By Jennifer Vanasco

Thirty years ago this month, 20,000 women gathered in Houston to talk about women’s rights. They were elected from smaller conferences held in every state of the union.

The 26 issues they were talking about at the National Women’s Conference were so new to the public sphere they didn’t have language they agreed on to describe them. We have the words for those issues now, though, and they include: child care, universal health insurance, domestic violence—and lesbian rights.

Lesbian rights almost sank that conference in 1977.

It was more a convention than a conference, really. Thanks to Rep. Bella Abzug, Congress gave $5 million to study the state of women in America and hold a national conference in which women would agree on a National Plan of Action that they would then send back to Congress and the president.

The conference leadership was worried that if lesbian rights—then called “sexual preference”—was voted into the call to action, then no one would take them seriously.

Advocating for women’s rights beyond suffrage was radical enough. But advocating rights for a minority so small that no one even had numbers to describe how many of them there were?

It seemed like stupidity.

“The ironic thing is that a lot of the women at the conference were lesbians,” a woman who was an elected delegate to Houston told me last weekend at Freedom on Our Terms, a conference honoring the 30th anniversary of that first one. “But even the lesbians weren’t sure that lesbian rights should be part of the platform.”

For those of us who were children or who weren’t born in 1977, it is difficult to understand how very different—and very difficult—the situation for women was.

Health insurance plans covered the wives of employees, but not husbands and women couldn’t enroll as individuals. Women couldn’t establish their own personal credit history. They earned 60 cents on the man’s dollar. There was one female member of the U.S. Senate and almost no female airline pilots, firefighters or FBI agents. Sexual harassment wasn’t understood as an issue. Sexual assault by husbands was not widely considered to be rape.

There were so many things women had to get done—why should they include this tiny, controversial and (in the eyes of some) radical minority?

Betty Friedan had called lesbians “the lavender menace” and the new conservative movement was targeting them. Anita Bryant, who that year was running a campaign called Save Our Children that targeted a Florida gay anti-discrimination law, ran a counter-conference saying that most women actually wanted to be housewives.

“If gays are granted rights,” she said that year, “next we’ll have to give rights to prostitutes and to people who sleep with St. Bernards and to nail biters.”

That sounds familiar.

Lesbians had few protections back in 1977. Lesbian couples could not co-sign loans. Most judges considered lesbians to be “unfit mothers,” and they would lose the children in divorces. No states had yet passed antidiscrimination laws, and lesbian sex—considered sodomy—was still illegal in most states.

After much acrimonious debate—and with the support of the lesbians in leadership positions and other activists like Gloria Steinem—the “Sexual Preference” plank passed with a strong majority.

Thirty years later, things have changed—and stayed the same.

The Freedom on Our Terms conference, held last weekend in New York, was organized by two lesbians, one of them the daughter of Bella Azbug. A central panel on the Houston conference was dominated by lesbians who talked about their struggle for inclusion at the time. And the keynote speaker was lesbian Rosie O’Donnell.

Lesbians are fully integrated now in the women’s movement; they head and staff organizations and women’s groups are clear that lesbian rights are women’s rights.

And a lot of things are easier for lesbians now. There is greater social acceptance. Advances for women—including the ability to hold jobs previously advertised for men only—have helped lesbians tremendously, as have the advances in gay rights, especially antidiscrimination laws. Twenty states now prevent discrimination against gays and lesbians.

But lesbians (like gay men) still don’t have their relationships recognized in most states, can still get fired for being gay and still struggle to get parental rights.

Women in 1977 thought that the National Women’s Conference was the beginning of something. They thought that Congress and President Carter would take their recommendations and make things happen.

None of them thought that in 30 years another national women’s conference would be necessary. Instead, Ronald Reagan was elected to office and the new conservative movement was just beginning. Women still struggle for equal pay and equal respect.

The big change came within those women themselves. They no longer felt like they were alone. And so they went back to their communities, those 20,000 women, and they fought for change themselves, sometimes with the government’s help, sometimes not. And lesbians fought—and are fighting—right alongside them.

Email Jennifer Vanasco at jennifer.vanasco@gmail.com. She blogs daily on the gay political site VisibleVote08.com.