1975-1985
The UN Decade for Women is launched at the first UN World Conference on Women in Mexico City (1975), marking a turning point in feminist mobilisation. Across the global South, women’s movements intersected with anti-authoritarian, peace, and anti-nuclear struggles, challenging colonial legacies, patriarchal norms, and the economic violence of neoliberal restructuring. This decade lays the foundation for transnational feminist solidarity and systematic critiques of global inequality.
A wide range of events shape feminist agendas during this period. The 1979 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) articulates the indivisibility of civil, political, social, and economic rights. In 1980 the Conference on Women held in Copenhagen highlights persistent divides between global North and South feminists. These dynamics reveal tensions and new possibilities within global feminist organising.
The rise of neoliberalism under Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan in the US—marked by austerity, privatisation, and welfare retrenchment—further intensifies poverty and gendered precarity, particularly in the global South. In Latin America, the fall of military dictatorships creates openings for feminist-led justice struggles. Anti-nuclear activism—from the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in the UK, to the Pacific region’s opposition to French and US testing—reframes peace as a feminist, decolonial demand. Even as Reagan’s 1984 Mexico City Policy (Global Gag Rule) restricts reproductive health funding, grassroots and transnational feminist alliances deepen, redefining development, rights, and resistance for the decades to follow.
