“The Right Type of Woman . . . at the Policy Making Level”: The International Women’s Year and Representational Struggles in Ghana

Abstract: Accounts of the United Nations International Women’s Year (IWY) have often depicted a tripartite division in which the West, East, and Third World advanced divergent definitions of the problems of women and disagreed bitterly over solutions and priorities. The World Conference of the IWY, held in Mexico City in June 1975, has thus been recounted in terms of a “showdown” between “western feminists” and “Third World women.” This article examines the IWY from the vantage point of Ghana—a former British colony that was firmly aligned with the Third World bloc in 1975. We locate Ghanaians’ engagements with the IWY in a longer trajectory of historically contingent and competing claims to know, organize, and represent women. We argue that these representational struggles can be best understood via an interscalar analysis, which identifies how conflicts across global blocs were closely connected to and shaped by in-country contestation, and vice versa.