Letting Their Hair Down

As Leah Rabin, wife of Israel's Premier, stood up to address a session of the International Women's Conference in Mexico City (TIME, June 30), the Arabs, Africans and Communists who made up more than half the audience streamed out. To those who remained, Rabin observed philosophically: "I know countries have conflicts and misunderstandings, but not to be willing to sit down and listen to each other is to reject the point and goals of our being here together."

Indeed, as the U.N.-sponsored two-week-long conference neared its final days, the problems that beset women seemed all but irresolvable in the face of national conflicts. Soviet and Chinese delegates berated each other for sabotaging the war on imperialism. Other speakers denounced colonialism, apartheid and multinational corporations. Finally, Elizabeth Reid, Australia's outspoken chief delegate, objected: "The conference is treating women as irrelevant. We have not talked about women as such at all."

Back to Coffee. Mary Anne Krupsak, New York's no-nonsense Lieutenant Governor, also wanted to bring the subject back to women. Addressing the "Tribune," some 5,000 people who were meeting unofficially, she said: "If we can move beyond the point of being mouthpieces for our countries' political points of view and start discussing the problems of women that face us as women, then maybe we can salvage this thing." One way, she suggested, was to "start letting our hair down and start leveling with each other about how we all got here today." Her point: every woman delegate was handpicked by a man.

Franc, Giroud, France's Minister for Women's Affairs, noted that much of the speechmaking at the conference to date had merely enunciated national policies that were set by men. "Throughout history," she said, "men have got women to fight their revolutions, but once the fight is terminated, the women return to making coffee. And International Women's Year will have been one more trick if it is subtly deviated toward political goals, national or international, no matter how urgent, respectable or noble."

The major goal of the conference--to agree to a ten-year "World Plan of Action" emphasizing better health care, education and a greater role in government for women--seemed at tunes almost impossible of attainment as various groups introduced a mind-boggling total of 894 amendments to the proposed text. The Third World countries drew up a twelve-page document known as the Declaration of Mexico, calling for the establishment "with urgency of the new economic world order."

In fact, speakers from several developed countries acknowledged, the gap between rich and poor nations must be bridged if equality between women and men is to mean more than shared misery. The U.S., which had earlier resisted the proposal that an economic revolution must precede the struggle for sexual equality, gradually moved closer to the Third World view.

The more flexible American attitude was enunciated by Patricia Hutar, co-leader of the U.S. delegation, in a position paper acknowledging that the "longrun goal" of equality and development "implies for us, as no doubt for others, modifications in many existing economic and social structures."

Feminists who argued for more immediate goals for women, most notably their right to birth control and abortion, are likely to be disappointed. Such provisions will probably never be included in the final plan of action, if only because they are anathema to church and government in many nations.

Indeed, the much-argued-over action plan will hardly be revolutionary. But then, as Reid emphasized, the world's women do not stand to benefit so much from economic or political revolution as "revolution in the heads of people." And, declared Krupsak, "That's what this conference is all about. It should be a massive consciousness-raising session."

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