94–167, (1975). This money also provided for financial aid to ensure that women of all socioeconomic status could have an opportunity to attend the conference as a delegate or alternate.

10 National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year, “ … To Form a More Perfect Union … ”: Justice for American Women Report of the National Commission on the Observance of International Women’s Year (Washington, Department of State, 1976).

11 The Spirit of Houston, 10.

12 The Spirit of Houston, 10. See Joan Cook, “For Women of All Views: A State Meeting,” New York Times, May 22, 1977, 385.

13 Abzug, “Welcome to the National Women’s Conference,” 3. Box 5, Folder 1, Fifield MSS, emphasis original.

14 Barbie Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain: The Shape of Memory Studies,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 12 (1995): 214. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295039509366932

15 Shawn J. Parry-Giles and Trevor Parry-Giles, “Collective Memory, Political Nostalgia, and the Rhetorical Presidency: Bill Clinton’s Commemoration of the March on Washington, August 28, 1998,” Quarterly Journal of Speech vol 86, no. 4 (2000): 418. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335630009384308; Abzug, “Welcome to the National Women’s Conference,” 3.

16 National Women’s Conference Program, November 18–21, 1977, front cover. Box 5, folder 1, Fifield MSS.

17 National Women’s Conference Program, November 18–21, 1977, inside front cover. Box 5, folder 1, Fifield MSS.

18 See Tiffany Lewis’s work on suffrage and the role of the West. Tiffany Lewis, “Mapping Social Movements and Leveraging the U.S. West: The Rhetoric of the Woman Suffrage Map,” Women’s Studies in Communication 42, no. 4 (2019): 490–510. https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2019.1676349

19 National Women’s Conference Program, November 18–21, 1977, 5. Box 5, folder 1, Fifield MSS.

20 National Women’s Conference Program, November 18–21, 1977, 15. Box 5, folder 1, Fifield MSS; See also Lewis, “Mapping Social Movements and Leveraging the U.S. West.”

21 Edith P. Mayo, “Historical Notes: Our Foremothers,” National Women’s Conference Program, November 18–21, 1977, 26. Box 5, folder 1, Fifield MSS.

22 Mayo, “Historical Notes,” 27, emphasis mine.

23 Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles, “Collective Memory, Political Nostalgia, and the Rhetorical Presidency,” 418; Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain,” 232.

24 Editorial Staff, “We dedicate our coverage of the first National Women’s Conference in the ‘Daily’ Breakthrough to the first women voters in Texas & to suffragist Christia Adair,” The Breakthrough, November 18, 1977, 1.

25 Editorial Staff, “We Dedicate Our Coverage,” 1.

26 Editorial Staff, “We Dedicate Our Coverage,” 32.

27 Editorial Staff, “We Dedicate Our Coverage,” 32.

28 Editorial Staff, “We Dedicate Our Coverage,” 32.