Women of the world unite draws on the collections in The Women’s Library at LSE to highlight the UN Decade for Women, which began in 1975 with the first International Conference on Women in Mexico City. Below, co-curator Gillian Murphy selects seven standout items that illuminate the conferences, the activism of their participants and the wider impact and legacies of transnational feminisms.
The United Nations declared 1975 International Women’s Year and held its first International Conference on Women in Mexico City on the themes of equality, peace and development. This was the beginning of what became the UN Decade for Women with further world conferences on women in Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985, and a follow-up conference in Beijing in 1995. Each conference had a programme of events organised by Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) running alongside it. These conferences were huge events with thousands of women attending from around the world. Many important issues were brought to the global stage including women’s civil and political rights, development, solidarity, sisterhood, colonialism, decolonisation, racism, neo-colonialism, neoliberalism, and the global economy.
The conferences were spaces for women to network, to educate and to share information between activists, policy makers and researchers by linking the local to the global. This blog post looks at some of the diverse voices and organisations that came together at these different conferences.
1. Winnie Mandela at an International Women’s Day event, 1975
International Women’s Year 1975 allowed activists to highlight the importance of women’s rights as well as other current political struggles such as apartheid. This image shows the South African anti-apartheid campaigner, Winnie Mandela, addressing an International Women’s Day event in 1975.
2. Lucille Mathurin Mair on the cover of Women Speaking, 1980
Lucille Mathurin Mair of Jamaica was an influential historian, diplomat, civil servant and women’s rights activist. She was Secretary General of the UN conference on women in Copenhagen in 1980. Four years of research and experience of projects and programmes since 1975 enabled delegates to talk about their work and the problems they faced with hard facts. Under Mathurin Mair’s leadership, the conference considered the root causes of women’s inequality for the first time. Networks and friendships were forged and women left Copenhagen thinking about how they might do things differently.
3. Nita Barrow at the Nairobi Conference, 1990
Nita Barrow was a nurse, public health officer and diplomat becoming the first female governor-general of Barbados in 1990. Five years before, she was chair of the NGO Forum at the Third UN World Conference in Nairobi. This was a landmark conference because many of the delegates were from South America, Africa and South Asia. In this image of Nita Barrow, you can see her wearing her dove badge.
4. The dove badge, designed as the UN Women emblem, 1975
The symbol of a stylised dove with an equal sign and biological female symbol became the official emblem of the United Nations International Women’s Year and was created by graphic designer, Valerie Pettits. It represented peace and equality, two of the themes of the conference. The symbol was used on posters and merchandise for the 1975 conference and NGO Forum, and for those that followed. It is still the symbol of UN women today.
5. Front cover of Development, Crises and Alternative Visions, 1986
In preparation for the Nairobi conference, the Indian economist, Devaki Jain, held a meeting in Bangalore in 1984. She invited Peggy Antrobus and Claire Slatter, and others, whom she had met in Copenhagen, to reflect on their experience of the Decade from local and regional perspectives. Topics of discussion ranged from testing nuclear weapons in the Pacific, religious fundamentalism, food shortages and poverty. The women described these issues as crises. They came up with a platform document Development, Crises and Alternative Visions which formed the basis for a series of panels at the NGO Forum in Nairobi bringing women’s lived experiences to a global audience.
Following the positive response to these panels, the transnational network DAWN (Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era) was launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1986 bringing together scholars, policy makers and activists to work on gender, ecology and economic justice. DAWN is still active today. Find out more about DAWN in this podcast with Dr Imaobong Umoren.
6. Front cover of Unbowed: One Women’s Story by Wangari Maathai, 2006
Wangari Maathai was a member of the National Council of Women in Kenya (NCWK), an umbrella organisation that coordinated the work of women’s groups throughout Kenya. In 1973, the NCWK held several seminars to consider what their agenda should be at the Mexico City conference. They heard from women in rural areas who talked about having no wood for fuel or fencing, no water for drinking or cooking or enough food for themselves, their families and their livestock. Maathai believed that their problems stemmed from environment damage through deforestation and unsustainable agriculture.
Although Maathai was unable to attend the conference because of lack of funds, those that attended from the NCWK returned with the message that they needed to address the needs of rural women. Maathai came up with the idea of planting trees which would solve many of the environmental issues. This became the Green Belt Movement in 1977 under the auspices of the NCWK. At the Nairobi conference in 1985, the Green Belt Movement co-sponsored several of the panels on women and the environmental crisis and took many delegates to see nurseries outside Nairobi where seedlings were grown. Maathai attended the Beijing conference ten years later and delivered a paper on ‘Bottlenecks of Development in Africa’ at the NGO Forum which described the problems of debt, poverty, and environmental destruction, and that development should be focused on people. She also spoke at the official conference on some of the values that women were attempting to bring to “Our Global Neighbourhood”. The Green Belt Movement is still active today.
7. Image of Gertrude Mongella and peers from World Women, 1995
The Beijing conference and the parallel NGO Forum are considered the largest known gathering of women with around 17,000 delegates from 189 member nations attending the conference and over 35,000 registered for the Forum. The Tanzanian politician, Gertrude Mongella, was Secretary General of the conference, who you can see in the image below at the opening event for the NGO Forum. Find out more about how the lesbians took on the UN at Beijing.
Women of the World Unite: The United Nations Decade for Women and Transnational Feminisms 1975 to Now is open in LSE Library Gallery until 22 August 2025.
Our archives are open to all. Get in touch with the Library to find out more about accessing our archives and special collections.
Note: This article gives the views of the authors and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Images used on this page are as follows:
1. Postcard of Winnie Mandela (ref: TWL.2003.499)
2. Lucille Mathurin Mair (ref : Women Speaking fromTWL@LSE journals)
3. Photograph of Nita Barrow (ref: 2IAW/1/J)
4. Dove badge (ref: TWL.2017.1)
5. Development, Crises and Alternative Visions (ref: TWL@LSE books)
6. Unbowed: One Women’s Story by Wangari Maathai (ref: TWL@LSE books)
7. World Women, 31 August 1995 (ref: 5BJF)
Banner image: Outside the fourth UN World Conference on Women in Beijing, 1995. from 5BJF.
All image credits: LSE Library
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