From the Executive Board 

It’s been a busy time for Executive Board members of SSWP, Inc. Here are the highlights: 

We’re incorporated! Executive Board members reviewed and approved Articles of Incorporation, and the Society for the Study of Women Philosophers, Inc. is now incorporated in the State of Ohio. We’re a tax-exempt non-profit organization! SSWP, Inc. has filed a nearly 40-page IRS document to apply for non-profit, tax-exempt status, and recently received official IRS approval of that status. I have also filed our first tax return! 

We have a Bank Account! We have opened an SSWP, Inc. bank account for the purpose of receiving dues, paying SSWP expenses, and (in the hopefully not-too-distant-future) disbursing token “travel scholarships” to enable a Graduate Student to present a peer-reviewed paper at an SSWP session. For the first year at least, the account is free for tax-exempt non-profits! 

We’ve got mail! sswpdues@gmail.com Our email account takes inquiries about dues, confirms of receipt of dues, issues new member passwords (for accessing members-only pages of the website), notifies members w when premiums (Busted!! DVDs/photo album) are mailed. 

We’ve submitted a Grant Application! On behalf of SSWP, I have applied to the APA for a small grant to enable SSWP to cover the production costs of volumes 2 and 3 of the Busted!! DVD series. Many thanks to Dorothy Rogers for her assistance with that grant proposal and special thanks to Claudia Card, past president of the APA Central Division and founding member of SWIP for her enthusiastic letter of support to the APA for our project. 

We were represented at the APA conference on Diversity in Dayton Ohio! I presented a paper about how SSWP’s Busted!! Projects (the DVD series and the coffee-table photo album) can be used as supplementary instructional tools that can encourage undergraduate women to see themselves as future professional philosophers. The APA is rightly concerned about the paucity of women in the profession.

Welcome to new member Laura Newhart, Chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond, Kentucky. Laura joined SSWP at that meeting and took as her gift a copy of the Busted!! Photo Album. 

APA BLog Rethinking the Canon: We’ve furthered our goal of promoting the history of women philosophers with an APA blog: If you’re an APA member, do consider joining the blog Rethinking the Canon which I will be moderating as SSWP Executive Director.

 www.apaonline.org/group/rethinkingcanon

This is yet another way to bring SSWP to the attention of APA members in discussions about which philosophers (think: women) belong in the Canon.

We’re expanding our horizons: At the APA Diversity Conference I roomed with Kate Lindeman who runs the Women-Philosophers website www.women-philosophers.com and has been helping me understand some tricks of the trade for having search engines find our website. Kate is a very active Emerita. There is very significant overlap between the goals served by her website and the goals of SSWP. Our new website will have many links to hers. Rather than risk having her wonderful site languish in the event of her ill health, we are discussing the eventual merging of the two sites. 

We’ve almost got a new website: I have been working hard, but with limited success to launch our new website: 

http://www.societyforthestudyofwomenphilosophers.org

The tremendous amount of work this involves has given me new respect for the yeoman efforts of Dinesh and Sabrina to maintain the old website. More on this in our next newsletter. 

We’re also on Facebook: With help from Dorothy Rogers, SSWP has its own FACEBOOK page. Some photos are posted there of the presentation I did at the World Congress of Philosophy in Greece during August. But the page needs tweaking so that material from SSWP members’ personal FB pages don’t show up there. “Like” us anyway! 

We were represented at the World Congress of Philosophy: In addition to presenting a paper "Diotima of Mantinea: Philosophy’s First Hysterectomy?" I lobbied widely for SSWP. This had several immediate results: 

>Colleague Heisook Kim of Ewa Woman’s University in Seoul, Korea put me in touch with Seseoria Kim, a Confucian Feminist from Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul, who kindly supplied names and dates of some women philosophers in the Confucian and Daoist traditions during late antiquity through the early modern period. Some of those individuals will be last-minute additions to the Busted!! DVD series. 

>Ruth Hagengruber of University of Paderborn in Germany is the editor of Emilie du Châtelet between Leibniz and Newton, Springer (2012). Ruth became a new member of SSWP at the World Congress of Philosophy and took as her premium the Busted!! Photo Album. Visit her Facebook page Women Philosophers and Scientists, https://www.facebook.com/history.women.philosophers. 

>I met with half a dozen officers of IaPh, the International Association of Women Philosophers www.women-philosophy.org. We discussed the possible future collaboration or sponsorship of a joint meeting of IaPh/SSWP in Europe. At our annual business meeting I will be discussing the possibilities with our Executive Board. Such collaboration would greatly increase the exposure of SSWP in Europe. 

>We have an opportunity for a member to publish: I’ve been invited by Rowman & Littlefield to update SSWP member Catherine Villanueva Gardner’s Historical Dictionary of Feminist Philosophy. I can’t undertake this project myself, and the publishers have asked me to solicit interest from SSWP members. If this is a project you might want to undertake, let me know and I’ll pass your name along to the editor in charge of this important and worthwhile project. 

Whew!! What a BUSY time it’s been. And although much remains to be done, some significant strides have been taken. But we need Executive Board members to volunteer to help keep things moving ahead. Hope to see EVERYONE at the next SSWP meeting in Baltimore! 

-Mary Ellen Waithe, SSWP Board Member 

Society for the Study of Women Philosophers

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