The United Nations (UN) declared 1975 the International Women’s Year (IWY) after women from Eastern Bloc countries proposed the idea during a period still shaped by the Cold War. The year was aimed to promote equality between men and women, integrate women into development efforts, and recognise their contributions to peace. As worldwide attention focused on it, the IWY helped put women’s issues at the centre of the UN agenda. To mark such an unprecedented focus, a World Conference was held in Mexico City in June, followed by a World Congress in East Berlin in October. Yet, when IWY is recounted, only the Mexican event is usually remembered; the East German meeting and its contributions to the history of gender and feminisms are often forgotten.
Held between 20-24 October 1975, the World Congress for IWY in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) explored a collective vision of women’s emancipation rooted in socialist principles. It saw sex equality as inseparable from struggles against other systemic forms of violence, such as racism, colonialism, and global economic inequalities. This view contrasted with the liberal feminism officially supported by many Western governments, which had a strong individual focus, and regarded debates on these same political issues – race, foreign domination, poverty – as undue politicisation of the women’s agenda.
Although the event in the GDR may have been written out of the liberal-shaped feminists’ canon, this World Congress enjoyed strong support from those who refused to view discrimination solely through the narrow lens of patriarchy. In celebration of its 50th anniversary, this article sheds light on both the relevance the event acquired among high-ranking staff at the UN, activists, and politicians of the time, and on the project of women’s emancipation debated in East Berlin. To do so, I explore a few editions of the quarterly Women of the Whole World, which was published by the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF), a global coalition of left-wing women that played a key role in organising the World Congress. WIDF, the largest and among the most influential women’s organisations after the Second World War, published this journal in six languages (English, Arabic, French, German, Russian, and Spanish) and circulated it across all continents. An extensive collection of this periodical is held at the Women’s Library, London School of Economics, where I consulted it.
From the start, the organisers wanted the World Congress to be an open forum, unlike Mexico City, where official state delegates would meet in the main conference to negotiate the official documents, and the participation of women’s organisations was limited to a parallel event – the Tribune – with no role in the official proceedings. As Ilse Thiele, vice-president of the WIDF, put it in an interview for Women of the Whole World (no.2/1975) a few months before the Congress: in East Berlin, women themselves ‘will have the floor’. According to the Communiqué published in the journal (no.1/1975), the organisers – inspired by a socialist project for women’s emancipation – expected that equal rights would be debated in the GDR in the context of wider socioeconomic issues, including peace, solidarity, and national independence. Prominent women such as the Indian Prime Minister Indira Ghandi and the Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Nikolayeva-Tereshkova seemed to support this path, as both sent encouraging messages to the organisers reinforcing the interdependence of women’s emancipation and political concerns, which were published alongside the Communiqué.
As almost 2,000 women and men from 141 countries gathered in East Berlin for the Congress, greeting messages – framed within a politicised view of women’s rights – poured in. According to a firsthand report by Wanda Tycner, chief-editor of the Women of the Whole World, no less than 900 telegrams were received, expressing goodwill, solidarity, and support from statesmen, politicians, and public officials (no.1/1976). Some were published in that issue. Kurt Waldheim, UN Secretary General, stated that ‘the role of women in society and the task of creating a new and more equitable international economic order are closely interlinked’. Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, stressed that ‘the cause of women is indissolubly linked with the cause of the people’. The Guinean Jeanne-Martin Cissé, on behalf of the UN special committee on Apartheid, indicated that if the Congress addressed the dismantling of this system, ‘it will have served its purpose and come up to the expectations placed in it by those peoples striving for peace, freedom, justice and progress’. Read together, these words suggested that women would never be fully emancipated in a world marked by unequal socioeconomic structures and threatened by war.
This politicised tone was carried into the nine commissions created to organise debates during the World Congress, and, using Celia Donert’s expression, a vision of women’s rights ‘recognized as specifically socialist’ came into view. Kristen Ghodsee explains that socialist women believed both in (some) state intervention with redistributive policies and in the idea that sex equality could not be separated from broader politics. They, she writes, ‘saw no point in advocating for the equality of black men and women under a system of apartheid or for equal pay for equal work when the entire working class survived on less than subsistence wages’. Alongside Ghodsee, authors such as Francisca de Haan and Chiara Bonfiglioli suggest that this understanding contains the roots of what today feminists call intersectionality and that it strongly appealed to many women in the so-called ‘Third World’.
Women of the Whole World highlighted some of the commissions’ conclusions – drawn from their final reports – and this politicised view stood out clearly (no.1/1976). It is notable how approaching women’s emancipation through a political lens created overlaps, with issues spilling into multiple commissions and opening space for new connections. In Commission 1 on equality, participants recognised that ‘inequality, as it affects the majority of female population of Latin America, Asia, and Africa’ was ‘closely linked with the problem of under-development’. Complementing this, Commission 3 on women and development noted that many women could not play a more active role in society due to ‘the harsh conditions’ in which they lived, ‘victims of colonialist and neo-colonialist hegemony’ that led to ‘[o]ppression, illiteracy, hunger, malnutrition, disease, unemployment, prostitution, beggary and want’. Together, these conclusions suggested that unequal global structures depriving the ‘Third World’ of wealth had to be confronted for women’s full emancipation, as poverty and foreign domination laid at the roots of their oppression. In Commission 6, on women and peace, delegates drew connections between sex equality, environmental protection, and the use of natural resources in the interest of peoples – not private businesses – urging the women’s movement to ‘intensify its demands for the greater utilization of scientific achievements for environmental protection and for the freeing of extensive means for these tasks through the reduction of arms costs’.
As promised, the World Congress’ final documents – an Appeal and a Statement – were approved by the plenary without distinction among participants. Both were published in Women of the Whole World and,as part of what was celebrated as a ‘People’s Congress’, widely circulated (no.1/1976). As expected, they reflected the politicised view of women’s rights that shaped the event. In the Appeal, women declared: ‘[d]isarmament, not armament – more money for the legitimate rights of women’; ‘[o]nly a free people can guarantee women’s legitimate rights’; and ‘[e]quality cannot be achieved without the active participation of women themselves’. Their closing words called for a project of emancipation that went beyond simply bringing women into men’s world. Rather than seeking equal access to old structures, they envisioned a fairer future by transforming the racist, imperial, and deeply unequal world structures – vices that, unfortunately, still persist.
Radical projects for women’s emancipation – such as the one that took stage at the World Congress – have been erased from IWY histories and those of the broader women’s movement. Under the guise of a ‘global sisterhood’, Ioana Cîrstocea shows that alternatives were marginalised, whilst liberal-oriented feminism, stripped of critique of broader socioeconomic structures, has become hegemonic in international law and institutions. In a world marked by neoliberal retrenchment, rising inequality, increasing militarisation, unprecedented environmental destruction, and rampant racism, the narrow framework of this (allegedly) depoliticised feminism has proven insufficient. Women’s full emancipation will never be achieved as long as the mainstream path remains detached from the socioeconomic and political concerns beyond patriarchy that shape women’s lives and perpetuate their subjugation. Returning to the emancipation project discussed during the World Congress in East Berlin offers a fresh perspective on longstanding systemic challenges and reminds us that there are already solid foundations in our not-so-distant past from which to build.