International
Federation For Research in Women's History
Federation Internationale Pour La Recherche En Histoire Des Femmes
Dear
colleagues,
It was a pleasure to meet a number of scholars connected with the Federation
in June at the Berkshire Women's History Conference in Rochester, New York.
Nancy Hewitt, Lynn Abrams and I were together in the same place for only the
second time since we took up our Board positions in Montreal in 1995. The
programme was packed, with 20 parallel sessions on some occasions, but we
managed a brief meeting to discuss pressing matters. The first was the Oslo
conference in August 2000. The second was the state of our finances. The third
was to receive assurances that the Search Committee charged with identifying
the new Board members to take over at the quinquennial General Meeting at
Oslo is making energetic inquiries!
Nancy Hewitt, Mrinalini Sinha and Ida Blom have arranged an exciting series of panels for the Oslo meeting. They have had difficulty selecting papers because so many scholars offered excellent topics, and the time and space that CISH has allocated to us is restricted. Every five years our conference is held under the auspices of the International Committee for Historical Sciences, an umbrella group for many areas of the discipline where practitioners are networked internationally. Those who attend the Oslo meeting will have rich programme offerings, as these other associations have also organised panels and a number of these include gender issues. We ourselves promoted the panel on women and religion in history. Ida Blom, unfortunately, is now ill; we send our warmest best wishes for her recovery.
Our finances are low at the moment. Our costs for paper and postage are minimal. The Federation's main expense is paying our affiliation fee to CISH, and we ask all national bodies that can afford it to contribute US$30 each year. Please remember to send your contribution if you are able to. Our only other sources of revenue are the royalties from the books we have seen through publication, Writing Women's History (now out of print) and Nation, Empire, Colony, published last year. The good news is that the publishers, Macmillan of London, have accepted a collection based on papers given at the Melbourne conference last year. The manuscript should be delivered to them by December this year.
At Oslo we will need to start planning the location of the conference for 2002 or 2003, which seems a very long way off, but such affairs need considerable lead time for the organisers. Despite our efforts to form an international network, this
remains difficult while women's historians must face the high cost of bridging large distances to meet in person. Travel to international conferences is beyond the reach of many people, and mail, phones and faxes are uncertain avenues of communication in many cases. We can be optimistic however now that more and more academics are gaining access to electronic mail, our networking efforts may become more cheap, frequent and reliable in the not-so-distant future.
I hope your year in your various institutions progresses well, and that your work in women's history is thriving. Best wishes to you and your committees.
I