Document 68: "Introduction," in Susanna Downie, Decade of Achievement: 1977- 1987: A Report on a Survey Based on the National Plan of Action for Women (Washington, D.C.: National Women's Conference Committee, 1988), pp. 3-4.
Introduction
This "Introduction" provides an overview of the process that produced Decade of Achievement: 1977-1987. The report focuses on the achievements of the women's movement in the United States in relation to the National Plan of Action adopted in Houston. It does not offer "recommendations for future action" or a reworking of the original recommendations.
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INTRODUCTION
This study began as an attempt to measure progress on the National Plan of Action for Women. PART I contains background on "How the Plan came into Being" and will make clear why it was important, ten years after "Houston", to make such an attempt.
By 1986, when this project got underway, there was strong reason to suppose that the real work on the Plan was going on at the "grassroots" level. This report shows, beyond any shadow of doubt, that the American women's movement as a whole is 100% spontaneous, arising up out of the cities (including our nation's capital) and towns and countryside of the United States, wherever women have been and are, a spirited response organized by local leadership, defining the issues and problems as they saw them, reinforced by regional or national networking, responding collectively to the conditions of women's lives, and creating new means to solve the problems as they defined them. The data given in "The Decade in Numbers" (pages 1 & 2) could have been brought about in no other way. The "movement", and progress on the Plan, is therefore best measured by simply looking at what those women have been doing - particularly what organizations they have formed and what new institutions they have created, and how they have organized themselves within existing institutions. This survey report makes a beginning on the project, which is very far from being completed.
PART II, THE TWO-STAGE SURVEY: As it was first proposed, the survey was to be more or less what is reported in Part II, which gives the results of a questionnaire, based on the Plan and mailed out to a sample of 2000 women's organizations to find out what areas of the Plan they are working on, and to get some idea of what we have accomplished so far.
The Plan is an ideal tool for doing this, for weaving the full tapestry of our achievement, because it is a very pragmatic document (it names activities that can be counted) and because it really was a national consensus document. Officially, it was just the delegates in Houston in 1977 that ratified it. But the more you know about how the Houston Conference came about and what went on there, the clearer it becomes that the Plan really does represent the women's movement of the United States, as well as or better than any other similar agenda compiled in some other way. And when you take out the language about who should do it, and focus on what is being called for, you get a very nice, coherent, detailed, somewhat messy but very lovable version of what the American women's movement is all about.
The condensed version of the Plan, which we sent out along with the questionnaire, and which appears here section by section in Part III (as "National Plan Goals"), was produced just that way, by looking at what was being called for in the full text of the Plan, and ignoring as much as possible who was being called upon to do it (e.g. "The President", or "Congress"). The fact is, without much help from the Federal Government, esp. since 1981, and only with hard-won help from State Governments, all the progress chronicled herein has been made by women themselves. And even where governments have helped, you can bet there were women, and maybe even a few feminist men, on the inside, in a wide range of government agencies and offices, helping to make it happen. Documentation of the participation of women in governmental agencies and offices remains to be done and is not really addressed by this survey report. But in every sphere of life, hundreds of thousands of women (and increasing numbers of men) have begun to build a new society, and this report gives you a few clues as to what that new society has already begun to look like.
THE SECOND STAGE OF THE SURVEY (PART III): As the survey returns began to come in, and as I reflected on what I knew of the women's movement from working in feminist media in the Pittsburgh PA branch of it since about 1972, I knew how much information there was to be had that we would not get from the survey proper, yet which belonged in any adequate account of the past decade in relation to the Plan, and which would follow up on the beginnings suggested by the 1986 Update (see end of Part I). So this booklet contains the results of two methods of survey, both based on the Plan. And the mailed questionnaire survey confirms, in a somewhat abstract way, the results of the other survey, which was conducted mostly by phone, over a period of a few months (Sept. 87 - Feb. 88) using leads from the survey forms and other sources, tapping many Old Girl Networks, and involving many other co-authors. It was this second, more informal, survey which produced the information reported, section-by-section, in Part III. I wrote a little over half of these sections myself (where no author is named), the others were principally written by the person named at the end of the section. In all cases, I asked authors to include, and as author I myself included, names or acknowledgements of sources of information, persons consulted, or persons who helped in any way.
PART IV contains other information that came up in various ways and did not fit neatly into the sections of the Plan but which I felt reflected something important about what has happened in the last two decades in relation to Plan issues.
This study is not restricted to the period 1977-87. That decade has been an important one, and a
great deal of the growth in the numbers of "The Decade in
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All of the specific projects and organizations described herein are included because they illustrate the same reality that the numbers capture in a much more abstract way. In order to understand what "1000 Displaced Homemaker Programs" means, you have to know what a Displaced Homemaker Program is. To know what "503 Women's Studies Programs" means, you have have some idea what a Women's Studies Program is. I have tried to include at least one good example in every section, but the reader should understand that each example could be multiplied many times, and each one of the 1000 or the 600 or the 503 or whatever would have a different story to tell. There was no possibility, within the scope of this project, of being truly comprehensive. I also exerted some care to assure that examples of activity in the Mid-west and Plains states were included, since media in general, and even feminist media reportage of the women's movement tends to be dominated by the news from the East and West coasts. And those who have expertise in a particular area may not find much of interest in that area of this report. But information that "everyone knows" is not at all well-known among young people, for instance, or among many whose expertise lies elsewhere. So in describing organizations or developments that may be familiar to many feminists, I had in mind the young women who weren't old enough in 1977 to have noticed "Houston", and the others who weren't reached by the information.
No attempt has been made in this book to include explicit recommendations for future action, nor to update the recommendations of the Plan itself. The work of formulating such recommendations belongs to a truly representative consensus body. An attempt at such recommendations was made at the 10th anniversary celebration of "Houston" which was sponsored by NWCC in Washington DC in November of 1987. Over 600 women attended, dozens of national women's organizations were involved in the planning and production of the celebration, workshops were held on each area of the Plan, and the recommendations that came out of the workshops have been gathered together in a booklet to be published by NWCC in early 1988.
After some little attempts to deal with the area of Women and Religion, we decided we couldn't do anything adequate in this publication. Religion, and all the issues that involves for women, was left out of the Plan altogether because of the principle of "separation of church and state". The Houston conference was a matter of state, mandated by the UN and funded by the federal government, therefore the U.S. Constitution had to be respected. But no account of the women's movement of the last twenty years will be complete until a chapter is included touching on all the wonderful things that church-women are doing both inside and outside the established churches, and the new forms of women's spirituality blossoming within women's culture.
It is clear, after all this work, and with all the information that is packed into this booklet, that in some important way, we have just scratched the surface. I am certainly aware of how much has been left out, of all the good information that there was no room for. Far from being "over" or "dead", the women's movement is not only here to stay and bigger than ever, but much richer and more complex than anyone has yet documented. And far from being comprehensive or "definitive", this report just makes a beginning at that documentation. I hope some day a more adequate collection of all the information and all the stories will be brought together. A compilation built around the whole Plan, one which would include what Kathy Bonk once called "the passion and the fun", would be an achievement, and a gift we all deserve. We not only deserve it, we need it, so that we can fully perceive the true scope and depth of our accomplishment, so we can see how many of "us" there are, and how beautiful and necessary we are.
For purposes of this project, however, what was necessary was to limit the space devoted to each section of the Plan, in order to keep the total number of pages manageable, in order to produce something definite within the current constraints on our resources. But we welcome your suggestions about other stories, projects, or data that should be included, in future works of this kind, that would help us all to see the beauty of the Plan in the great work of the American women's movement, still just a young adult, in the richness of her living story. NWCC would also like to begin to keep track of any constituency there might be "out there" (this means you, dear reader) for a large and truly representative Second National Women's Conference, modelled on the IWY/Houston happening.
Send feedback, suggestions (and documentation) to NWCC, P.O. Box 65605, Washington D.C. 20035-5605.
– Susanna Downie, on behalf of NWCC
and everyone who helped with this project-
April, 1988.
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