In general, organizational and corporate histories are not well-regarded forms of historical writing. They are innately prone to pitfalls, since they are often commissioned by the organizations or corporations about whom they will be written, which can mean that the resulting studies are celebratory rather than critical and analytical. The sponsoring institution may choose an author who is not a professionally-trained historian or even look to an insider who may have knowledge not available to a scholar from outside the organization but who may also find themselves wrestling with bias.

Yet there are situations in which organizational histories can be useful to historians, where they provide an available and useful synopsis of how the organization or corporation changed over time. The writers of these histories may have utilized primary sources that are not accessible to the general public, and their bibliographic trails can provide jumping-off points for further scholarship. During the COVID-19 pandemic, as the 50th anniversary of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) approached, I found myself in one of these situations. When I was invited to contribute to AWM’s massive commemorative volume [6], I realized that I wanted to look at the society’s history against the backdrop of other associations for women in science, technology, engineering, and medicine (STEM) [1]. It was not possible to travel around and look at physical archives, so I dug through websites, collected digitized primary sources when I could, and placed a few targeted Amazon orders. I finished the project thinking that it would be fantastic for a graduate student to do a larger version the “right” way, with actual legwork, but I also think I found evidence that sheds light on AWM’s similarities to other major professional societies for women in STEM:

• Graduate Women in Science (GWIS, established in 1921);
• the Society of Woman Geographers (SWG, established in 1925);
• the Society of Women Engineers (SWE, established in 1950);
• Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS, established in 1971);
• the Association for Women in Science (AWIS, established in 1971);
• the Association for Women Geoscientists (AWG, established in 1977); and
• the Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN, established in 2002).

For instance, the need for camaraderie while navigating male spaces was a key motivation for each group’s founders. Thus, Graduate Women in Science originated as a sorority house and honor society at Cornell University in 1921 before members shifted their focus to securing funding for graduate students [8; 11; 19, vol. 1, pp. 300–301]. In a retrospective, Margaret Mead noted that the Society of Woman Geographers came together because women were banned from New York City’s Explorers Club, and she described how SWG continued to offer a good place for socializing with other professionals [10]. In the late 1960s, the women who would establish AWM met when they were comparing notes about discrimination and their lack of opportunities [7]. Even as late as 2002, the Earth Science Women’s Network came about because women wanted to communicate with each other and build mentoring relationships [2].

The new organizations then engaged in a second common characteristic, collective action. For example, in 1971 AWM encouraged members to raise complaints about unequal treatment in their departments, while the Association for Women in Science went so far as to sue the National Institutes of Health to force it to commit to appointing more women to grant-review committees [4; 12]. In 1972 the Society of Women Engineers joined the Federation of Organizations of Professional Women to discuss employment equity; leaders also decided to support the Equal Rights Amendment, although backlash from some members led the Society to draw back from issuing public statements and to concentrate their efforts for the rest of the 1970s and 1980s on conducting surveys that gathered valuable data about the status of women in engineering professions [17].

Third, leaders and members intentionally set out to create professional organizations that would be afforded recognition and legitimacy by existing scientific societies. In addition to graduate training, historians of science and technology typically identify three markers of professionalization: establishing an academic association, generating publications, and holding conferences. Indeed, these societies generally undertook steps toward official incorporation, such as writing a constitution and by-laws, fairly quickly, although completing the bureaucratic processes may have stretched over several years. Conferences and publications usually came together more rapidly. Largely through the efforts of Mary Gray, AWM sent out advertisements in February 1971 and had a printed newsletter up and running in May [13]. The Society of Women Engineers also began a newsletter in its first year [21]. Sociologists for Women in Society needed twelve months to start their newsletter; by 16 years of existence they had established a formal academic journal, 1987’s Gender & Society [16; 18].

Similarly, most professional organizations for women in STEM began holding formal conferences nearly immediately. An especially interesting story about this marker of professionalism comes from the Society of Women Engineers. During a conference at Drexel University in 1949, the leaders of several small groups of undergraduate and graduate women engineering students agreed to combine their efforts into what would become SWE. The next year, about 50 women formally established SWE during a two-day camp for engineers at Cooper Union that they completely organized themselves—not only did they conduct all of the business, they also took care of all of the logistics, even cooking and serving the meals. For their first official annual meeting in 1951, they outsourced the more mundane tasks [17].

A final shared attribute, attention to the choice of prepositions, was especially important for the three professional societies formed in 1971. From its beginning, Sociologists for Women in Society intentionally chose the word “for” to welcome men as well as women. “In Society” was also significant phrasing, as the group’s organizational aims addressed both the profession of sociology (“Sociologists for Women”) and wider society (“Women in Society”) [16; 18]. (See also [5] for a scholarly analysis of the choice of “in” during this time period.) AWM started out as “Association of Women in Mathematics”, but male allies provided essential encouragement and public endorsement of the society’s goals even before AWM was officially formed. By September 1971, the organization had changed its name from “Association of Women” to “Association for Women,” again to signal that men were welcome to join the endeavor of promoting women in mathematics [7]. The Association for Women in Science appears not to have done much navel-gazing over its name, but the development of the Association of Women Geoscientists from a local group in the San Francisco area in 1977 to a national organization in 1981 again involved a name change from the preliminary “Association of Women Geoscientists” to the final “Association for Women Geoscientists” [3; 4; 20]. Perhaps too much can be made of a name, but it is striking that none of these societies wanted to be women-only. Rather, they associated institutional and professional strength with partnership and collaboration.

As I mentioned above, my paper was published in a doorstop of a book that itself can be seen as an example of an organizational history [6]. Its 1146 pages contain 94 chapters organized into 17 parts. The vast majority of the chapters are reminiscences by AWM members; these personal accounts not only provide information about their authors’ lives, careers, and roles in AWM, but also, when read as a whole, construct an overlapping narrative of AWM’s five decades and highlight other themes that appear in histories of women in STEM, such as two-body problems, employment discrimination, and the formation of intellectual communities. Chapters that may be of particular interest to Canadian mathematicians include an account of the founding of AWM from the point of view of the New Left Mathematicians Action Group, which is one of the final publications of Chandler Davis, who was a member of both CMS and CSHPM [9]. Other memoirs come from Maria M. Klawe—who earned a PhD in mathematics at the University of Alberta and a PhD in computer science at the University of Toronto, then became known for recruiting women to the institutions she served—and Barbara Lee Keyfitz—who was mentored at the University of Toronto by Davis and others, and who was simultaneously selected as director of the Fields Institute and the 17th president of AWM [14; 15]. Although various constraints on the project, including the pandemic, precluded the deep archival dive that I think my own topic deserves, I was still able to use a historian’s skills to draw conclusions from the available evidence and to identify significant common factors in the development of these societies. The volume as a whole will be valuable reading for anyone interested in the history of North American women in mathematics for decades to come.

References

[1] Ackerberg-Hastings, Amy. (2022) AWM in Context: Comparing the Histories of Professional Societies for Women in STEM. In Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM, edited by Janet L. Beery, Sarah J. Greenwald, and Cathy Kessel, 975–985. Vol. 28, Association for Women in Mathematics Series. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

[2] Adams, Amanda S., Allison L. Steiner, and Christine Wiedinmyer. (2016) The Earth Science Women’s Network (ESWN): Community-Driven Mentoring for Women in the Atmospheric Sciences. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 97(3), 345–354. https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00040.1.

[3] Association for Women Geoscientists. (2020) About AWG. http://www.awg.org/about.

[4] Association for Women in Science. (2019) AWIS History. https://www.awis.org/about-awis/awis-history/.

[5] Barany, Michael J. (2022) Mathematical Institutions and the “In” of the Association for Women in Mathematics. In Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM, edited by Janet L. Beery, Sarah J. Greenwald, and Cathy Kessel, 325–341. Vol. 28, Association for Women in Mathematics Series. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

[6] Beery, Janet L., Sarah J. Greenwald, and Cathy Kessel, eds. (2022) Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM. Vol. 28, Association for Women in Mathematics Series. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

[7] Blum, Lenore. (1991) A Brief History of the Association for Women in Mathematics: The Presidents’ Perspectives. Notices of the American Mathematical Society 38(7), 738–754. https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/199109/199109FullIssue.pdf.

[8] Braselmann, Sylvia. (2003) Reluctant Rebels: Women Scientists Organizing. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 23(1), 6–9.

[9] Davis, Chandler. (2022) Mathematicians Action Group and the Founding of AWM. In Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM, edited by Janet L. Beery, Sarah J. Greenwald, and Cathy Kessel, 25–30. Vol. 28, Association for Women in Mathematics Series. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

[10] Eppinga, Jane. (2009) They Made Their Mark: An Illustrated History of the Society of Woman Geographers. Guilford, CT: The Globe Pequot Press.

[11] Graduate Women in Science. (2018) GWIS History. https://www.gwis.org/page/history_2018.

[12] Gray, Mary, ed. (2017) Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter 1–2 (1971–1972). AWM Newsletter Archive. https://www.drivehq.com/folder/p8755087.aspx.

[13] Greenwald, Sarah. (2016) Interview with Mary Gray. AWM Newsletter 46(5), 8–16. https://www.drivehq.com/folder/p8755087/14895458733.aspx.

[14] Keyfitz, Barbara Lee. (2022) Interesting Times: Reflections of AWM’s Seventeenth President. In Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM, edited by Janet L. Beery, Sarah J. Greenwald, and Cathy Kessel, 721–737. Vol. 28, Association for Women in Mathematics Series. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

[15] Klawe, Maria M. (2022) Supporting Women in Mathematics and Computer Science. In Fifty Years of Women in Mathematics: Reminiscences, History, and Visions for the Future of AWM, edited by Janet L. Beery, Sarah J. Greenwald, and Cathy Kessel, 283–293. Vol. 28, Association for Women in Mathematics Series. Cham, Switzerland: Springer.

[16] Laube, Heather, and Beth B. Hess. (2001) The Founding of SWS. Sociologists for Women in Society. https://socwomen.org/about/history-of-sws/the-founding-of-sws/.

[17] Perusek, Anne M., and Troy Eller English, eds. (2015) We Built This: A Look at the Society of Women Engineers’ First 65 Years. Chicago: Society of Women Engineers.

[18] Roby, Pamela Ann. (2009) The Women’s 1969 Sociology Caucus, Sociologists for Women in Society and the ASA: A Forty Year Retrospective of Women on the Move. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, San Francisco, 8 August 2009. https://socwomen.org/about/history-of-sws/the-women/.

[19] Rossiter, Margaret. (1982–2012) Women Scientists in America. 3 vol. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

[20] Schneider, Blair, Lisa M. Tranel, and Mackenzie Cremeans. (2018) The Association for Women Geoscientists: Forty years of successes, struggles, and sisterhood. In Women in Geology: Who Are We, Where Have We Come From, and Where Are We Going? edited by B. A. Johnson, 105–120. Geological Society of America Memoir 214. Boulder, CO: Geological Society of America.

[21] SWE Blog. (2020) Celebrating 70 Years of SWE! All Together. https://alltogether.swe.org/2020/05/celebrating-70-years-of-swe/.

Amy Ackerberg-Hastings finally got around to joining AWM shortly after publishing the chapter discussed in this column. She co-edits “CSHPM Notes” with Hardy Grant, co-edits MAA Convergence with Janet Heine Barnett, and researches the histories of mathematics education, mathematical instruments, and women in science and mathematics.

Email the author: aackerbe@verizon.net

Keywords: women in mathematics; history of mathematics in Canada; history of mathematics in the United States