Seventh Berkshire Conference on the History of Women

Abstract

Berkshire Conference is unusual among academic meetings because it rep resents not only scholarship on women's history but also goals central to vari ous aspects of the feminist movement. It is held every third year in June at a women's college in the Northeast. 1987 conference, held at Wellesley Col lege on June 19-21, was attended by more than two thousand scholars and provided an opportunity to consider not only the significance of recent re search, but also the different paths taken by feminist scholars in the past two decades. theme of the conference, Beyond the Public/Private Dichoto my: Reassessing Woman's Place in History, produced panel topics covering the widening realms of scholarship on women's lives. panels highlighted in this review, chosen with the interests of ILWCTTs readers in mind, represent only a fraction of the topics in a three-day conference consisting of almost two hundred sessions on the history of more than half of humanity. Alice Kessler-Harris's keynote address on pay equity or comparable worth introduced themes that were developed in a number of panels, especial ly those on the working class. Entitled The Just Price, the Free Market, and the Value of Women, the talk was both a reminder to scholars of their re sponsibility to address public issues and an analysis of ways in which overly abstract models of gender differences have been misused both in scholarly analyses of women and in the political arena. Kessler-Harris pointed out that subjective judgements about social hierarchy are embedded in notions of equi ty and the just price. She argued that comparable worth has important impli cations because it challenges abstract definitions based on traditional ideas about gender differences. Redefinitions of equity reveal complexities about gender differences that provide a potential basis for challenging tradition. Several panels explored the importance of the conversation between polit ical engagement and scholarship, which is central to challenging inequality. Reflecting on the history of a movement that contributed to shaping the con ference, a panel on socialist feminism and women's unions featured papers on the Chicago women's liberation movement and the Berkeley Women's Union. panelists (Karen V. Hansen, Margaret Strobel, Ruth Rosen, and Mari Jo