A study examined changes in the treatment of women's issues and feminism from 1975 to 1985--the United Nations (UN) designated "Women's Decade"--by two nationally circulated newspapers. The purpose was to find out how much and what kind of news was reported during the three UN World conferences for women held in 1975, 1980, and 1985; specifically, the study looked at the amount of coverage, placement of stories, tone of stories (degree of conflict emphasized), and use of the terms "feminist" and "feminism." In all, 80 stories from "The Washington Post" and "The New York Times" were content analyzed. Results indicated moderate coverage in 1975, scant coverage in 1980, and large coverage in 1985 of the respective conferences. Story placement shifted dramatically over time, from news pages in 1975 to lifestyle pages in 1980, and to an even division between the two sections in 1985. The use of the terms "feminist" and "feminism" reversed completely in the decade covered, with two-thirds of the stories in 1975 using the words and two-thirds of the stories in 1985 not using them. The one constant in the study was the consistently higher than average number of conflict stories reported (never below 40%), lending support to charges that conflict is over-selected in coverage of the Women's Decade. (FL)