By Caitlyn Jones
When organizers of the National Women’s Conference (NWC) announced in October 1976 that Houston, Texas, would host its historic gathering, a question soon emerged: Why Houston? The federally funded conference was a domestic iteration of the global International Women’s Year (IWY) put forward by the United Nations. Many Americans thought the NWC would take place somewhere like Washington, DC, the seat of national power, or an East Coast locale like New York City, where media coverage of the feminist movement proliferated. Yet, the members of the presidential commission organizing the gathering wanted something different. If the NWC was to be truly representative of American women, then they needed to host it in a place that represented the full American experience.
Unbeknownst to the public, Houston women had been working for years to prove that their city was the future of American feminism. They used Houston’s strengths – its close relationship with the federal government, its focus on tourism as an economic engine, and its reputation as a center of progress – to create a groundswell of local activity that attracted the attention of NWC planners and set the stage for a national debate over the future of American women in a place that claimed to be a truly American city.
“The Most American City”
In the 1970s, Houston was both a curiosity and point of consternation that made for colorful stories in print, radio, and television media. James Sterba, a New York Times correspondent covering Houston, traced the city’s transformation from a “steamy little southeast Texas swamp town” to a “brash, booming adolescent” promoting unlimited growth and unfettered capitalism. Most who wrote about Houston agreed: the city symbolized money, and that money was made of oil. The oil crises that punctured the decade meant that the city had become the domestic energy hub of the country needing an answer to its import dependency. “If Houston is the oil center of America,” writer James Conway argued, “it is de facto the most American city.”
Being the most American city meant having wealth and political connections, but Houston was not immune to the American problem of race. After NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center arrived in the 1960s, the local chamber of commerce rebranded Houston as “Space City, U.SA.,” a slogan that reinforced the city’s desire to look toward the future and divorce itself from its checkered past as a Jim Crow locale with a sizable Ku Klux Klan presence. Houston’s civil rights movement emerged in the 1950s and 1960s, often led by vocal student groups at Texas Southern University and the University of Houston who organized boycotts, pickets, and sit-ins to advocate for racial justice. Fearing violence, bad publicity, and a hit to their pocketbooks, business owners quietly desegregated their lunch counters and storefronts and worked with city leaders to orchestrate a media blackout where news of integration remained out of the newspapers and off the airwaves.
Even as Houston’s powerbrokers attempted to manufacture a discreet integration process, cultural and physical violence pierced the veil of peace. Interstate highway projects destroyed Black and Hispanic enclaves within the city limits, and police brutality became an ongoing issue. These incidents sowed distrust between institutions and communities of color, but they also served as a catalyst for multiracial coalition building, a strategy Houston feminists later tried to replicate in their own struggle for equality
To read the full story, click on Buy Magazines above to purchase a print copy or subscribe.
To see the torch relay from Seneca Falls to Houston that marked the beginning of the conference, watch this video:
To learn more about the historic tennis match that drew publicity to Houston’s feminist movement, watch this video:
For more information on an ongoing women’s organization, visit https://now.org/.
For more information about the NWC visit the University of Houston’s Special Collection for access to archives.
Follow