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Despite the rhetoric, delegates made intense efforts to succeed at the main business of the conference: ratifying the document on "forward-looking strategies." In one section of the report, the members urge their countries to put an economic value on the work of women who raise families, keep house and grow crops. The action was inspired by the London-based International Wages for Housework Campaign, whose organizers attended the NGO forum. The group of activist homemakers has called for a oneday, worldwide housework strike on Oct. 24 to demand government salaries for cooking, cleaning and child care. As radical as the notion may appear, it dramatizes a discouraging fact: domestic labor, seen everywhere as women's work, is universally undervalued. Indeed, according to a recent survey by Economist Ruth Leger Sivard, director of World Priorities, a Washington-based think tank, the cash value of the unpaid labor of women represents $4 trillion a year, equivalent to a third of the world's gross economic product. Said Brooklyn, N.Y.-born Selma James, a leader of the strike call: "Women are very determined that our work no longer be invisible."
The political nature of the U.N. parley was echoed at the NGO forum, where the Great Court of the University of Nairobi campus provided an outdoor bulletin board for the world's causes and conflicts. A Japanese peace group displayed life-size photographs of atom-bomb victims. The Pan Africanist Congress, a black South African liberation group, tacked up a banner showing a female guerrilla fighter. Free-form discussions of war and peace went on all day in three large blue-and-white-striped tents, known collectively as the Peace Tent. There all the gathering's anxious, angry or exhausted vented their hopes and fears. Over and over, women spoke in sweeping terms of the absurdity of the arms race. "Men never talk about peace, only arms," said Edith Ballantyne, general secretary of the Geneva-based Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. "We must push our governments to talk about peace." Inside the Peace Tent, women pushed themselves to talk, even with their supposed enemies. "I got up and said Palestinians have a right to exist," marveled Galia Golan, who heads the women's studies department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. "I didn't know I could say that and not be a turncoat."
Political discussion was only an aspect of the diverse NGO forum. Groups as varied as International Planned Parenthood, the Girl Guides Association of Thailand and the World YWCA organized about 1,800 workshops and seminars with such titles as "Women in Rural Development" and "What If Women Ruled the World?" American women in tank tops, Africans in brightly colored kangas and Indians in diaphanous saris wandered through exhibits like "Tech and Tools," inspecting innovative fish smokers from Ghana and concrete stoves from Fiji. Although several of the forum participants, including 19 Chinese, were double delegates representing the policy of their governments at both meetings, many found themselves in exchanges far more freewheeling than they could have had at home.