Reading over the stories I produced there, I am chagrined at how bloodless I made an event that was the human equivalent of a four-day fireworks display. Most newsrooms had sent female reporters to Houston, and some of us were afraid of being in the tank for freedom. I bent over backward to be a dispassionate observer, but the demands—child care, an end to job discrimination, the Equal Rights Amendment—were all things I wanted myself.
Watching from Washington, government guys were thunderstruck by the fierce sense of purpose and focus and the startling diversity of the delegates in terms of ethnicity, race, age and political affiliation. “They figured it was gonna be a tea party,” says Jane Hickie, part of the Texas delegation, who recalls her mother and four other older women passing a go-cup of bourbon, carefully avoiding one another’s lipstick prints on the rim while waiting to vote on the resolution on the rights of lesbians. Recalls Gloria Steinem, “I remember seeing three First Ladies, two former and one still in the White House, sitting in front of peace activists who had demonstrated against each of their husbands; delegates cheering in accents from Mexico, India and Japan for a speech by Barbara Jordan, the African-American congresswoman from Texas whose rhetoric rivaled that of Churchill; teenage Future Homemakers of America standing up for an antinuclear speech by Margaret Mead.”
There’s a danger to conspicuous power, especially among those expected to do without. Bella Abzug may have been the conference chair and a former member of Congress, but she was always being introduced as Martin’s wife and a mother of two. Across town, the reason for that was apparent; although they accounted for about one in five of the conference delegates, right-wing women ran a counterconvention that decried the official version as anti-family. It was the beginning of the mixed marriage of church and state that later found willing collaborators in the Republican Party. “Hairy-legged zoo girls,” one Texas legislator called the conference attendees.
Afterward, Abzug was fired as head of the women’s commission, and elected officials acted as though the 26-point plan of action hammered out during the conference didn’t exist. No national child-care initiative, no ERA, unless you count the Apache delegate from Arizona who, with more hope than prescience, had named her daughter Era. “The all-too-familiar voting and money concentrations in this country often allowed the right wing to stop us at the government, asking-Daddy level,” says Steinem, “but we were and are still strengthened enormously at the populist, global, bottom-up, doing-it-for-ourselves level.”
Doing it for ourselves is what we’ve always been good at: handmade, which is completely different from handmaid. Maybe that explains why so many of the women who were there believe the Houston conference marked the beginning of a powerful push in women’s political leadership, a push that sees us vastly better off today than we were 30 years ago. The nonresponse to the big event inspired women to find ways to build the infrastructure of equality themselves. And the meeting obliterated the two walls that have always divided women and made them blame themselves for their own lack of status: isolation and silence. That’s why the Bella Abzug Leadership Institute is running a conference next month in New York City, on the anniversary of the Houston meeting, with a special emphasis on young women, to give the next generation its own “aha!” moment. It’s hard to hush after speaking and to pull back after reaching out.
“When you go to political conventions,” says Jane Hickie, “the preferred seating is the skybox, where the real action is, with the big money and the consultants. There were no skyboxes in Houston. We were all down there on the floor together.” Maybe later on it seemed that the point of the revolution was to get up in the skybox ourselves. But maybe the key to real leadership is no skyboxes at all. After Houston I found the political conventions artificial and disappointing, with most of the action taking place among the few at a remove from the many. It takes a special kind of confidence to do it the other way, to wrestle democracy to the ground out in the open, with all voices heard. That’s what happened in Houston 30 years ago. It was a proud moment, not just for women, but for America.
