ABSTRACT
The 1975 Conference on Women was the first UN Conference to focus exclusively on women’s issues. Women, of course, had been organizing world conferences for at least 100 years but the 1975 was the result of mounting pressure to put women’s issues in the UN’s agenda. The 1975 Conference was intended to shift the processes of international legal and policy making but critical disagreements amongst the feminists of the Global South and Socialist blocs with the feminists of the Global North about the relationship between feminism and development within the context of the New International Economic Order were evident. Two documents emerged from the Conference, and this paper centres on The World Plan of Action. Our chapter presents these debates with a view of elucidating that different women have advanced radically different projects of international legal law-making, which in turn reflecting broader understandings of the source of women’s oppression and the routes towards liberation.
