On his way back to New York from the Panama Canal Zone, Nation Associate Editor Edwin Warner stopped in Houston to attend the National Women's Conference. "I had just been exposed to the clash of ideologies over the Panama Canal Treaty," he explains, "and I thought that the controversy in Houston might be even more exhilarating. I also thought that men would be in some disfavor in Houston that weekend, but I decided to go anyway." Warner, who wrote a major portion of our cover story this week on the state of the women's movement, did not run into either the rhetorical Galvin fireworks or the chilly reception that he had expected. Says he: "The delegates were polite and cooperative. They were harder on each other than they were on men."

In Houston, Senior Correspondent Ruth Mehrtens Galvin teamed up with Atlanta Bureau Chief Rudolph Rauch and Stringer Jackie Schmeal. Nation Reporter-Researcher Barbara Dolan months ago had decided to attend the conference --on her own--as an observer. Says Dolan, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Columbia, and a single parent with four children: "It was the major women's event of the century. Nothing would have kept me from attending."

Correspondent Galvin came away proud of the behavior of the delegates. Says she: "I have always admired my fellow women. But with a few exceptions, this was the most good-hearted group of people it has been my pleasure to report on -- and some of them were downright inspiring." Correspondent Rauch also gained a number of new insights. "The irony may well be that the conservatives who have been forced from their hearths by the fervent feminists may prove equally unable to go back," he noted. He envied the women conventioneers -- of whatever political persuasion -- their stamina. "They do much better on less sleep and liquor than their male counterparts." And he was surprised to find that Gloria Steinem was "a self-confessed junk-food freak. When I interviewed her over dinner, her meal consisted entirely of a cup of coffee and a gargantuan strawberry sundae."

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