A Community of Limits and the Limits of Community: MALDEF's Chicana Rights Project, Empowering the "Typical Chicana," and the Question of Civil Rights, 1974–1983

LORI A. FLORES

To speak of Chicanas is to speak of a multitude of
experiences, of histories, and of realities.
—Isabelle Navar

IN LATE MAY 1971, over six hundred Chicanas attended the first National Chicana Conference, La Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza, in Houston, Texas. The weekend-long gathering provided a forum for Mexican American women of all ages to discuss issues ranging from fair employment to higher education to healthy sexuality. The resolutions developed from the two largest workshops at the conference, "Sex and the Chicana" and "Marriage—Chicana Style," called for control by Chicanas over their own bodies and access to free legal abortions, birth control, and twenty-fourhour child care centers. The resolutions also called for Chicanas actively to question "machismo," educational discrimination, the double standard, and the repressive ideology of the Catholic Church.