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In June 1975, thousands of people converged on Mexico City for the United Nations (UN) conference celebrating International Women's Year (IWY), the first of four UN women's conferences that would eventually include those in Copenhagen (1980), Nairobi (1985), and Beijing (1995). Scholars and activists regard IWY as a watershed moment in transnational second wave feminism. Billed as the 'greatest consciousness-raising event in history,' the IWY events included both an official conference, which offered an unprecedented opportunity to put women at the center of international policymaking, and a parallel nongovernmental organization (NGO) tribune, which launched a new generation of civil society organizations focused on issues related to women and gender. This work examines the history, the actions and legacies of the IWY conference.

AbstractIn 2018, the International Labour Organization published a study about the critical role of paid and unpaid care work for the health of society, the economy, and the planet and about the ways that care work is sustained through the super-exploitation of women, particularly migrant women and racially and ethnically marginalized women. Dorothy Sue Cobble's sweeping, carefully researched, and beautifully written study of full-rights feminists gives us a much-needed history of how the ILO came to attend to questions of care work and social reproduction and how hard-fought this recognition has been.

This article examines work of Mexican singer and activist Concha Michel, particularly the pamphlet Marxistas y 'marxistas' that sealed her expulsion from the Mexican Communist Party (Partido Comunista de México, PCM). Michel wrote the pamphlet after her return from the Soviet Union, where her experiences only confirmed her belief that revolutionary governments in Mexico and the Soviet Union alike had failed to attend to the massive amounts of social and cultural labor performed overwhelmingly by women. In particular, Communists' emphasis on modernization and scientific theory privileged the 'social economy' of commodified production and devalued what she dubbed the 'natural economy' of subsistence, reproduction, and artistic labors. The pamphlet draws parallels with the capitalist exploitation of laborers and the sexual exploitation of women perpetrated even by Communist Party leaders. Michel's refusal to submit to the Party line resulted in her high-profile expulsion from the party, a fate that befell much of her social circle. Over subsequent decades, however, her commitment to activism on behalf of women, celebration of Mexico's indigenous cultures, and persistent critique of the elision of subsistence labors would earn her celebrity among Mexican maternalist feminists.

Using the framework of "dissident bodies," Rosa Blanco Cano explores the ways that contemporary women artists have literally and metaphorically deployed their bodies to challenge received mythologies about monolithic nationalism, sanctified motherhood, and tradition-bound indignity.

The 1975 United Nations International Women's Year (IWY) Conference in Mexico City took place amid heightened attention to media coverage as a human rights issue as feminists highlighted the ways popular cultural representations limited women's opportunities. Third World leaders objected to depictions of postcolonial nations as spaces of endemic violence and ungovernability, and journalists decried efforts to censor their reporting. This article draws on political theorist Nancy Fraser's concept of contestatory counterpublics, particularly her attention to power differentials in spaces of apparent equality. At the IWY meetings, participants and journalists alike deliberated over the relative importance of cultural and structural factors and the proper balance between press freedoms and ethical reporting. Both official organizers and energetic activists endeavored to shape media coverage of IWY, but conflicts arose over where the dividing line lay between politics and women's issues—or between ideological propaganda and disinterested information.

In a widely read memoir, a Bolivian union militant signals the moment of her alienation from the nongovernmental organisation tribune of the United Nations' 1975 International Women's Year (IWY) conference in Mexico City by describing her dismay when she encountered a group of women clamouring for sexual rights, reiterating a persistent narrative about a trade‐off between sexual rights and other forms of social justice.
 Drawing on feminist performance theory, this article examines the political performances of three central figures at IWY – Domitila Barrios de Chungara, Betty Friedan and Mexican theatre director Nancy Cárdenas – to explore the ways that political performances rooted in distinct scenarios, or historical contexts, generated a confusion of meanings around campaigns for sexual rights.

Remembered as the constant companion of Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, the folksinger Concha Michel achieved notoriety for providing the soundtrack of Mexico's cultural Left. However, she also authored many works of poetry and prose that critiqued liberal, Marxist, and Catholic universalisms—all while maintaining a tireless pace as a teacher and activist. This article offers a methodological exploration of how Michel used personal anecdotes to fashion a universal cosmology and political philosophy grounded in gender complementarity and indigenous authenticity.