Document 54: "Speech by Bella Abzug, Presiding Officer, First Plenary Session," in National Commission on the Observance of International Women's Year, The Spirit of Houston: The First National Women's Conference (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978), pp. 217-19.
Introduction
Speakers at the National Women's Conference in Houston included prominent public figures from current First Lady Rosalynn Carter, to Barbara Jordan, the first black woman Representative for Texas. The patronage of such influential women speakers indicates the importance of the NWC. A selection of some of the most notable speeches has been included in the following section of this project (see Document 50B, and documents 54 to 65). Speakers at the First Plenary Session on November 19 included Bella Abzug, the presiding officer, First Lady Rosalynn Carter, Former First Ladies Betty Ford and Lady Bird Johnson, NCOIWY commissioner Liz Carpenter, and Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.[71] Ten thousand people sat in the audience of the Coliseum in Houston to listen to these first speeches. Speakers for the Third Plenary Session on November 19 included Congresswoman Margaret M. Heckler and former Congresswoman and Assistant Secretary of State Patsy Mink both of whom had cosponsored Public Law 64-167.[72] During the Fourth Plenary Session on November 20, the anthropologist Margaret Mead and NCOIWY commissioners Cecilia Preciado-Burciaga and Carmen Delgado Votaw spoke.[73] During the Closing Plenary Session on the 21st of November, labor activist Addie Wyatt and Chair of the National American Indian and Alaskan Native Women's Conference, Billie Masters, were among the speakers. Wyatt chaired this final Plenary, while Masters filled in for an absent LaDonna Harris.[74]
p. 217
SPEECH BY BELLA ABZUG, PRESIDING OFFICER
FIRST PLENARY SESSION
NOVEMBER 19, 1977
We've waited almost two years for this moment, and it was worth it.
The road to Houston started more than a century and a half ago when American women began organizing to win the rights of citizenship.
The torch of freedom has been handed from generation to generation of women, and the torch we see here today is a symbol of our past victories and our hopes for future ones.
The road has twisted and turned, gone down byways and made detours at times, but today we're on the high road to equality.
Our present journey started with a bill—Public Law 94-167—that I introduced in Congress as a followup to International Women's Year in 1975. Congresswomen Patsy Mink and Margaret Heckler and the other Congresswomen united around the bill and spoke for it, as did many of the male members of Congress.
Our conference is a first in many ways.
It is the first time the Federal Government has sponsored a National Women's Conference and the 50 State meetings and six Territorial meetings that preceded this event.
It is the first time the Congress and the president have mandated American women to identify and help remove the barriers that stand between us and full equality with men.
The mandate under which we meet does not tell us to
consider whether women should seek to end discrimination, or
should seek full equality, full citizenship, and full participation in
society. Instead, it takes a stand for equality, a position that I
believe has the support of a majority
p. 218
How could it be otherwise 200 years after our nation was born in the great struggle for the rights of the individual?
And so the law directs us to examine the past and the present. It directs us to examine the status of American women, our needs, our problems, and the diversity of our lives. It directs us to seek change and improvements in the lives of women who have been held back by discriminatory practices.
That is our mission here this weekend.
We will be debating and voting on a National Plan of Action that includes dozens of recommendations on ways in which equality between men and women can be made a living reality.
Many of us see a future in which women will be free to live and work as individuals, as members of families, as members of society without the constraints of narrow customs and prejudices that demean our self-worth or laws that treat us as inferiors or weaklings.
Some among us may prefer a future that simple continues the past. Our purpose is not to tell women how to live or what to do. It is simply to say that women must be free to choose what they do.
Let us agree to disagree, if we must. It would be a dull weekend if we didn't feel free to state our beliefs. But I hope all of us here will remember our common interests as women who have for too long been treated as merely auxiliary human beings.
The National Plan of Action we shall be discussing comes from you, from the State meetings, from the members of the National Commission. It reflects the breadth of your concerns and needs and interests….
Throughout the history of our nation women have worked, but today more women than ever before are working.
Many are housewives who work part-time or on night shifts to help pay the mortgage and the grocery bills. Many work to support themselves and their children or work because they are single women, widowed, or divorced.
But despite the fact that women compose 40 percent of the work force, the wage gap between men and women gets wider, not smaller. A woman with a college education still earns less, on average, than a man with a high school education. And minority women earn less than white women.
Housewives, or homemakers, if you prefer, earn nothing at all, though this nation could not function for a day if the millions of women who work exclusively in the home were to stop doing what they do so lovingly for their families.
No objective value is placed on their sun-up to sun-down labor, and the result is that homemakers are placed at a serious disadvantage in inheritance and social security laws, in divorce and separation cases.
If so many women are concerned today about our status in the family, on the job and in our educational system, it is because more and more women realize that we are responsible for ourselves.
The economist Sylvia Porter reported recently that of 100 typical American women now 21 years of age, six will never marry. Of the 94 who will marry, 33 will get divorced, and of the remaining 61 who stay married, 46 will outlive their husbands.
Like it or not, that means that 85 out of 100 women will be on their own at some time during their adult lives, it is this realization that we do indeed have the responsibility for our own lives that brought more than 130,000 women out to the State meetings and brought you here to Houston….
What we are doing here in Houston is part of an irreversible worldwide movement in which women are speaking out for our needs and trying to create a better world in which men and women do not victimize each other, but work together for a decent life for all people.
There can be no turning back to a time when women were segregated in auxiliaries, prevented from using their skills and abilities, barred from places of power.
We can no longer accept a condition in which men rule the Nation and the world, excluding half the human race from effective economic and political power. Not when the world is in such had shape.
We can argue women, if we arrive at the stage where we do share power with men, will create a better world. I believe we will. I believe, if we had the opportunity, we could figure out ways to spend some of the $300 billion spent on armaments each year for more rational and humane purposes—like feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, creating jobs, preventing disease, ignorance, and illiteracy.
Personally, I am not interested in seeing women get an equal chance to push the nuclear button. I do want to see women and men work equally together for a peaceful world in which my daughters and your sons and daughters can live without fear.
But whatever women choose to do with equality, it must be ours as a matter of simple justice.
Our journey is far from over. We have much to do when we leave Houston. We have to see that the recommendations we support here become reality—and that will be long, hard work. We have to reach out to millions more women and men to enlist them in our cause. And we have to win real political power for women because as long as the Congress, the State legislatures, and city councils are dominated by men, we have to come as supplicants rather than as decisionmakers.
A reporter asked me yesterday whether Houston was going to be the death of the women's movement.
p. 219
Well, look at us!
We are a multitude. We are alive and kicking, and we shall get even livelier.
After this weekend, the whole Nation will know that the women's movement is not any one organization or set of ideas or particular lifestyle. It is millions of women deciding individually and together that we are determined to move history forward.
The women's movement has become an indestructible part of deciding that raising children, cleaning, cooking, and all the other things she does for her family is work that should be accorded respect and value. It is the young woman student asserting she wants to play baseball, major in physics, or become a brain surgeon. It is the working woman demanding that she get the same pay and promotion opportunities as a man. It is the divorcee fighting for social security benefits in her own rights, the widow embarking on a new career, the mother organizing a daycare center, the battered wife seeking help, the woman running for public office.
It is all of us here and all of the women cut there who say the time for equal rights has come.
I think of what a southern woman named Nell Battle Lewis wrote after the suffrage amendment to the Constitution was finally ratified.
"The pedestal has crashed," she said. "There are many even now who would patch the idol together. It was only an image after all … In its place is a woman of flesh and blood, not a queen, or a saint, nor a symbol, but a human being with human faults and human virtues, a woman still only slowly rising to full stature, but with the sun of freedom on her face."
Let the sun shine on our deliberations, and let us celebrate womanhood and woman power.
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