Committee on Women Historians Meeting, March 1986

The CWH of the American Historical Association, consisting of Alice Kessler­ Harris, chair, Nancy Schrom Dye, Sylvia Jacobs, Virginia Scharff, Ronald Wal­ters, and Judith Walkowitz met for a full-day meeting on March 7,  1986,  at the Dupont Plaza Hotel. Samuel Gam­mon, executive director  of  the  AHA, and Noralee  Frankel, special assistant for women’s and minority interests, also attended.

The committee’s major concerns are promoting women’s history and fur­thering equity within the profession. On equity, CWH discussed several issues that they will ask the Professional Divi­sion to consider. These include: the adoption of nonsexist language guide­lines for AHA publications, adoption of an addition to the program committee’s guidelines that would seek to avoid gen­der segregation in sessions, and adop­tion of a resolution that would urge the Equal Employment Opportunity Com­mission to support affirmative action.

As a result of the concern over the lack of female representatives among the foreign scholars who have been giv­en honorary AHA membership, the CWH will nominate three foreign wom­en scholars to the Research Division.

The Committee on Women Histori­ans is starting work on a targeted mail­ing to minority and women historians to encourage them to join the AHA. The Committee continues to make sugges­tions to the Professional Division on the updating of the Hackney Report’s sec­tion on part-time employment.

In addition, a report was  presented on the results of a CWH survey on the status of graduate students.

For the AHA annual program in 1986, CWH submitted two sessions: one on equity and leadership, and one on perspectives in women’s culture, class, race, and nationality. For the 1987 an­nual meeting, sessions on comparable worth and on equality and constitution­ality in celebration of the bicentennial of the US constitution will be organized. To encourage AHA’s women’s history projects, possible funding sources were explored for a conference on women and the Progressive Era and for a topi­cal and contemporary conference on women’s history. CWH also discussed how to lobby more effectively for Na­tional Women’s History Week.