"We Shall Go Forth"

What happened to the women's demands at Houston ?

The occasion was Houston Plus One, and across the nation last weekend, women celebrated. They picnicked in the parking lot of the Iowa capitol, had tea in the Michigan Governor's mansion, held a wine and cheese party in New Jersey, opened an exhibit of Women's Conference mementos at the Louisville Free Public Library.

It was a year ago that 12,000 feminist observers and 2,000 delegates concluded the National Women's Conference in Houston. Spirits and hopes were as high then as the pink and yellow balloons that sported the legend "We are everywhere," sent aloft by the lesbian caucus.

The delegates passed 25 resolutions, forming a plan of action for achieving women's full rights and equality. The resolutions ranged from the arts and humanities to welfare reform and the problems of minority women, to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. The delegates had answered the old question "What do women want?" When the conference ended in a chorus of We Shall Go Forth, there was little doubt that they would.

A year later, it seems that the spirit of Houston has endured, but concrete accomplishments have been weak. The law that originally established the conference required the President to receive the women's plan and to respond by July with recommendations on how the Administration and Congress should carry out the plan. July came and went. When Carter's 58-page response was issued in September, it was entitled simply a status report.

The President claimed credit for having already hired a lot of women: "More than 21% of my appointments within the White House and the Executive Branch have been women, an alltime high for any Administration." Beyond that, he stressed Administration concern for such first steps as passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, the enforcement of all civil rights laws and the development of improved statistical information concerning women. He asked Congress to pass a number of pending bills related to the Houston plan, but his message had little impact on a Congress already concerned with the ending of the session ("What message?" asked a member of Tip O'Neill's staff last week). Many activists were disappointed. "The White House has given us a very good chronicle of exactly where we are right now," says Jane McMichael, executive director of the National Women's Political Caucus. "But it also makes clear how much more remains to be done."

One of the notable things Carter has done was to appoint Sarah Weddington, 33, who argued and won a key abortion case before the Supreme Court, to the position of special assistant on women's affairs. But the problem of translating the Houston resolutions into action lies less in the White House than in congressional indifference to women's issues and the very size and scope of those issues. In the year since the Houston conference, women could count some small gains, including congressional passage of a bill to pro vide job training for displaced homemakers. But Congress failed to pass Houston requests such as funding for shelters for battered women. It made free abortion for poor women almost impossible, failed to extend Social Security coverage to housewives in their own right, and virtually blocked women from higher-ranked Civil Service jobs by retaining veteran's preference. "Many of women's needs are ten years ahead of the times," says Carol Burris, president of the Washington Women's Lobby, "and Congress is ten years behind the times. Half the people in the country are changing their way of living, and these guys haven't figured it out yet."

Indeed, Congress was persuaded to extend the period for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment only after 65,000 women marched in midsummer Washington heat in support of the measure. "It was the largest campaign, in terms of people, of the last congressional session," says Ellie Smeal, president of the National Organization for Women, "and we built it on the spirit of Houston."

"Houston was the beginning of a new girls' network," adds Minnette Doderer, Iowa state senator and co-chair of the conference Continuing Committee, which is supposed to press for action at the grassroots level. The delegates, who had been elected at preliminary state conferences, returned home from Houston armed with names and addresses, strategy and resources. "For the first time," says a Michigan delegate, "I knew I wasn't alone." California, New Jersey and Wisconsin groups analyzed their state laws in light of the plan of action. In Minnesota, delegates traveled through their state explaining the complexities of the Houston resolutions. Louisiana feminists held conferences on battered women and women and the law. In Kentucky, more than two dozen organizations formed a women's lobby, the Kentucky Women's Agenda Coalition, and pushed through legislation to help displaced homemakers.

In Missouri, which sent an anti-ERA, anti-abortion delegation to Houston, pro-plan women used the Houston networks to help defeat a right-to-work proposition in this month's elections. "Labor came to us," says Jean Berg, who chaired the state conference, "and now they know we can deliver." And in Washington, D.C., activists formed a Washington Women's Network to monitor change within the bureaucracy.

"Even when we lost, we created an awareness," says Carmen Delgado Votaw, president of the Inter-American Commission of Women and co-chair, with former Congresswoman Bella Abzug, of the National Advisory Committee for Women. Says Abzug: "The issues aren't going to go away, and neither are we. There is change everywhere. We are just beginning." Last weekend it seemed to many women a beginning worth celebrating.

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