International Women's Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History by Jocelyn Olcott (review)

Prodded by the Commission on the Status of Women and activist NGOs, the United Nations proclaimed 1975 "international women's year," inaugurating a targeted Decade for Women and holding a two-week conference in Mexico City in June. The conference addressed all manner of issues and problems of women's status around the globe. The gathering attracted a diverse group of politically active women, many self-proclaimed feminists to be sure, others shunning the term but engaged in party politics in socialist countries, and still others fresh from liberation struggles confronting the imperatives of economic and social development.

This conference is the central event in Jocelyn Olcott's detailed study of 1970s feminism, which contributes to a burgeoning new literature on the history of transnational feminisms from many centers. Hers is a global reading set within the wider geo-political and regional divisions as they were shaped and, in turn, impacted the UN commitment to transnational human rights and humanitarian change. In many ways, the conference structure was a familiar one on the international scene, preceded by gatherings of experts and NGOs on other vital transnational challenges, among them population, growth, and family planning. International Women's Year (IWY), too, consisted of two main parts: an official gathering of intergovernmental delegations sent by the member states and a more democratic, open people's Tribune made up of organized NGO groups as well as individual women committed to specific, even idiosyncratic causes. If the structure was familiar, the content and interactions were new to women's movement and human rights histories: the event took place outside the West and brought thousands of women face-to-face with their counterparts around the globe. While there had been earlier influential human rights movements—for example, the global anti-Apartheid struggle—the anti-racist organizations were located in different parts of the globe and their members had not worked together in person. Mexico City was the first large-scale personal confrontation of difference, exploding myths of 'global sisterhood' while reinforcing the fantasy of unity and a common "women's issues" agenda. As Olcott ironically understands, hers is a "story about how the subject of "women" was disintegrating even at one of it most conspicuous moments of reification…." (15).

Not surprisingly, then, the IWY gathering was, exceedingly "messy"—and the mainstream global press, whether in the US or Mexico, disparagingly mocked and dismissed it, even before the opening ceremonies. Olcott, however, is determined to use the disorder for critical analytical purposes. She writes that "disunity was, in fact, an achievement of IWY and it was accomplished precisely because First World women did listen closely to Third World women," despite assertions in the historiography to the contrary. Behind this study is Olcott the historian determined to write a more accurate account of this seminal event in the history of feminisms. She asks why "scholars and activists so readily accepted the [misleading] representations?" (13). The book is necessarily richly sourced, to make her interpretive case, and based on a wide range of evidence including archival materials (from Australia, Mexico, the U.S. as well as UN and UNESCO repositories); contemporary protocols and newspaper articles; other publications as well as memoir literature. The book's narrative is written through these sources—and she graphically takes readers into the debates, using the languages of the day. This careful attention to voice, while laudatory, makes the study, at times, too detailed and cluttered by first-hand quotations, partly because Olcott does not adequately differentiate the facts by significance.

The study unfolds in three dramatic acts: the lead-up to Mexico City; the tense and contradictory debates of the conference itself; and the IWY legacies, as Olcott sees them. The background discussion is designed to identify the geopolitical tensions, rivalries, and diverse assumptions that ultimately burst out in the open in Mexico City. When examining these Cold War and National Liberation politics, Olcott refracts them...