Abortion, Equal Rights, and Robert’s Rules of Order

The four-day hen session known as the National Women’s Conference cost the taxpayers $5 million. It brought thirty thousand females to Houston, about equally divided between the libbers of Bella Abzug and— for their own unsubsidized meeting—the anti-libbers of Phyllis Schlafly. The official NWC produced few surprises. Practically nobody got really mad at anybody. As an exercise in consciousness-raising, however, the affair probably was useful. This was the first such conference since the Women’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, N.Y. in 1848. That was 129 years ago, about the proper interval.

On November 17, the day before the Houston clambake began, a local Republican leader fired a resentful round of grape. Jerry Smith, Harris County GOP chairman, denounced the NWC delegates as “a gaggle of outcasts, misfits, and rejects.” He wanted them to “get out of town.”

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James Jackson Kilpatrick

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Abortion

Equal Rights Amendment

The four-day hen session known as the National Women’s Conference cost the taxpayers $5 million. It brought thirty thousand females to Houston, about equally divided between the libbers of Bella Abzug and— for their own unsubsidized meeting—the anti-libbers of Phyllis Schlafly. The official NWC produced few surprises. Practically nobody got really mad at anybody. As an exercise in consciousness-raising, however, the affair probably was useful. This was the first such conference since the Women’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, N.Y. in 1848. That was 129 years ago, about the proper interval.

On November 17, the day before the Houston clambake began, a local Republican leader fired a resentful round of grape. Jerry Smith, Harris County GOP chairman, denounced the NWC delegates as “a gaggle of outcasts, misfits, and rejects.” He wanted them to “get out of town.”