The Eighth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women: A Report

Conference Report The Eighth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women: A Report Lynn Weiner Seventeen years ago the First Berkshire Conference on the History of Women was held at Douglass CoUege at Rutgers University. Since then the conference has been held every two years or so at various women's colleges in the Eastern U.S.; each succeeding conference has offered more sessions to larger audiences. This last June the conference returned to Douglass for its eighth meeting. For many of us in the field of women's history the "Berks" has provided a sense of continuity and place within the profession over time. There we meet old and new friends, debate and discuss our work, hear the latest scholarship, and return home invigorated by the support and stimulation that only this conference provides. The Eighth Berkshire Conference aeated the rich inteUectual and social environment we have come to exped from this gathering. Over 2,500 scholars from some 15 nations crowded onto the Douglass campus, sleeping in dormitories, eating in cafeterias, and withstanding the traditional Berks quirky weather—this time thunderstorms and high humidity—with good humor. The theme of the conference was "Crossing Boundaries in Feminist History," and the keynote address by Bernice Johnson Reagon (curator in the Division of Community Life at the Museum of American History and founder of the musical group "Sweet Honey in the Rock") addressed the history of African-American women and American radicalism in a powerful talk laced with song and personal anecdotes. There were over 150 sessions and spedal panels presenting some 650 scholars as weU as ongoing displays of photographs, film and videotape demonstrations, and book exhibits. Two senior historians of women—Gerda Lerner and Anne Firor Scott—were honored at special receptions. A unique feature of the Berkshire Conference is its interdisciplinary nature. In addition to historians there were anthropologists, political scientists , sociologists, philosophers, Uterary scholars, archivists, Ubrarians, writers, high school teachers, publishers, and hundreds of graduate students brought together by a common interest in the history of women. Graduate students held their own meetings to organize and network, including one weU-attended session sponsored by the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession. My own impression was that more women of color were in attendance than previously. © 1990 Journal of Women's History, Vol 2 No. 2 (Fall) 1990 Lynn Weiner 175 There were sessions—many of them so crowded that people spiUed out into the haUs—on gender and the welfare state, sexuatity, lesbianism, health, education, feminism and suffrage, historical method and theory, biography and autobiography, race, class, culture, and work. Many offered comparative or interdisdptinary perspectives that aossed boundaries in myriad ways. There was a session on the history of women in medieval South India, another on revolution and gender reform in the USSR and China, stiU another on Early Modern England and the Ottoman Empire and yet another on women, labor, and sodety in Southern Africa. Kate MiUet, Catherine Stimpson, and Alix Kates Shulman spoke on sexual poUtics to a standing-room only audience one evening; other nights were fiUed with receptions, meetings, and slide shows. There were numerous roundtable sessions on topics such as women's studies, secondary school curriculum, teaching methodology, lesbianism, Southern women's history, Middle Eastern history, archives, and rural women. My own current research topic—the history of motherhood—received ample attention. At the eartiest Berkshire Conferences there was Uttle or no attention to paid to motherhood as a subjed of scholarly inquiry. But more recently motherhood has become the focus of discussion and research among many historians. Last June, for example, the conference on Feminism and Legal Theory held at the University of Wisconsin conducted an examination of motherhood that induded discussions of welfare, employment, the state's interest in potential Ufe, and other topics. In Odober of 1990, the Women's Studies Department at SUNY at Binghamton wiU sponsor the conference "Contested Terrains: The Construction of Mothering." Topics wiU include the cultural representation of mothering in film and fiction, mothering and cultures of resistance, and much more. At the Berkshire Conference the new scholarship on motherhood was weU represented. Clarissa Atkinson and Gerda Lerner, for example...