The 1977 International Women's Year Conference
One of Post's favorite memories is of the time she spent at the 1977 International Women's Year Conference. She marvels at the radical resolutions the women passed despite their different backgrounds.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Suzanne Post, June 23, 2006. Interview U-0178. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- SARAH THUESEN:
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On a related note, you attended the International Women's Year
Conference in Houston in '77, right?
- SUZANNE POST:
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Mmm hmm.
- SARAH THUESEN:
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Tell me a little bit about that experience.
- SUZANNE POST:
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That was a hilarious experience. We had had a state conference first to
elect women to go the one in Houston. We had adopted an agenda at that
conference at U of K. The agenda was four things. Has anybody told any
of this yet?
- SARAH THUESEN:
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No.
- SUZANNE POST:
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We adopted an agenda that called for ratification of the Equal Rights
Amendment, gay and lesbian rights, child care, and choice. So we had
those four things and we had yellow t-shirts made. God, I wish I still
had mine. Down the front of the t-shirts, overimposed on a map on
Kentucky, we had these things. People said, "My God, how did
you get those passed in a place like Kentucky?" It was a really
good question. I mean, it's a very conservative state. But
we were able to get support for choice, for
gay rights, for child care, and for the ERA. So we get to Houston and
you're going to laugh at me, but one of the things most I
remember about Houston, which had ten thousand women descend on it and
the hotels were really not prepared, was that the second day we were
there, you couldn't find a tampon within two miles of the
hotel. They had sold out of boxes of tampax. So when you figure that
one-fourth of the women are going to be menstruating at the same time
during this conference—is it one-fourth or a third?
- SARAH THUESEN:
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I would say one-fourth.
- SUZANNE POST:
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Yeah, okay. So it was hilarious. We couldn't find tampons. The
other thing we couldn't—we had to liberate the
men's bathrooms constantly because there wasn't
enough women's bathrooms. It was highly charged. It opened
with a march led by Betty Friedan and Bella Abzug and one of our local
judges. They had a mini-marathon and somebody carried a torch in. This
huge hall, it was very heavily charged, because there was an enormous
anti-ERA, anti-choice, anti-gay's rights bias there. I
honestly didn't think we were going to get what we wanted; I
just didn't think we were. I'll be damned if we
didn't get every one of those things passed.
- SARAH THUESEN:
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A resolution in support of them?
- SUZANNE POST:
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Mmm hmm, which is amazing in 1977. I mean, it was just totally amazing,
because there's so many bible-belt states in this part of the
country. The other thing that I remember really well about Houston is
that I had bought a pair of jeans on sale that were way too tight for me
and we were all living out of vending machines because they
weren't set up to handle us. Within a day or two, the buttons
on my jeans, oh God, it was just agony, it was agony. But it
was really fun. I was so glad.