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Newsletter No 31
Message from the President of IFRWH

Greetings from Belfast!

It was my great honour and pleasure to have been nominated as the in-coming president of the Federation at the Oslo Conference in August 2000. I thank the nominating committee for their faith in me and in the other members of the new board: Vice-President: Pirjo Markkola; Secretary-Treasurer: Karen Hunt; Newsletter Editor: Eileen Boris; Shirin Akhtar, Noriyo Hayakawa, Alison Mackinnon, Mrinalini Sinha and Sylvia Van Kirk.

One of my first tasks as president is to express our appreciation to the out-going board for all the work that they have undertaken for the Federation. In particular I would like on behalf of the Federation to record our thanks to Patricia Grimshaw for the commitment and time that she has given to the organisation. Pat not only organised the Melbourne conference (the proceedings of which will be published shortly) but she has also been very successful in extending the network of the Federation and encouraging the formation of new national committees. At Oslo, we formally welcomed five new national committees to the Federation: Bangladesh, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania and Poland and there are now over forty countries affiliated to the Federation. We hope Pat will continue to play an active role in the affairs of the Federation.

The other members of the out-going board have also done sterling work for the Federation and we thank them all: the vice-president Nancy Hewitt, the secretary and newsletter editor Lynn Abrams and board members: Ute Daniel, Francisca de Haan, Maria Izilda Santos de Matos, and Tanika Sarkar.

Oslo Conference
Nancy Hewitt had responsibility for organising the Federation's conference in Oslo as part of the 19th International Congress of Historians. Nancy was assisted in the task by Ida Blom and Mrinalini Sinha. The programme was an excellent mixture of new and more established researchers and also included representatives from an impressive number of countries (my estimate is twenty-five!). It was very uplifting to listen to scholars from so many countries with a common interest in women's history. The conference also gave a very favourable impression of the growing strength of research into the history of women in different parts of the world. The papers and discussion were intellectually stimulating and raised a number of issues that could well form the basis for future conference themes. Many thanks to Nancy for the superbly efficient conference organisation. Nancy plans to edit the proceedings and it should make a worthwhile volume.
One of the key aims of the incoming board will be to continue to expand the network of the Federation. There are still many countries, which are not represented in the organisation, and we hope to make contact with some of these in the next five years. In addition to bringing in new members we would like to encourage more contact and communication between the members of the Federation. The Newsletter already provides a vital link and, under the new editorship of Eileen Boris, it will continue to do so. As Pat Grimshaw noted in the last newsletter, electronic communication has made it easier for us all to keep in touch and we would like to develop this form of contact through the establishment of a website for the Federation. We plan to use the website as a source of information about the activities of the Federation and its affiliated committees. We will provide space for any national committee that wishes to use the website to advertise conferences, publications and other activities. We will also maintain a list of websites relevant to women's history. The temporary address for our first steps in this project is www.historians.ie/women. I will initially serve as editor of the site so anyone interested in posting information should send it to me, preferably in a Word file (e-mail address: .odowd@qub.ac.uk). We would also welcome suggestions as to the sort of items and information which members would like to see on the website.

Conference in Belfast in 2003
My main task as president is to organise the 2003 conference that will be held in Queen's University, Belfast. The themes of the 2003 conference and that of 2005 were discussed by the new board in Oslo. We are proposing the theme of Women, the Family, Personal Lives and Sexuality for the Belfast conference. We are suggesting this theme for a number of reasons. First, we would like to have a theme that will attract papers from medievalists, early modernists as well as modern historians. The conferences of the Federation to date have tended to appeal more to scholars working on 19th and 20th century topics than to historians working on earlier periods. There has been a great deal of work completed on the role of women in the medieval and early modern family in different parts of the world and we hope this theme will, therefore, appeal to scholars working in this area. Secondly, the three large conferences of the Federation in Montreal, Melbourne and Oslo have concentrated on women's political and public lives, largely because this had been a neglected area of women's history. 2003 may, however, be a good time to take another look at some of the early debates on women's private or personal lives and, hopefully, also contribute towards a wider international discussion on the history of women, family and private life. Finally, the proposed theme has a contemporary relevance. Public debates on the role of the family in society are taking place in countries throughout the world and a key component in many of the discussions is women's relationship with the family. Feminists have been portrayed as being anti-family while many women who work outside the home have often found themselves struggling to achieve a balance between their family and working lives. An international conference that explores this topic from a historical perspective might, therefore, contribute to the wider public discourse on the family. We would welcome comments from national committees on this proposed theme.

Conference in Sydney in 2005
The tentative theme for the 2005 conference is historiography and women's history or the impact which women's history has had on the way in which history is written at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This would be a revisiting of some of the themes first raised in Writing Women's History: International Perspectives edited by Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson and Jane Rendall, which was the first publication to appear under the auspices of the Federation. The new vice-president Pirjo Markkola will be responsible for the organisation of the 2005 conference, which will be held in Sydney. We would also welcome responses to this proposal.

With best wishes to everyone for the new year.

Mary O'Dowd