While March is celebrated as Women’s History Month, 2025 also marks a milestone: the 50th anniversary of the first United Nations World Conference on Women, held in June 1975 in Mexico City. The first in a series of four U.N. women’s conferences — which included Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in 1995 — the 1975 conference is considered by scholars to have been “a watershed moment.” Yet, few know about it.
Professor of History Jocelyn Olcott wrote the book — or one of the books — on this landmark event: “International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History.” (Oxford University Press, 2017). On the occasion of its 50th anniversary, and in honor of Women’s History Month, we sat down with Olcott to reflect on the conference’s impact, both past and present.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
What was the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference, and why was it significant?
The 1975 International Women’s Year Conference was the first United Nations conference dedicated to global women's issues. It had two parts: an intergovernmental meeting of official delegates from member states and an NGO Tribune, where civil society organizations gathered — a feature that became a hallmark of future U.N. conferences. It also marked the start of the U.N. Decade for Women (1975–1985), which fostered not only new policies around women and gender but also completely new and more radically diverse ways of conceptualizing feminisms.
How did this become an area of research for you?
My interest in this started as a chapter in a book about motherhood and political economy in Mexican history. But when I looked for research on the 1975 conference, I was surprised to find almost nothing. Despite being widely recognized as a turning point in global feminism, most of the existing accounts were memoirs by U.S. participants, many of whom viewed the event as a failure because participants could not arrive at a consensus. I came to believe the opposite: that the disagreements and ruptures in 1975 were what made the conference so transformative. It helped shift the conversation toward a more inclusive, global understanding of women’s rights.
Why was the conference viewed as a failure? Can you tell us a bit more about these disagreements?
The 1975 conference has often been overshadowed by the 1995 Beijing conference, in part because of political controversies in Mexico City. There were major disagreements over everything from abortion rights to Zionism. Many European and U.S. feminists focused on issues such as equal pay and workplace discrimination, while women from the Global South emphasized basic needs such as access to water, national sovereignty and freedom from violence. These differences sparked debates about what counts as a “women’s issue.”
Some think these tensions made the conference politically uncomfortable to revisit, but I would argue that those very tensions were essential. Ultimately, they led to a broader understanding that women's rights must be defined within their local and global contexts. They forced a reckoning with global inequality and reshaped feminist movements in lasting ways.
Can you give us a few examples of how did the conference influence the feminist movement?
It prompted many governments to create women’s bureaus, ministries and policies addressing gender equality, as well as leading to increased funding and infrastructure for women’s issues globally. It also paved the way for key developments like the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), which requires reporting that continue to shape global accountability on gender issues — even though the U.S. still hasn’t ratified it. Civil-society organizations could leverage all these mechanisms to effect practical changes.
How does your research on the 1975 conference connect to Women’s History Month?
Women’s History Month is about remembering how hard-won progress actually is. There’s a tendency to celebrate gains without acknowledging how contentious and complicated the process often has been. The history of the conference shows us that feminism has always been a struggle across differences. It’s not just a feel-good story — it’s about the hard work of coalition-building, of figuring out what solidarity really means. Those conversations are still ongoing today.
It’s also a reminder of unfinished business regarding women’s status. One of the most urgent items of unfinished business from 1975 is addressing the unsustainable labor burdens of women performing unpaid caretaking labor while participating in the labor market. This was actually the only issue that everyone agreed on at the Mexico City conference, and, by the time of the 1995 Beijing conference, it was widely recognized as a “crisis of care.” Most women, around the world, continue to report high levels of stress and time poverty as they juggle these demands.
This June, and with generous support from Trinity College and several other units, Duke is hosting a conference of the CareWork Network. It’s the 25th anniversary of this interdisciplinary network, and we have researchers coming from all over the world. I don’t think we’ll be able to resolve the care crisis and dust off our hands after a three-day conference, but this type of problem-driven research remains critical for addressing these urgent issues.
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The “2025 CareWork Summit: Histories and Futures of Care” will take place at Duke on June 5-7, 2025, with generous support from Duke’s Trinity College of Arts & Sciences; Gender, Sexuality, & Feminist Studies; History; Economics; the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute, and Global Duke. For more information, visit their website.
