United Nations Decade for Women

International Women's Year (IWY) was the name given to 1975 by the United Nations. Since that year March 8 has been celebrated as International Women's Day, and the United Nations Decade for Women, from 1976 to 1985, was also established.

The first World Conference on Women was held in Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July. The 1975 conference and IWY were part of a larger United Nations program which developed over the Decade of Women (1976–85), and included the drafting and of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), agreed at the second conference in 1980 in Copenhagen. The 1985 third conference in Nairobi, Kenya, not only closed the decade of women, but set a series of member state schedules for removal of legislated gender discrimination in national laws by the year 2000. The 1973–75 planning of the IWY, led by Assistant Secretary General for Social and Humanitarian Affairs Helvi Sipila was very much influenced by the rise of Second Wave Feminist movements throughout the developed world in the early 1970s. Delegates sought to deepen these advances in legal recognition of female equality and bring them to the developing world, and promote the role of women as an aid for economic development.

The 1975 Mexico City Conference was attended by over a thousand delegates. Prominent attendees included:

An International Women's Year Tribune was also organised and attended by 4,000 women in 1975.

The 1975 conference was also notable for passing the first "Zionism is racism" resolution passed at any UN-sponsored forum, thus preparing the way for United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 in 1975 the following November.

A statement equating Zionism with racism was also included in an annex to a report to be considered at the final conference of the United Nations Decade for Women in 1985 in Nairobi, Kenya. However, as stated in It Takes a Dream: The Story of Hadassah (1997), by Marlin Levin, "Bernice asked [President Ronald] Reagan to publicly repudiate the U.N. resolution. He agreed and promised that the U.S. delegation would walk out of Nairobi if the Zionism-equals-racism resolution was included in the final conference declaration." Tannenbaum also convinced the United States Senate to condemn the conference resolution and demand its withdrawal. She also personally flew to Kenya with a draft of the Senate resolution, where Maureen Reagan, President Reagan's daughter and the head of the American delegation, repeated the president’s promise to withdraw from the conference if the resolution was included in the final conference delegation. Kenya then brokered a compromise in which Zionism was omitted from the final conference report.

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