International Programming

The NWSA took several important steps in international programming at its First Convention. Those participating in sessions included women from Argentina, Britain, Ghana, Holland, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Senegal, and Zanzibar. Three national leaders of the All China Women\u27s Federation of the People\u27s Republic of China spent a day touring the Convention. But more important than the mere presence of foreign visitors were the information and issues generated by an international perspective. In the first place, the Convention provided a forum for exchange of information. International sessions covered such topics as the educational needs of immigrant women in capitalist systems; women writers of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; French and West German feminism; multinational corporations and Third World women workers; and teaching about Third World women

Consciousness-Raising at the NWSA Convention: An Overview

In order to add a personal component to the response to racism, this year\u27s Convention included consciousness-raising groups, which, however, proved controversial: some women disputed their composition; some felt they were too elementary; some welcomed them as a way of dealing in small groups with the Convention as a whole—including, but not limited to, the issue of racism. The Northeast region assumed the responsibility for organizing the CR groups for the Convention. CR facilitators and the structure of the groups came out of the Northeast regional conference held earlier in the spring. At that time, women of color from the Boston area who were involved in CR decided that groups for the National Convention should be segregated. They believed that white women must work through their racism; women of color should not have to bear that burden and responsibility

NWSA News and Views

It\u27s been a little more than a year now that I\u27ve been reporting on the Association in these columns, a little more than two years since there has been a National Women\u27s Studies Association to report on. When friends and supporters ask, How is it going?\u27 I\u27ve been forced to give a rather cryptic-seeming reply: It\u27s going steadily better, so even more is expected; but we hardly have resources to meet the original expectation, so sometimes it feels like it\u27s going worse. Often the next question from members has been, When are we going to have the Convention?\u27 A Convention, so it seems, would indicate NWSA s progress in establishing itself as a functioning organization. NWSA is moving toward the milestone that the first Convention represents. There is every reason to believe that it will have been worth waiting for, and every reason to expect that the second and third Conventions will follow even more smoothly for groundwork laid this year