Present and Future Roles for the CCWH

Susan Wladaver-Morgan will talk about the challenges that a mature organization like the CCWH faces in the academic environment of the twenty-first century. Organizations of women historians have achieved notable successes since their founding in the late 1960s and early 1970s, both in terms of legitimizing the (then) new field of women’s history and serving the needs of women historians within the profession. But challenges remain. To avoid becoming an academic ghetto, women historians and our organizations must find ways to integrate gender as a category into all aspects of the discipline, as race and class have been. To ensure more input into academic governance, we must support women scholars not just in getting hired and achieving tenure but to make the vital transition from associate to full professor. Perhaps most urgently, we must creatively devise strategies to serve the needs to the growing numbers of our fellow historians, male as well as female, who work as adjuncts with no institutional home, which not only undermines their livelihood and sense of professional worth but also keeps them from producing the scholarship on which we all rely.