First World Conference on Women

World Conference on Women, 1975 was held between 19 June and 2 July 1975 in Mexico City, Mexico. It was the first international conference held by the United Nations to focus solely on women's issues and marked a turning point in policy directives. After this meeting, women were viewed as part of the process to develop and implement policy, rather than recipients of assistance. The conference was one of the events established for International Women's Year and led to the creation of both the United Nations Decade for Women and follow-up conferences to evaluate the progress that had been made in eliminating discrimination against women and their equality. Two documents were adopted from the conference proceedings, the World Plan of Action which had specific targets for nations to implement for women's improvement and the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace, which discussed how nations foreign policy actions impacted women. It also led to the establishment of the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women to track improvements and continuing issues and the United Nations Development Fund for Women to provide funding for developmental programs. The conference marked the first time that the parallel Tribune meeting was successful in submitting input to the official meeting and became a catalyst for women's groups to form throughout the world.

The World Conference on Women occurred in the 1970s amid the Cold War when geopolitical conflict was controlled based on the interests of the United States or the USSR in various regions throughout the world, polarizing the world into two camps and their respective fields of influence. At a time when the United States had just withdrawn from Vietnam, forty-eight separate conflicts would rock Asia in such places as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. African wars during the end of decolonization in the 1970s turned toward long-lasting civil wars in Angola, Ethiopia-Somali, Mozambique and other African nations, with the superpowers manipulating the conflicts in the background with troops and arms.Decolonization of the Caribbean saw twelve states gain their independence between 1962 and 1983, but simultaneously remain marginalized by pressures from world powers which continued to manipulate local concerns. Two significant Middle East conflicts occurred in 1967 and 1973 with the US backing its Arab allies and Israel, while the USSR backed Arab socialist regimes. In Central and South America various coups d'états in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, El Salvador and dictatorships led to instability and decimation of indigenous populations.

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