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SPEAKER 1: The Women Historians of the Midwest is a group of professional and nonprofessional women interested in the field of women's history and the role women have played in this area. Gretchen Kreuter is the president.

GRETCHEN KREUTER: Our own membership is made up of women who teach history in colleges and universities or in high schools. Our membership also includes women who are in historical societies and in historical archives and publishing, together with women who have also just an interest in history, or wish to meet other women who are interested in history. Our organization has really two broad aims. On the one hand, we are interested in advancing the status of women in the historical profession, and we're also interested in expanding both public and professional awareness of women's history and the role that women have played in history.

SPEAKER 1: Karen, could you address yourself to the question of the role of women specifically in the profession of history and how their status is in Minnesota?

KAREN: Perhaps the easiest way to look at it would be from a professional teaching point of view. Our group has been interested, for instance, in trying to take some kind of surveys of colleges and universities within the state of Minnesota, for example, or in our broader five-state region to try to get some hard facts as to just what the status of women in the profession of teaching history at that particular level is. We haven't completed that work to the point of being able to give any facts and figures, although we know locally, among the colleges with which we're best acquainted and the University of Minnesota, that the numbers of women historians are very minute.

Out of 25 or 30 total members of history departments for instance in the five Minneapolis and Saint Paul colleges that are in the five-college consortium now, we perhaps have one, or maybe a fraction between one and two women teaching in those departments. So it's a rather poverty-stricken area for women teaching. This is very important because we know from studies coming out by psychologists and others now that women tend to be high achievers and to do well in professions when they have had models in those professions, and especially when they've had women teaching them on an undergraduate level. So to get a bad start like that is undermining the achievement of women all along the line.

SPEAKER 1: What is the effect of the lack of women role models and what do you suppose the cause is? Would you like to speculate on that?

SPEAKER 2: Well, I think there are-- really, the facts would bear us out that quite a few women do major, if you will, in history and have interest in it. They are, as many other women in other disciplines, cut off from holding professional positions. That may be a result of either conscious or unconscious discrimination.

But their absence in history, in the recording of history I think results from the fact that for the most part, our history has been based on the history of diplomacy of politics or of war. And up until just recently, women were simply excluded from all of those fields. We were not the soldiers, we were not the diplomats, and certainly we were not the politicians making the plans for either of those two areas.

So our absence can be explained. But there are other tremendously significant movements that took place in this country and not recording their presence in those movements to me is a mystery. Their role in the Revolutionary Period, their role in the Civil War, the fight for human rights and the abolition movement, et cetera is certainly quite profound, but simply not recorded.

GRETCHEN KREUTER: One of the reasons that the Women's Rights Movement began in the 1840s and '50s was that women who were interested in the cause of abolition found that they couldn't speak before anti-slavery societies because it was not thought proper for women to be on a public platform. And it was really then that they discovered-- they began to discover the kinds of limitations on the social action that they felt moved to take.

SPEAKER 1: In correcting these abuses, I understand you have a project going for the bicentennial year. Yvette, would you like to describe the project?

YVETTE: What it is a proposal for a five or six-part television series that will outline and give visual meaning to the history of women in Minnesota, and more broadly the history of women in the Midwest. We have been going through both documents and textbooks on women in our area and it is really surprising how their absence strikes you. So we are hoping to put on a television series that would be for public consumption, hopefully on commercial television, that will bring to the public's awareness that women were not only present, but they were also involved in social movements and they were involved in what was happening in our region.