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For several years the Women’s Caucus met at EAAS events
and, each time, a new crowd of people gathered,
discussed—sometimes heatedly—issues related to women’s
and gender studies, the political and economic situation
of women’s and gender studies in the various EAAS member
states, and how the Women’s Caucus could work. At most
meetings, we easily agreed that networking and the
mutual exchange of ideas would be a wonderful
undertaking. However, we also disappointedly agreed that
hardly anyone could spare the time to start either a
members’ list or even a separate website. While the
meetings were always full of enthusiasm and new ideas,
the aftermaths of such gatherings proved disillusioning
because every-day academic life made it difficult to
maintain connections.
I recall our first official “meeting” (shoptalk) in
Cyprus in 2006 with a pretty large number of people
engaging in discussion, but I also recall another
meeting in Dublin in 2010, where we were a last-minute
addendum to the program, and the only room left was what
one participant called a broom closet. But perhaps
because of the narrowness of the room and the ensuing
closeness we felt then, first stirrings emerged, and we
at last started a list and received a promise from the
EAAS webmaster to post anything we sent him. In Dublin,
Justine Tally from the University of La Laguna in Spain
and I were elected the first Steering Committee members,
and we managed to contact the organizers of the 2012
Izmir conference (Meldan Tanrisal and Tanfer Emin Tunc)
for a preferred slot on Monday morning. The Izmir
meeting proved to be a turning point.
In Izmir, a relatively large number of people from
Turkey and elsewhere gathered, among them Meldan
Tanrisal, then Vice President of EAAS, and Tanfer Emin
Tunc, Vice President of the American Studies Association
of Turkey. Justine and I were happy to welcome them as
members of an enlarged Steering Committee, and together
we set up a new list on the EAAS website and
invited/sponsored Lisa Hayes, who performed a one-woman
show—“Finding the Light”—on behalf of the Women’s Caucus
at the 2014 Hague conference. This conference made it
clear to us that we needed to be in touch more than just
biennially, so we reorganized the Steering Committee to
include four members. In addition to Tanfer, we gained
the new, vigorous, and enthusiastic voices of Annessa
Ann Babic from New York, Ingrid Gessner from Germany,
and Rubén Cenamor from Spain. It is because of their
hard work that the Women’s Caucus, renamed the Women’s
Network, was able to hold its first symposium in 2015 in
Lublin, Poland on “The State of the Nation: American
Women in the Twenty-First Century.” The Steering
Committee hopes to host this platform for the discussion
of women’s and gender issues biennially, in different
locations throughout Europe, to alternate with the EAAS
Conference.
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