By Caitlyn Jones
I was walking to my car in downtown Houston on a humid afternoon in 2020 when I first saw it. There, glinting off the red brick of the Hobby Center, was the only physical marker of the history that happened there on a steamy weekend in November 1977. “The Sam Houston Coliseum, now the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts, was the site of the first National Women’s Conference,” it read. “It was the largest political conference of women in the United States since the Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, New York in 1848.
Joy surged through my body when I read these words. For the last two years, I had been working on Sharing Stories from 1977, a digital humanities project at the University of Houston (UH) Center for Public History that spotlights the National Women’s Conference (NWC). But I often felt like our team – comprised of academics, technologists, and a contingent of women who were there in 1977 – was going at it alone. Even the feminist writer Gloria Steinem, who helped plan the convention, called it, “the most important event nobody knows about.” Seeing the marker, I realized Houston had not forgotten.
I soon learned former Houston mayor Annise Parker, the city’s second woman mayor and the first openly lesbian mayor of a major U.S. city, commissioned the plaque in 2015. As a young Rice University student, she attended the 1977 conference as a volunteer for the League of Women Voters. Although Parker missed much of the convention floor activity, she remembered the spirit of Houston swept through the halls. “There are folks like me who were overwhelmed by just the number of women and the strength of the women who were in that room, and it had an impact,” she recalled.
Decades later, Parker found herself seated next to Gloria Steinem at a fundraiser. Steinem was disappointed when she learned there was nothing commemorating the event. “It’s a shame we’ve lost that history,” Parker remembered Steinem saying. “You would think there would at least be a plaque or something.” Suddenly, it clicked. The mayor could fix that. Parker and her cultural affairs team wrote the text for the marker and contacted the Hobby Center’s owners, who affixed it to the building’s exterior where it waits for curious passers-by.
Although an important first step in preserving this history, the marker provides only a glimpse into the NWC’s impact on national politics. The conference was the first time – and to date the only time – the U.S. government asked women directly what they wanted and put forth money to elicit an answer. And unlike Seneca Falls, the NWC was not exclusive to educated, upper-class white women and their allies. Roughly 2,000 elected delegates from every state and territory descended onto Houston, alongside more than 18,000 journalists, volunteers, politicians, celebrities, protestors, and international dignitaries, to debate issues that reverberate in today’s political atmosphere.
It was where the phrase “women of color” was first used to amplify the common experience of discrimination faced by Black, Hispanic, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and Indigenous women. It was where lesbians and women with disabilities fused their own civil rights movements with the larger women’s rights movement. It was where rural women brought to light gender discrimination in agriculture laws, and urban women fought for universal childcare. It was even where conservative women showcased their political power organizing in opposition to abortion and the Equal Rights Amendment. In short, the NWC, often referred to simply as “Houston,” gave the nation a glimpse of what the United States would look like under a matriarchy.
As you will read in this magazine, the work of Houston women made this dynamic moment possible. We take you into tension-filled back rooms where volunteers frantically prepare for the thousands of people pouring into the city’s hotels and convention center. We highlight famous figures like Houston-born Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who electrified the crowd with her commanding call for unity, and unknown names such as UH student-athlete Sylvia Ortiz, who carried a symbolic torch of freedom onto the convention floor and became the face of a movement.
Through photographs and archival materials, we show you how women from across the country used posters, clothing, pins, and printing presses to transform Houston into a political arena. And finally, we illuminate the Houston women representing the Texas delegation and hear from past and present officeholders on how this legacy of leadership shaped their lives.
This magazine is dedicated to the people who made the spirit of Houston happen. You carved a path for a new generation still striving for equality and you are not forgotten.
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