Women\u27s Studies International at Copenhagen: From Idea to Network

Almost a year before the United Nations\u27 Mid-Decade Conference on Women was held in Copenhagen during the summer of 1980, Mariam Chamberlain of The Ford Foundation, Amy Swerdlow, Myra Dinnerstein, and I began informal discussions about holding meetings of women\u27s studies practitioners there . When we learned that an NGO (NonGovernmental Organizations) Forum would be organized, I wrote to sixty women\u27s studies practitioners outside the United States, informing them of the badly-publicized NGO Forum itself, and inviting them to contribute to the planning of women\u27s studies seminars. Eventually, The Feminist Press, the U.S. National Women\u27s Studies Association, the Simone de Beauvoir Institute of Concordia University in Montreal, and the S.N.D.T. Women\u27s University in Bombay, India, agreed to act as sponsors of women\u27s studies sessions, and the May issue of the U.S. Women\u27s Studies Newsletter further spread the word. From the beginning, the idea of what might be done in Copenhagen was both modest and practical: to make use of an extended occasion during which an international group might be able to meet to talk about women\u27s studies. Planners assumed also that it would be useful to share resource materials, and, of course, to include a formal registry for participants so that the dialogue might continue afterwards