Dear colleagues,

Best wishes for all your work and plans for your associations and for women's history generally in 1998.  It is wonderful through the reports in the newsletter to discover at least something of the ways women's history is being presented and researched in a variety of universities and beyond.
This will be the year that the 50th anniversary of the United Nations' Declaration on Human Rights will be celebrated in addition to it being 150 years since the beginning of the US Women’s Rights Movement and thus a fitting year for the focus of our international conference on human rights, social justice and citizenship, scheduled for late June/early July. It is wonderful that some 200 people from outside Australia have indicated a wish to a present a paper, and that scholars from so many different countries hope to attend. The keynote speakers whom this university has sponsored (together with other Melbourne universities), come from Hawaii, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Nigeria, India, Slovenia, the United States of America and an Aboriginal historian from this country. They will speak at plenary session; otherwise there will be a rich offering of panels to choose from, among the numerous concurrent sessions.
A draft programme with titles of sessions and names of speakers will be posted on our WWW site in the new year:

Registration leaflets are now available which offer a reduced registration fee for those who register before 30th April. Speakers will receive a leaflet automatically. Otherwise email or write to us and we will put one in the post for you. If we can manage it, this will also appear on the website, as will this newsletter. Ida Blom and I attended the meeting of the Comite Internationale des Sciences Historiques in Spoleto, Italy, last August, and we found that ou Fedeation was generally becoming known and well-respected. We appear to have links with historians across a larger number of countries than most of the affiliated associations, but of course our links are rather fragile outside of those countries where electronic mail is possible. We need to seek ways of establishing contact with more non-western scholars than we have to date, and of keeping more closely in touch with those whom we already know. We look forward to hearing more about your activities. It would be a pleasure to meet up in Melbourne in 1998 or Oslo in 200 at our conferences.