Steinem speaks at the historic National Women's Conference in Houston, the first and only U.S. government-sponsored conference on women's rights.
On November 18, 1977, Gloria Steinem addressed delegates at the National Women's Conference in Houston, Texas. Convened under federal authorization following the United Nations' International Women's Year, this gathering remains the first and only conference in United States history to be sponsored directly by the federal government to comprehensively examine women's rights and status.
More than 2,000 delegates attended, along with tens of thousands of observers, representing a broad cross-section of American women, including significant representation of women of color, disabled women, and LGBTQ women—itself a historic first for inclusivity at a national political gathering of this scale.
Steinem was a key organizer and speaker, helping to shape and support the conference's National Plan of Action, a sweeping policy document addressing issues including the Equal Rights Amendment, reproductive rights, childcare, employment discrimination, and violence against women.
The conference is remembered as a high-water mark of organized feminist political power in the 1970s, bringing together disparate factions of the women's movement under a shared federal platform. Though many of its policy goals remained unrealized in subsequent decades, the event's historic nature—as a government-convened forum on women's rights—has never been replicated, cementing its singular significance in American political history.