SEWSA: An Organizational Memoir: 1994-2005
Richard Taylor, East Carolina University

Academic conferences tend to be evanescent, in spite of all the money, labor, and sacrifice that make them possible. The papers, performances, and other presentations that comprise the heart of them are themselves in a tenuous state between initial conception and polished publication. The conferences provide a respite from the academic routine, an intellectual rush, and the joy of reunion with friends and longstanding debates, a chance to tell stories of survival and loss and challenge and triumph. But last year's conference tends to fade quickly in the hurry of the moment and in the ever-mounting need for next year's shot-in-the-arm.

Recently the Southeastern Women's Studies Association revised its by-laws, a process that entailed some critical examination of the organization's past. Where have we been and where are we headed? A look at the conferences over the past decade boldfaces two trends: one towards a globalized feminism, the other a future orientation—imagining—and in imagining helping to bring about—a future in which women are less imperiled, more free. There is somewhat less emphasis on the past; panels on 18th-or 19th-century women, my own stock in trade, tend to be sparsely attended. The imperative to keep a record of this remarkably strong and durable organization is one to which we have nodded but not really acceded. Further complicating the task is the lack of a complete archival record: we are left with old programs and fading memories.

To begin the process of compiling at least a summary record of SEWSA's quarter-century of service to the profession of Women's Studies, I offer thumbnail sketches of the conferences from 1994, when SEWSA first came to my home institution, East Carolina University, until 2004 as it prepares to return to Greenville, North Carolina for the 2005 conference. The limits of my memory and of my purview as a conference participant and, later, organizational secretary are reflected in the scantiness of detail, and I hope this will represent the beginning of a collaborative effort to preserve an extraordinary record, one that I think has been under-appreciated as a critical part of the history of women's studies. I invite all participants to add their recollections and observations. Of pressing need are memories of the first half of the organization's life, from its first meeting in Atlanta in 1977 to the late 1980s.