A History of the Women’s Network of the Classical Association of Canada

by Lisa Trentin on behalf of The WN executive (Lisa Trentin, Allison Surtees, and Kathryn Simonsen)

The Women’s Network (WN), an affiliate of the Classical Association of Canada (CAC), was founded at the annual meeting of the CAC in Victoria, British Columbia in May of 1990. The first official meeting of the WN was held the following year in Toronto, Ontario and the first WN-sponsored panel was held in 1992 in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. In the first decade of our existence, the WN was a small and informal grouping of women, with no official constitution or executive; this would change at the turn of the new millennium when interest and membership in the group increased and the first Secretary, Paul Swarney (York University), volunteered for the position and drafted the WN’s constitution (2002). A formal executive committee of three members was established by 2007, with two new members added in 2016, and a redrafting of the original constitution forthcoming in 2017.

Although the WN began life as a space devoted almost exclusively to the needs of women, over the past twenty-six years the WN has grown to become a steadfast beacon of support for all scholars of Classics in Canada, regardless of gender or sexual identity. We provide a forum for general discussion about academic life and its challenges, and encourage research in the areas of women, sexuality, and gender studies in the ancient world. The WN has no membership qualifications or dues and is open to all members of the CAC. The most recent annual meeting (2016, Laval) included 35 members representing the diversity of our discipline: graduate students, early career academics, and adjunct, tenured, and retired faculty.

The WN is run by an executive committee of three members (currently: Lisa Trentin, University of Toronto Mississauga, President; Allison Surtees, University of Winnipeg, Vice-President; Kathryn Simonsen, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Secretary) and just recently added a Communications Officer (Kelly Olson, University of Western Ontario) and a Graduate Student Representative (Rowan Ash, University of Western Ontario). Each executive member serves for two years, in each position of secretary, vice-president, and president, and every two years a new member is selected by the executive and approved by the membership. The executive works to promote the network within the CAC and the wider international Classics community. We hold a general meeting and lunch during the CAC annual conference to encourage networking and mentoring among scholars, to hear concerns of the membership, and to address business arising over the course of the year.

The WN is also responsible for mounting topical panels at the CAC meetings. The first WN-sponsored panel was held in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island in 1992 on the topic of ‘Myths of Women / Women in Myth’ and was chaired by Alison Keith (University of Toronto), one of the WN’s founding mothers. For a quarter of a century we have offered panels (often with 2–3 sessions, and as many as 5) on a wide range of topics, attracting the attention of international scholars from Europe, the UK, and the USA. Some of our panels have included: ‘Women and Law in the Greek World’ (1991, Kingston), ‘Women in Myth’ (1998, Ottawa), ‘Women’s Networks in the Ancient World’ (2002, Vancouver), ‘Women and Memory’ (2007, St. John’s), ‘Women and the Reception of the Classical World’ (2012, London), and, most recently, ‘Women in Conflict’ (2016, Laval). One of our recent panels on ‘Gender B(l)ending in Greek and Roman Culture and Society’ (2015, Toronto) is currently being reworked into an edited volume by Allison Surtees and Jennifer Dyer (Memorial University of Newfoundland), a Cultural Studies scholar working in gender/queer/trans theory. This interdisciplinary collaboration brings Classics and the work of the WN to a broader academic community.

Additionally, the WN works closely with the CAC’s Equity Committee: from 2014–2016 the WN and the EC developed and distributed a survey to obtain data on equity in Classics across Canada. This survey is particularly important for the WN in assessing the positions women hold in the discipline across the country. The results of this survey were made available to CAC members in late July of this year revealing, unsurprisingly, fewer female tenured and tenure-track faculty, compared to male faculty, and more full and part-time limited-term female faculty than male. The executive of the WN will be analyzing this data further in the coming year and will be working with other women’s organizations globally to jointly examine survey data for international trends in women’s employment. The WN is dedicated to shaping a more equitable working environment for all members of our discipline.

The WN has also been developing a more active online profile: we have recently updated our website and added Facebook and Twitter (@wn_cac) pages to connect with our membership and others in the online Classics community. Give us a ‘like’ and follow us for current news and events!

Beyond our own organization, the WN has developed an increasingly strong international presence, collaborating with other organizations of similar interest. The WN has always had a close association and shared membership with the Women’s Classical Caucus (WCC), an affiliate of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), USA. Members of our executive have served on the steering committee of the WCC (e.g. Allison Glazebrook, WN Past President, 2009–2011), and, recently, Judith Fletcher (WN Past President, 2013–2015) served as guest editor of the Fall 2013 issue of Cloelia, contributing a provocative piece on bullying in the academic workplace. Writing from a place of personal experience, Judy drew attention to the ways in which harassment affects women in academia, offering suggestions about how to deal with it, and resources to empower women to stand up against bullying.

Members of the current WN executive are also actively engaged with our sister organizations globally, including organizing panels focusing on issues that are of fundamental concern to the WN. Allison Surtees organized a panel on ‘Revealing Gendered Violence in the Academy’ for Feminism and Classics VII (May 2016, Seattle). This panel addressed a number of aspects, starting with a working definition of violence and the types of violence (emotional, physical, and sexual) affecting women at all levels of academia, followed by the challenges of teaching sexually violent content to students who have experienced such violence in their own lives, followed by an analysis of ‘lad culture’ in the UK, based on data collected from surveys which revealed the high numbers of instances of male-perpetrated sexual violence, and concluding with a discussion about the ways of addressing these issues. Lisa Trentin has organized a roundtable session for the next SCS Annual Meeting (2017, Toronto), aiming to highlight trans-national career challenges facing women in the academy. Using survey data collected from multiple countries, discussion will focus on issues of pay inequity, service expectations for women, and student evaluations of female instructors. Kathryn Simonsen has proposed a panel for the upcoming CAMWS Annual Meeting (2017, Kitchener) focusing on biases in hiring, problems in gender equity for graduate students, and the evaluation of women’s scholarship. All of these panels include representatives from the Women’s Classical Caucus (USA), the Women’s Classical Committee (UK), and the Australasian Women in Ancient World Studies (Australia & New Zealand). Further collaborations with these organizations are sure to follow.

The Women’s Network is an active body within Canada and internationally, and greatly contributes to the promotion of Classics both here and abroad. We are working towards a future where women’s voices are heard, and, moreover, where all marginalized individuals, regardless of gender or sexual identity, can feel welcome.