Nation: 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."