Achievements and Battles: Twenty-five Years of CCWHP

Abstract

������ The founders and subsequent generations of members of the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession have worked over the past twenty-five years, in the words of Berenice Carroll, change the profession of history, to change historical scholarship, and to change the direction of our own history.1 To bring about such changes, CCWHP has fought many battles and attained impressive achievements. Origin: During the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when many women historians actively participated in movements for student free speech, civil rights, peace, and women's Uberation, the American Historical Association (AHA) remained a gentlemen's protection society which had ruled the association until then, openly supporting practices of sexism, racism, classism, heterosexism, and antisemitism.2 Acting within this context of social and poUtical agitation, Berenice CarroU in October of 1969 sent a petition with some thirty signatures to the AHA council on behalf of women historians. In response, the AHA council appointed a Committee on the Status of Women (CSW), charged with the duties specified in the petition. At the same time, Berenice CarroU circulated a letter among historians that caUed for improvment in the status of women in the profession. Some twenty-five interested women historians who attended a meeting at the annual conference of the AHA in Washington D.C. in December 1969 agreed to estabhsh an organization to encourage recruitment of women into the historical profession, to oppose discrimination against women in the profession, and to encourage research and instruction in women's history. To reflect the group's concern with both the status of women in the profession and the development of women's history as a scholarly field, the founders named the new organization the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession. They presented their resolutions in early 1970 to the CSW and published them in the AHA Newsletter.3 The newly created organization became an affiliated organization of the AHA. Regional and Other Organizations: At the time of its founding, a question had been raised about the relationship between CCWHP and the existing regional organizations, namely the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians (founded in 1926), and the West Coast Historical Conference (founded in 1969, now the Western Association of Women Historians. Upon Sandi Cooper's recommendation, it was decided that CCWHP