2. History of the Association
of Faculty Women                   Madison
A Participant's View
by Ruth Bleier
In the summer of 1970 there was a flurry of quiet official activity on the
University of Wisconsin-Madison campus regarding the status of its women
without, however, our knowledge or participation. The main difference be-
tween that initial period and the subsequent several years was that the ac-
tivity remained no longer quiet nor did it suffer from the absence of women
participating in determining the course of their lives and work in the univer-
sity. 1
In July of 1970 a team from the Chicago Civil Rights Office of the
Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) came to Madison to in-
vestigate charges of discrimination against women in employment policies
and
practices by the University of Wisconsin. The complaints were filed by the
Women's Equity Action League (WEAL) and were based in part on a study
prepared in the spring of 1970 by the Women's Research Group, a small
group of women - students, faculty and faculty wives. Their study vividly
described the attitudes and the practices that result in the channeling of
wom-
en into certain kinds of professions and jobs, low paying and low ranking,
along with their exclusion from others, not the least striking example of
which
is academia itself.
Despite the fact that those most concerned, the women themselves, were
not interviewed in July, the HEW team confirmed the existence of a pattern
of discrimination and underutilization of women as well as minority group
members. Their report noted that the university had developed a written
affirmative action compliance program in May of 1970 but that it was inade-
quate, lacking definite procedures for implementation of stated policies
as
well as projections of specific employment and promotion goals and target
data for achieving them.
By the beginning of the fall semester word of these furtive happenings
reached some of the women on the campus and in October Kay Clarenbach
called a lunch meeting of all the women she knew to discuss the situation.
The most significant discovery the fifty of us present made was that few
of us
knew each other and that few of us knew anything about how the university
runs. Thus, in November we formed an Association of Faculty Women (AFW)
and it soon included more than one hundred members at all ranks and from
more than forty departments. Despite our name (chosen for convenience and
out of some ignorance at that time about the numbers and significance of
non-faculty academic ranks, especially for women) we have always been an
organization counting among its most active members at least as many
women with non-tenure track as with tenure track appointments.
In preparation for the January return of HEW, we (AFW) asked women to
submit descriptions of discriminatory treatment. About twenty-two did and


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