Radcliffe Plans Conference

Aided by a $250,000 grant, Radcliffe officials this summer are mapping out the format of a series of conferences beginning this December on women in the next century that outgoing President Matina S. Horner has said will be her last major project in office.

Four separate conferences are in the works as part of the "Women in the 21st Century" series, said Sandy Lee '89, who is helping to plan the conference. The first gathering--slated for December 1 to 3--has been organized already, and four women have agreed to write specially commissioned papers which will serve as the focal points of the conference, Lee said.

Planning for the events began this June after the Revson Foundation donated $250,000 to Radcliffe, the foundation's largest gift ever, Lee said. She said the Revson grant will provide almost all of the funding for the conferences, which will continue into October of 1989.

"Things have really gotten going since we got the money in June," Lee said. "We have made a master list of people to write specific papers for discussions--these include a variety of activists, policymakers and academics."

Horner and Virginia O'Leary, who Horner brought in to coordinate the project, have been overseeing the planning. Neither could be reached for comment.

Horner announced last spring that she would step down from her post as Radcliffe president at the end of the next academic year. Since she became president in 1972, Horner has been credited with establishing Radcliffe as one of the foremost centers for research about women's issues in the country.

Although her main achievement was to help craft the "non-merger merger" agreement that essentially relinquished Radcliffe control over women undergraduates, Horner oversaw the creation of the Bunting Institute--a research center for young women scholars--and the improvement of the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in America.

At the December conference, two papers on women's condition today and where they will be in 30 years will lay the groundwork for the rest of the discussions, according to Lee.

Under the heading "New Demographic Realities", Daphne Spain, a professor at the University of Virginia and a former researcher at the Census Bureau, will present a paper using census data to pinpoint the current situations of women. Suzanne Keller will use that information as a starting point for her paper, which will be a "more projectionary and daring" exploration ofwhere women will be at the beginning of the nextcentury, Lee said.

She added that there will be three othercategories of discussion at the Decemberconference: Economic Issues, Legal andConstitutional Limits and New FeministScholarship. Alice Rivlin, who was a fellow at theInstitute of Politics last spring and was directorof the Congressional Budget Office, will write apaper on the economic issues women face.

Assistant Professor of Law Kathleen M. Sullivanwill present a paper during the legal section ofthe conference.

The three other conferences in the "Women inthe 21st Century" series are planned for March,April and October of 1989, Lee said, adding thatplans for those events have not yet been finalize