International Women's Year Research Articles

THE THIRD WORLD CONGRESS OF FREE UKRAINIANS AS A COMPONENT OF STRUGGLE FOR THE RIGHTS OF THE UKRAINIAN NATION

The article examines the preparation and proceedings of the Third World Congress of Free Ukrainians (WCFU). The author highlights the key challenges faced by the organizers of this event, including a lack of funds and a decline in interest. Furthermore, the article analyzes the influence of international factors on the activities of the WCFU, particularly the processes of decolonization and the increased focus on human rights and freedoms in the 1970s. As a result of these developments, representatives of the Ukrainian, Belarusian, Estonian, Latvian and Lithuanian World Congresses jointly drafted a “Memorandum on Decolonization of the USSR” and submitted it for consideration by the United Nations (UN). To conclude the Congress, a demonstration titled “Defending the Rights of Ukraine – For the Decolonization of the USSR” was organized. The article highlights key achievements of the Commission on Human Rights of the WCFU, including the defense of the rights of political prisoners such as Valentyn Moroz, Leonid Plyushch, Mykola Rudenko, Oleksiy Tykhyi, Lev Lukianenko and others. The Commission also participated in conferences under the auspices of the UN in honor of the International Women's Year in Mexico in 1975 and Habitat Conference in Vancouver in 1976. Moreover, the article examines the reaction of the Soviet press to the Third WCFU and identifies the main clichés of Soviet propaganda used to describe this event.

‘Edited and Approved by Women for Maximum Benefit of all Readers’: Newsprint Journalism, the International Women's Year and the Remaking of a Gendered National Public in 1970s Ghana

AbstractDuring the International Women's Year (IWY) of 1975, United Nations bodies made concerted efforts to ensure global awareness and understanding of the IWY aims of equality, peace and development, via the mass media. In this article, we engage with these strategies of global information distribution from the vantage point of Ghana, West Africa. Drawing from interviews with women journalists and examples from the women's pages of the national state‐owned Daily Graphic newspaper, we argue that the onset of the IWY presented an important opportunity for women living under the constraints of military rule. A small but determined group of journalists capitalised on a longer history of readers writing into newspapers, and on lower levels of government surveillance of women's pages. Working with and through multi‐layered forms of address, they adapted the homey, gossipy women's pages and turned them into spaces of engagement between men and women as co‐citizens. During the IWY, connections were forged between international events and agendas and ‘domestic issues’. By hosting older debates about widowhood, inheritance and polygyny, and newer debates about family planning, formal education and employment, the women's pages positioned Ghanaian women as a key constituency in national development, but also enabled more assertive critiques of men's privileges.

International Women’s Year and women’s activism: a comparative look at Poland and Spain

ABSTRACT This paper provides a comparative study of the impact of the 1975 International Women’s Year (IWY) on women’s activism in two non-democratic European countries: Spain and Poland. Intended by the United Nations (UN) to advance women’s rights globally, the effects of IWY were significantly influenced by national contexts. In Spain, activities relating to IWY unfolded in two interconnected spheres: the official arena controlled by the authorised Francoist women’s organisation, and the unofficial, where legal and illegal activists came together to combine a feminist agenda with anti-Francoist activity. At both levels, transnational and international relations were established or further developed during IWY. In Poland, celebrations were dominated by state-approved women’s organisations to a far greater extent, although diverse initiatives did develop on the margins, providing a space for critical debate on gender equality. However, IWY neither provided a trigger for grassroots women’s activism in Poland, nor significantly secured women’s issues on the anti-regime agenda.

1975-1985: a catalyst for Global South-oriented advocacy by Dutch feminists

ABSTRACTThe article discusses the significance of the International Women's Year (IWY) and the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women for the development of Global South-oriented advocacy by feminists in the Netherlands. It examines how a focus on women evolved within Dutch development cooperation policy and development studies which persists to this day under the banner of ‘women’s rights, gender equality, and gender mainstreaming’. The article highlights instances of international advocacy fostered by the UN International Women’s Year Conference in 1975, the UN International Conference on Population in 1984 and the UN World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the UN Decade for Women in 1985, and how the advocacy efforts contributed to a reframing of the early Dutch policy approach of ‘women in development’.

Arriving from the revolution: International Women’s Year in the Portuguese ‘Hot Summer’

ABSTRACT In this article, I discuss reactions to International Women’s Year (IWY) in Portugal. Following the military coup of April 1974 that brought down the Estado Novo dictatorship and initiated the Carnation Revolution, Portugal underwent the ‘Hot Summer’ of 1975, a period of intense social conflict and the decolonisation processes of countries in Africa that had long fought for independence (1961–1974). I examine the composition of the Portuguese delegation and the socialist-oriented discourse they adopted, underlining how little the needs of either women in the former colonies or feminist movements were represented and addressed. While two Portuguese women’s organisations, the Democratic Movement of Women and the Commission for the Status of Woman, took advantage of IWY to promote initiatives within the country, the Movement for Liberation of Women took a more critical approach. Interweaving history, memory, and written, visual, and oral sources, I interpret the legacy of events during the summer of 1975, at both an individual level and from the perspective of women’s organisations.

“Nothing Less Than Justice”

This article analyzes the significance of the 1977 California International Women’s Year (IWY) Conference, one of fifty-six state and territorial meetings held ahead of the 1977 National Women’s Conference (NWC) in Houston, Texas. The NWC was the first and only time that the U.S. federal government funded and authorized an event focused on women’s rights. Utilizing primary and oral history sources, we examine the political mobilization of women of color and lesbians from California. We focus on the efforts of these minoritized women to reach their respective communities and to form coalitions with one another, before and during the state meeting, in order to make collective impacts at the NWC. We make three arguments. First, these California activists built upon a longer tradition of political mobilization within and across communities defined in terms of race, indigeneity, and sexuality. Second, the timing of political engagement by women of color and lesbian-identified activists with the NWC, namely in the late 1970s, challenges the temporal understanding of so-called second-wave feminism, which tends to focus on the 1960s and early 1970s. Finally, the range of political ideas and strategies expressed at the California IWY Conference and the NWC reveals the intertwining of various ideologies and approaches to creating change. The NWC was a state-sponsored political event, but the grassroots mobilization that occurred at the local, state, and national levels enabled women of diverse backgrounds and beliefs to articulate and advocate for their political vision.

United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in Women Empowerment Strategies in Cameroon 1976 – 2015

For the past decades, discussions on African women have witnessed steadily increasing awareness of the need to empower women through measures to increase social, economic and political equity, and broader access to fundamental human rights. The focus on women as a topic of political debate stepped into the international arena during the United Nations (UN) Decade for Women in the1970s. This led to the establishment of the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) in December 1976. The vision emerged from the Voluntary Fund for the United Nations Decade for Women in the International Women’s Year (IWY) with its first director Margaret C. Snyder. This paper thus aims at assessing UNIFEM’s strategies in empowering women in Cameroon’s development sectors. The study is informed by primary and secondary data sourced during a field study in some localities (Bamenda, Ebolowa, Kye-Ossi and Douala) and some published and unpublished documents. The findings of the research revealed that UNIFEM’s actions improved on women status in various domains. This however, was not optimized due to certain setbacks. Some of the benefits included skill training, adult education and enterprise development. Ultimately, the data derived from the various sources appeared vital to our topic and enabled us to note that within the context of an expanding civil society, the need of women’s empowerment to alleviate poverty and foster community development remains crucial.

A Transnational History of Left Feminism in Turkey (1974–1979): Relations and Exchanges between the IKD and the WIDF

This article presents a transnational history of left feminism in Turkey between 1974–1979 when international women’s movements gained momentum on a global scale with the designation of 1975 as International Women’s Year (IWY). With this article, my aim is to go beyond methodological nationalism in the established historiography on women’s movements in Turkey. I study in particular the local and international activities of the international activities of the Progressive Women’s Association (İlerici Kadınlar Derneği, IKD), the mass left-feminist organisation between 1975 and 1980 that engaged in left-wing women’s activism all around Turkey. I explore the bilateral relations, connections, exchange, interaction, and collaboration between the IKD and international women’s movements, particularly the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), which was a global coalition of women of the anti-fascist, pro-communist left. I use the term left feminism that, in my opinion, expands the definition of feminism by going beyond the liberal political goal of individual emancipation. Against the overarching premise that women’s agency cannot be actualised under state-socialism or within communist-socialist women’s organisations, my article shows the overlapping issues between communism and feminism as well as the diverse agendas that constitute history of feminism in twentieth-century Turkey from a transnational perspective.

Seeking to Understand the Opposition to the Relief Society Activities of the Sesquicentennial Year

Seeking to Understand the Opposition to the Relief Society Activities of the Sesquicentennial Year

Women Empowerment for Accelerating the Rural Economy of Arunachal Pradesh

“To awaken the people, it is women who must be awakened, once she is in the moves, the family moves, the villages’ moves, and nation moves”. Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru Introduction: Women empowerment is gaining popularity in the 20th century; it is era of socio- cultural reforms. Empowerment means to increase political, social, educational, and economic, Gender or spiritual strength of personal society. Women constitute the most elegant resource of society. They are regarded as the backbone in family. They play the role of mother, sister, wife, grandmother. Women are considered as the central pillar of every sphere of development in human progress. A woman is regarded as agent of for the growth and development of family as well as good society. In rural areas women are closely attached with the environment for the survival and livelihood. Protection and conservation of the forest is correlated with the role of women. In remote areas women not runs the family they also tries to earn additional wages for their family. It is very much peculiar and unique system that in Galo and some others tribes of Arunachal Pradesh women work harder than the male. They are more in cultivation than male counter parts. So if they are empowered economically, as well as socio-politically, the scenario of the rural areas will definitely transform towards the path of prosperity. For further up-liftment of the women status. International women year was declared in 1975 by United Nation. The 08th march of every year is celebrated as International women Days. The first international conference on women was held in Mexico City in1975. Followed by, Copenhagen in199 and third conference in Nairobi 1985.

1975 – ‘Not just a year, but a lifetime for women’

Abstract The article looks at the significance of the International Women’s Year (IWY) 1975 for the development of Dutch policy on development-related gender equality issues. It analyses how the route to the IWY World Conference and Women’s Tribune in Mexico City was marked by power struggles in and around the United Nations (UN), amongst member states, and between national governments and women’s organisations, in a geopolitical context of the Cold War and Global North–South divisions. The article discusses how, despite little initial enthusiasm for the IWY amongst the Dutch government and feminist groups, engagement with IWY generated a new momentum for national and international policy advocacy that was to come to fruition after 1975.

Women Politicking Politely: Advancing Feminism in the 1960s and 1970s

Kimberly Wilmot Voss describes the contributions of lesser-known women to the women's rights movement and the second-wave feminist movement during its first decades. She focuses on six women who used their jobs in government and journalism to promote the status of women in the public sphere. Ideologically moderate, and to avoid jeopardizing their positions in the civil service and news organizations that employed them, they acted subtly behind the scenes. Unlike radical icons—such as Betty Friedan, Bella Abzug, and Gloria Steinem—who gained fame through their place in the movement and politics, the women Voss studies were rarely recognized. Catherine East, the executive secretary of the Interdepartmental Committee on the Status of Women and the Citizens' Advisory Council on the Status of Women, held positions in every presidential commission on women in the 1960s and 1970s. A founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW) and a leader at the United Nations International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City in 1975, she also helped push the equal rights amendment through Congress.

Revisiting Second Wave Histories: New Chronologies, Geographies, and Appraisals

Revisiting Second Wave Histories:New Chronologies, Geographies, and Appraisals Tamar W. Carroll (bio) Janet Allured. Remapping Second-Wave Feminism: The Long Women's Rights Movement in Louisiana, 1950–1997. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016. xiii + 348 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-8203-4538-3 (cl); 978-0-8203-5477-4 (pb); 978-0-8203-5004-2 (epub). Shelah Gilbert Leader and Patricia Rush Hyatt. American Women on the Move: The Inside Story of the National Women's Conference, 1977. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016. xxi + 169 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4985-3599-1 (cl); 978-1-4985-3601-1 (pb); 978-1-4985-3600-4 (epub). Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson, eds., Women's Activism and "Second Wave" Feminism: Transnational Histories. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. vii + 335 pp., ill. ISBN 978-1-4742-5051-1 (cl); 978-1-4742-5052-8 (epub); 978-1-4742-5053-5 (pdf). Jocelyn Olcott. International Women's Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvi + 334 pp., ill. ISBN 978-0-1953-2768-7 (cl); 978-0-1906-4998-2 (epub); 978-0-1997-1664-7 (pdf). These four recent books on second wave feminism raise compelling theoretical and methodological questions while also providing a wealth of information about women's activism in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chief among them is how to define second wave feminism itself; Janet Allured, as well as Barbara Molony and Jennifer Nelson offer critiques of the wave metaphor for how it tends to elide women's activism that does not align neatly with the crests of women's suffrage and second wave feminism. Yet, Malony and Nelson retain the term "second wave" within quotation marks because of its historical significance and widespread use in the historiography of feminism; their volume seeks to "fill in the troughs" between waves and broaden our geographic conceptualization of the second wave to recognize the autonomous development of non-Western feminisms (3). Allured points out that "the term 'second wave' remains useful in describing the renewed burst of grassroots service and political activism in the 1960s and 1970s," an observation that is born out in Olcott [End Page 136] and Leader and Hyatt's accounts of the 1975 International Women's Year (IWY) conference in Mexico and the 1977 National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas: something special really did happen in these years (3). Together, these works also contribute to methodological questions, including how to understand the role of international and national conferences in the broader feminist movement and how to incorporate local and regional history into national and transnational narratives. The first two books under review broaden the chronology and geographic scope of second-wave feminism, while the second two hone in on the mid-to-late 1970s and look at International Women's Year conferences as pivotal moments in both transnational and US feminism. In Remapping Second-Wave Feminism, Janet Allured sets out to "encourage the full and complete telling of the story of second-wave feminism in the South" and to demonstrate that the region "had a vigorous, defiant, and persistent cadre of committed feminists who supplied the national organizations with both ideas and personnel" (3). Allured's study shifts our attention to the activities of feminists in the American South and is grounded in Louisiana, where she conducted prodigious archival and newspaper-based research and an amazing number of oral histories (at least ninety-seven by my count). She draws on other recent studies of feminism in Southern cities to round out her account, which shows that feminism not only flourished in the South but was distinctive in some important ways from the "bicoastal" feminisms of the urban North and West that Allured argues have dominated the historiography.1 Southern feminism was part of a multi-ethnic "regional movement against social injustice" that drew on liberal Christian and Jewish religious faith traditions that "demanded equality of opportunity for oppressed people" (3, 11). Methodist, Lutheran, Episcopalian, and Reform Judaism congregations were especially important in transmitting a social justice ethic and inspiring women to fight for equality of sex as well as race; they also provided key meeting...

“Once a typist always a typist”

This article discusses the Australian Women's Broadcasting Co-operative (AWBC), formed by women working at the Australian Broadcasting Commission in response to the United Nations' declaration that 1975 would be International Women's Year. It examines the AWBC's attempts to challenge entrenched structural inequalities and sexual discrimination, improve opportunities for women in the organization, and change dominant representations of women's lives in the media. It analyzes the significance of the AWBC's key interventions, including the production of a national weekly radio show for women, The Coming Out Show; the provision of production training for women; pushing for a formal inquiry into the status of women; lobbying for staff childcare facilities; and representing women employees in industrial relations matters. The article concludes with a discussion of the long-term impact of the AWBC and the Coming Out Show, which, despite its genesis as a “bold experiment,” endured for twenty-three years.

‘Women are a colonised sex’: Elizabeth Reid, Human Rights and International Women’s Year 1975

This article situates Australian Elizabeth Reid’s contribution to International Women’s Year (IWY) (1975) within ongoing historiographical discussions on development and human rights. The world’s first advisor on women’s affairs to a head of government, Reid used the burgeoning Women’s Liberation Movement’s critique of ‘sexism’ to challenge IWY’s goals of formal equality, a limited and undesirable outcomes that prevented women and men from instead becoming ‘more human’. These ideas were then used to challenge the dominance of economic development over individual and collective rights at the 1975 Mexico City conference, placing Reid as a participant in the 1970s human rights ‘breakthrough’.

To Save the World Through Women

Jocelyn Olcott’s book on the International Women’s Year (IWY) in Mexico City captures an astonishing United Nations gathering, one of great hope, fear, anger, resentment, passion, and joy—as well as one of powerful implications, which is overdue for book-length treatment. Most likely, 1975 is better known to the readers of this journal for the findings of Frank Church’s Senate committee on intelligence activities, or the U.S. flight from Saigon. Readers may recall, too, a year of crisis and change on many fronts—the lingering effects of the OPEC embargo following the Yom Kippur War, the rise of African nationalist parties to challenge the Portuguese in Angola and white-minority rule in Rhodesia, the violent aftermath of the coup against Salvador Allende—all of them a combustible mix of military oppression, apartheid, anti-colonialism, and economic challenge even as the Helsinki agreements helped usher in a “Final Act” for the Cold War. Perhaps less remembered is that the unlikely soundtrack of “Love will Keep Us Together” dominated the airwaves that summer, reaching gold record status by the end of the conference; for the first time, listeners in Mexico City could enjoy the Captain and Tenille’s chart breaker simultaneously in Spanish (“Por Amor Viviremos”).

How the Personal Became Political: The Feminist Movement of the 1970s

ABSTRACTElizabeth Reid (AO, FASSA, FAIIA) was the first adviser on women's affairs to any head of government in the world, appointed by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in 1973. Drawing on her own life and writing, and those of other members of the Women's Liberation Movement and the Women's Electoral Lobby, Reid recreates the fire that burned in 1970s feminists. Weaving together connections between sexuality, justice, morality, and the cultural structures of sexism, Reid evokes women's experiences of personal disempowerment that fuelled their activism and political determination. In 1973 when the Prime Minister's office advertised for a Women's Adviser, feminists debated whether or not revolution could be made from within government. Reid recalls her work as Women's Adviser, and her leadership of the Australian delegation to the 1975 International Women's Year events in Mexico City. As the nation's most prominent feminist, Reid travelled around Australia and spoke to all kinds of women. She received more letters than any member of Cabinet other than the Prime Minister. In this significant retrospective, Reid summarises the achievements of the Whitlam Government in various areas, the constraints it faced, and more broadly the successes of the 1970s feminist movement and what we can learn from it now.

Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics by Marjorie J. Spruill

Reviewed by: Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics by Marjorie J. Spruill Leandra Zarnow Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics. By Marjorie J. Spruill. (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2017. Pp. [viii], 436. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 978-1-63286-316-4; cloth, $33.00, ISBN 978-1-63286-314-0.) In November 1977, the Albert Thomas Convention Center in downtown Houston, Texas, was transformed into the grandest experiment in civic engagement conducted by women in U.S. history. For four days, two thousand elected delegates from every U.S. state and territory passed a twenty-five plank National Plan of Action, which was then submitted to President Jimmy Carter. Over twenty thousand additional well-wishers, reporters, and international dignitaries observed the proceedings. Historian Marjorie J. Spruill's Divided We Stand: The Battle Over Women's Rights and Family Values That Polarized American Politics is an outstanding study of the National Women's Conference (NWC). Published to coincide with the conference's fortieth anniversary, Divided We Stand is the first book to fully explore this momentous event. Spruill's treatment of "four days that changed the world" highlights how this description works for not only the NWC but also the oppositional Pro Family Rally that brought around fifteen thousand to Houston that same week. Both gatherings, as Spruill sees it, "constituted a major consciousness-raising session" (p. 13). Spruill attempts to locate the roots of current partisan polarization in these two coinciding events. She traces the rise of a bipartisan "feminist establishment" in government alongside an antistatist, religiously motivated "'family values'" counterforce (pp. 14, 12). The Houston face-off, Spruill suggests, offered the nation "a glimpse of its political future" (p. 13). But if the NWC became a catalyst for new conservatism, it also revealed deep-seated tensions about family, femininity, and federalism. Spruill begins her story before 1977, drawing focus "to a chain of events that began in 1961" (p. 15). Early chapters map out the institutional building blocks that Democratic and Republican feminists laid, leading to the establishment of the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year (IWY) on January 9, 1975. This story features familiar highlights and players, including Esther Peterson, Kathryn "Kay" Clarenbach, Catherine East, Betty Friedan, Jill Ruckelshaus, and Mildred Marcy. Here, Spruill draws on research conducted in presidential libraries, which explains why she emphasizes political insiders pressuring presidential administrations rather than federal resistance to change and the influence of grassroots organizers. Spruill takes the opposite approach when turning to conservative women's organizing, a less familiar subject. She meticulously creates a narrative by drawing from a swath of oral interviews, published works, and archival collections. She decenters Phyllis Schlafly, debunking the inaccurate assumption that the pro-family rally was her idea. Rather, we learn that the mastermind was Lottie Beth Hobbs, a Church of Christ leader from Fort Worth, Texas, who founded Women Who Want to Be Women. Spruill introduces a broad web of ardent, savvy advocates, including Rosemary Thomson, Connaught "Connie" Marshner, Dorothy "Dot" Malone Slade, and Kathryn Dunaway, among others. [End Page 527] These women are the victors in Spruill's story, successfully harnessing center stage in politics from the Ronald Reagan era forward. For this reason, Spruill directs her attention to the maelstrom sparked by the passage of Public Law 94-167 (the act establishing the National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year) rather than the feat of this legislative accomplishment itself. She notes that as the Equal Rights Amendment ratification battle narrowed to a few southern states, "the IWY would be fought in every state and territory and in the space of a few months" (p. 137). After attending the IWY in Mexico City, the Democratic representative from New York, Bella Abzug, shepherded $5 million in appropriations through Congress in 1975 to bring the IWY spirit home. What feminists saw as a crowning achievement heralding women's rights as human rights, IWY challengers deemed an egregious abuse of tax dollars for social engineering. Much of Spruill's study is a play-by-play of "Armageddon...

Editorial Note: Women and the Global 1970s

Editorial NoteWomen and the Global 1970s Elisa Camiscioli and Jean H. Quataert What does the 1970s look like through the lens of women's history? The articles in this issue explore key markers of this decade—the expansion of the rights revolution that began in the 1960s, a loosening of previous restrictions on contraception and abortion, the broadening of women's healthcare and family planning organizations, and the growth of the environmentalist movement—to show how these developments touched the lives of women in Egypt, Australia, the United States, and Spain. Whether centered on national and regional studies or such global moments in 1970s women's history as the 1975 International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City, the articles highlight women's empowerment through bodily sovereignty, sexual exploration, state resistance, and traditional forms of high politics. We open with two articles that examine the long 1970s with regard to family planning initiatives. The first, by Alissa Walter, focuses on Egypt under President Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir's modernization project while the second, by Teresa Ortiz-Gómez and Agata Ignaciuk, is located in Spain during late Francoism and the transition to democracy. Family planning centered on contraception became an important postwar social experiment, dovetailing with UN debates about population and resources. By the 1960s, the widespread availability of contraceptive technologies like the Pill and the IUD invigorated these programs, and often their primary objective was women's empowerment through the avoidance of unwanted pregnancies. But this was not necessarily the focus in the developing world where, as Walter shows, family planning reflected postcolonial anxieties about the strain that high birth rates placed on state resources, thereby hindering national development. In Nasir's Egypt, contraception was part of an effort to modernize the lower classes. Walter illustrates rural women's spirited "non-participation" in this program, which was a key reason it failed in the 1960s and 1970s. In her account, ignoring the state constitutes resistance, and ignore the state they did: women declined to use any modern contraceptives at all, they rejected government-issued contraceptives, they used traditional herbal or barrier methods instead, or they adopted contraceptives provided by the government to space births, in the hope of increasing the number of surviving children in their families. This was not about religious objections, or women's refusal to act "rationally" by eschewing small families. As Walter concludes, rural Egyptian women "were not averse to regulating their fertility, they simply wanted to do so on their own terms." [End Page 7] The Spanish family planning movement developed in a different context: the public debates on contraception and abortion that occurred in many Western states from the mid-1960s through the 1970s. By the end of the decade, Britain, France, Italy, West Germany, Canada, and the United States all had witnessed a loosening of legislation on birth control and abortion. As Ortiz-Gómez and Ignaciuk show, such liberalization also occurred in Spain where, under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, contraception was illegal. Birth control activism nonetheless emerged among progressive members of the medical profession in the late 1960s, in the outpatient clinics of public hospitals where doctors and nurses circumvented "hospital directives and contemporary legal norms" to advise in favor of contraception. They were joined by members of the burgeoning feminist movement that had sprung up after Franco's death in 1975. While for Spanish feminists, family planning was part of the "new sexual ethics" promoted by the international women's health movement, for doctors, it was generally a reflection of their support for the ideals of the World Health Organization and the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Ideological differences between feminists and physicians did not deter cooperation, however. This successful grassroots coalition of doctors and feminists helped to bring about the decriminalization of contraception in 1978, during Spain's transition to democracy. Women's healthcare is also central to Flannery Burke and Jennifer Seltz's analysis of "natural birth" in the United States. Their article reminds us that the rise of modern environmentalism—and the emergence of environmental anxieties about pollution—occurred in the decade of the 1970s as well. Burke and Seltz compare the perspectives of feminists and...

Bella Abzug's Dilemma: The Cold War, Women's Politics, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the 1970s

This article examines Bella Abzug's activities with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict at home and abroad during her congressional career (1971–1977), with a focus on the dilemmas she faced, her approach to overcoming them, and her ability to mobilize like-minded but diverse American women for her struggle. After tracing her Labor Zionist background and her activities in the early 1970s, this article investigates her strategy for defending Israel during and after the 1975 International Women's Year Conference in Mexico. Abzug's story offers a useful window into the connection between women's politics and the Middle East question; it also illuminates the active role of a group of American women in making the US-Israeli relationship closer during the 1970s. This article concludes that, ironically, in order to endorse Zionism, Abzug, a staunch critic of the Cold War, relied on the US Cold War strategy of eliminating Communist influence from women's politics.