Mal was also co-chair of the committee that organized the 20-year anniversary celebration of that Houston conference. The celebration took place in Washington DC in 1997. Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan were both still alive and they spoke and they physically passed the actual torch from the original conference to the younger generation. Mal was very wonderful at organizing events that had just enough pomp and ceremony and also time to talk. Here's a writeup about the 1997 conference, still to be found online at http://www2.edc.org/WomensEquity/edequity97/0302.html - it quotes Mal and credits her:
>NWC BRIEFING
>Volume I Number 1
>17 August 1997
>
>NWCC CELEBRATES 20th ANNIVERSARY OF HOUSTON
>
>The National Women's Conference Committee is planning a
>national conference to celebrate the historic 1977 Spirit of
>Houston Conference on Women. The Houston Conference attracted
>20,000 delegates and observers, the largest gathering of women
>ever held in the United States, hosted by three former First
>Ladies, Lady Bird Johnson, Betty Ford and Rosalynn Carter.
>The 20th Anniversary of that event will be held at The
>Georgetown University Conference Center in Washington D.C.
>November 20-23, 1997.
>
>Participants from throughout the United States will come
>together to assess the progress made toward implementing the
>National Plan of Action, the document of the Houston Conference.
>It will provide an opportunity to recognize the veterans of the
>women's movement and celebrate the successful efforts that serve
>to improve the lives of women and their families. The dialogue
>of the conference will produce a substantive report that will
>document the work of non-government organizations from Houston
>to Beijing and beyond.
>
>The President's Interagency Council on Women is in the process
>of producing a National Action Agenda that will guide the
>United States in follow-up and implementation of the Platform
>for Action, focusing on 12 general issues as described in the
>official document of the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women
>held in Beijing in September, 1995. The National Action Agenda
>is a compilation of recommendations expressed by thousands of
>women nationwide during a White House satellite conference
>hosted by First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton one year after the
>Beijing conference. The report will be presented at the 20th
>Anniversary Conference for the first time in an open forum.
>
>Conference Committee Chair Mal Johnson says, "We view the
>20th Anniversary Celebration of the Houston Conference as an
>opportunity for the women of America to assess issues that
>require additional attention to further improve the status
>of women."
>
>Members of the National Women's Conference Committee,
>non-government organizations, students and federally-employed
>women are expected to participate in the Conference.
>
>For further information and registration, contact:
>
>Mal Johnson, Conference Co-Chair
>2020 Pennsylvania Avenue N.W., Suite 267
>Washington, DC 20006
>Phone/Fax: 703.922.4468
>Email: natwom@usa.net
>
>OR visit our Web site at http://www.natwom.org
>
-----------------
Mal was really pleased to have been invited to this conference in Little Rock in October 2006, to share the podium with Bella Abzug's daughter Liz, among others. It was to plan the 30th anniversary of the 1977 Houston Women's Conference. I know Mal was very concerned about whether health would permit her to attend this Arkansas meeting for the 30th anniversary, and I can't remember if she attended or not. Perhaps a reader will post a comment about this.
http://www.nwhp.org/news/conference.php
-----------------
Note to researchers: If you start searching for "National Women's Conference Committee" as a term, you will find truly amazing activities that they have been involved in at not only national but also state levels, working to implement the National Plan of Action. A real must for any research on the impact of Mal Johnson, among others.
--------------
I first got to know Mal when I attended a meeting in St. Louis of the National Women's Conference Committee board, in I think the spring of 1992. I was looking for support for a radio project that I wanted to do. Mal and Sarah Harder liked the idea, and they put me in touch with Martha Burk as well. I think Sarah Harder, a very close friend of Mal's, was then President of what at that time was the Council of Presidents of Women's Organizations, but later evolved into the National Council of Women's Organizations. Martha Burk later became president of this group. Mal helped me design the radio project, and she worked for it, too. It wasn't possible to get any direct endorsement or support from the Council of Presidents, because it was just a coalition and not an organization in itself, but with the help of Sandy Suffian in Kansas City, we raised about $4,000 for the project from NCWO member groups, and the groups provided participants for the programs (it was a two-part series, but all recorded in one day). The project was a multi-city broadcast, with one studio a public radio studio in New York (where Marlene Sanders was the host), and one studio on Capitol Hill in Washington that was owned by the Democratic Party. We used an ISDN line that NPR owned to link those two cities, and then used the Public Radio Satellite Service to have the signal brought back live to the studio where I was monitoring and recording it, in Kansas City. I did a quick edit and released it on the Public Radio Satellite Service, as "National Women's Agenda 1992: What Women Want and How They Plan to Win It." Mal was the producer in the Washington studio.
Mal Johnson loved satellite links, and was very proud to have been involved in setting up an IntelSat satellite connection between the US and the UN's third World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1995. (Later, she and I together toured the Worldspace satellite radio facility and also the XM satellite radio facility in Washington. And in 2005 we took the delegates from the International Association of Women in Radio & TV [IAWRT] conference on a tour of XM.)
The National Women's Agenda, referred to in the program's title, was (probably still is) an agenda agreed to annually among the various US women's organizations working in coalition - identifying, from the numerous goals in the National Women's Plan of Action, a few goals to be highlighted and worked on in the year ahead. I think the only gift Mal ever gave me (aside from her friendship and wisdom and conversation and sometimes a place to stay) was a copy of the National Women's Plan of Action, published by the US government shortly after the 1977 National Women's Conference. This was a very precious and rare treasure. Jimmy Carter, who was President in '77, was appalled by the very progressive and far-reaching conclusions in the plan, and so only a few copies were published and then the book largely disappeared. If you find a copy, and maybe in Mal's effects there will be several, don't throw it away! There was a partial version republished later, I think by WEDO (Bella Abzug's last NGO), to mark an anniversary of the conference. The Carter administration (much less the Reagan one and subsequent) refused to pony up any money for implementation of the National Women's Plan of Action, even though the Congress - thanks to Bella Abzug - had put up several million dollars to have the formal structure implemented: delegates elected at state conferences who then met in Houston and voted on the planks of the National Women's Plan of Action. It was the only formal mechanism ever put in place to determine the will of American women. Anyway, the National Women's Conference Committee went ahead and worked on implementation of the Plan every way they could given that there wasn't any money. In the end, they decided that the most cost effective way to work was at the state level. In 1992, there were committees in about 20 US states.
I'm writing this off the top of my memory - a real history needs to be written. Again, researchers, you have your work cut out for you! Mal was on the NWCC board, and as I recall in 1992 she was representing Federally Employed Women. Even though she wasn't federally employed herself, she had worked closely with women in government as she covered the federal government for Cox.
(Funny, I keep thinking that Mal will read this and that I'll call her up and she'll tell me what parts I got wrong!)
One of Mal's greatest frustrations was the inability to launch a media caucus of the National Council of Women's Organizations. She was always on the verge of doing it, but so far it never flew; she said she couldn't get it prioritized by the Council - from what I gather, they paid lip service, but they didn't put energy into mobilizing it. Mal would never usurp the President of any organization she worked with - she had a strong sense of appropriate protocol, which is probably one reason she was such a popular board member. That, and the fact that she worked like the dickens. She and I wrote a grant proposal a couple of years ago in response to a one-time Request for Proposals from the Women Donors' Network. If our plan had been funded, it would have provided $250,000 a year to put media at the top of the National Women's Agenda for four years, funding media events at the national level and local levels for the member organizations to work with the democratic media movement. What made it possible to even write NCWO into such a proposal was the fact that NCWO finally had an executive director, who could structurally make a decision to be part of a proposal without having to get separate approval from every group in the large coalition. We got some serious consideration from WDN for that proposal, but in the end the money went to a group that trains people to write and place op-eds for newspapers. Nevertheless, the fact that a substantial amount of money had been offered for a project related to women and media did raise the heads of the feminist leaders a bit to note this issue. Eventually, I believe media will reach the top level of priorities for the US women's movement. Mal would be pleased. In 2005, she arranged for IAWRT delegates to have a sit-down luncheon with NCWO member organization representatives, to discuss the value of media for women's organizations.
- Frieda Werden
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