Newsletter No 27

Message from our President

Dear friends and colleagues,

Some months have passed since our IFRWH conference here in Melbourne, but people continue to comment on aspects of the conference that they found important. A number of participants from western countries have felt reinforced in the utility of the concept of 'women's history', at a time when some have promoted 'gender' as the more appropriate focus for historical analysis. Some papers delivered from speakers from outside the west saw women's history as innovative, as reshaping the discipline, and significant for the work of supporting equity and social justice for women in their countries. A few emphasised that the act of isolating women's experiences still appeared challenging to male-dominated tertiary institutions in their part of the world, and indeed even subversive of a current oppressive order. They were pleased to be part of an international conference, and to know of an international association that could lend credibility and strength to their own, often recent, scholarly and academic initiatives.

Similarly other participants, women of colour who are part of minorities in their countries, saw the conference as an opportunity to make clear to their compatriots as well as to scholars from elsewhere the ways in which women's history can ignore those people who are defined as outside the mainstream. These women pointed out how such scholarship in fact constitutes an oppressive political act under the guise of progressive scholarship. The International Federation for Research in Women's History can be increasingly crucial in this and other issues dealing with ethnicity and racial divisions if our forums continue, as they have so far, to offer historians from a wide range of countries and regions a platform on which to speak of their experiences, and to counte dominant white readings of history.

 One very pleasing outcome of the conference is the number of papers that are being published, sometimes as individual pieces but a few in special journal editions and collections. The Scandinavian participants,the Australian participants and the Pacific participants are among the groups who have taken this path.With two colleagues from the conference organising committee, Marilyn Lake and Katie Holmes, I am discussing with a publisher the feasibility of a collection demonstrating the breadth of topics and speakers represented at the conference. We will be in touch with people if we are successful.

Meanwhile I am sure you will be aware that the papers from the Montreal conference of 1995 have appeared in a handsome edition, the work of Nupur Chaudhuri and Ruth Pierson with the title: Imperialisms, Colonialisms and Nationalisms: Historicizing Gender and Race. The University of Indiana Press are the publishers.

We can be very grateful for the organising group dealing already with our IFRWH session at Oslo in the year 2000, Nancy Hewitt, Mrinalini Sinha and Ida Blom. It will be excellent if national conveners and others from each constituent country can attend. The current Executive and Board will of course hand over to a new group at the General Meeting we will convene at that time.

Warmest best wishes for the New Year!

Patricia Grimshaw