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Women’s Committee
Report of the Women’s Committee
The Women’s Committee has spent the 2000-01 year actively working to meet the needs of its diverse constituency and keeping the Council and membership informed about issues affecting women in the profession. We welcomed new members Ardis Cameron (University of Southern Maine) and Barbara McCaskell (University of Georgia), July 1, as former chair Kandice Chuh (University of Maryland) and Tracy Fessenden (Arizona State University) cycled off the committee.
The activities we have planned for the 2001 convention in Washington, D.C. are designed to highlight successful examples collaborative, interdisciplinary work from a global perspective. The Women’s Committee and the Minority Scholars Committee are co-sponsoring a “Roundtable on the Meanings and Representations of Work in the Lives of Women of Color.” The roundtable involves 4 scholars from a Ford Foundation-funded project made up of 16 academics, museum specialists, artists, and policy analysts who examine contemporary scholarship, creative and popular cultural expressions, and pedagogies related to gender, race/ethnicity, and labor as part of an interdisciplinary project that will make new knowledge and theories available to larger publics (teachers, scholars, community groups, policy makers). The project has not only furthered individual scholars’ research, but also represents a model for curriculum transformation projects and interdisciplinary collaborative research projects at other sites. The Women’s Breakfast on Saturday morning (the first joint Women’s Breakfast / International Women’s Breakfast) will feature Hiroko Sato, an American Studies scholar in Japan, who will talk about “A Never-Ending Story: A Japanese Woman’s Encounters with the United States.” We will also be co-hosting our annual reception on Thursday evening with the Minority Scholars Committee and the Queer Caucus to enable us to meet and mingle with our overlapping constituencies. We will continue the tradition of a joint business meeting with the Minority Scholars Committee to discuss issues of common concern.
We are pleased to see featured panels about affirmative action at the 2001 annual meeting, and we welcome the continuing opportunity to be part of the discussions about the ASA’s policies and initiatives that will arise from them.
We have begun preliminary planning for the 2002 convention in Houston. We will continue to discuss successful community/academy partnerships at our breakfast with guests from area universities and continue to collaborate with allied committees to examine the intersections of gender, class, race/ethnicity, and education at co-sponsored panels.
In conjunction with the Minority Scholars Committee and the Task Force on Ethnic Studies programs, we have prepared and submitted a proposal for the Lora Romero First Book Award, which awaits approval at the 2001 business meeting. The award will recognize a first book that examines the intersections of race with gender, class, sexuality, and/or nationality by awarding its author lifetime membership in the ASA. Our hope is that this award will help institutionalize the centrality of diversity in scholarship to the ASA, and become part of the support systems available to young faculty pursuing this kind of work. We hope the first award will be made at the 2002 annual meeting in Houston.
We have engaged in preliminary long-term planning over the last year. Our breakfast in Detroit was dedicated to the topic of “Working Conditions” and set up to be more participatory than past formats featuring a single speaker. Our goal was to get a sense of the needs of our members in their various workplaces and the role of the ASA and the Women’s Committee in improving them. The range of needs was broad—from scholars who feel that their work as women scholars was accepted as mainstream to scholars who feel marginal and marginalized in their institutional homes as both scholars and faculty members. The unevenness of institutional and curricular transformation was striking, and we are still engaged in conversations about how we can best address this range of needs.
One of our strategic goals has been to make a greater effort to include international members in our work. As the Task Force on International Women in American Studies ends, we are working to implement many of their recommendations. We will be working with the International Scholars Committee to make decisions about the best ways to make use of the data base the Task Force began, and we will be discussing the inclusion of a permanent seat for an international scholar on the Women’s Committee at our business meeting in Washington DC.
Another strategic goal is to continue our efforts to facilitate academy/community partnerships. Many of our members are housed in American Studies, Women’s Studies, or Ethnic Studies programs with a tradition of close cooperation with the larger community on issues of common concern. The Ford Foundation panel at the 2001 convention and the breakfast in Houston are efforts in that direction. We will discuss further initiatives and prospects/possibilities for outside funding at our annual business meeting.
Respectfully Submitted,
Erin Smith, Chair, Women’s Committee
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