Yellowed pages, virtual realities: publication in women in German's past, present, and future.(Women in German Yearbook)

The first two presidents of WiG reflect on the history of the organization and the Yearbook, take stock of the present, and speculate about the future. WiG began as a supportive community for feminist Germanists isolated in their departments from like-minded scholars. The Yearbook has come to embody the ethos of the organization in certain ways: feminist process and academic rigor; scholarly and creative writing side by side. Despite the high quality and rich variety of the contributions, the Yearbook has not yet found a substantial readership beyond WiG itself. The authors explore the promises and perils of e-publication as the likely future of the Yearbook. (JB and JC)

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Jeanette: The editors' invitation to write a piece for this twentieth volume of the WiG Yearbook was an opportunity to reflect on where we began and how far we've come, as well as to project some ideas for the future. Women in German as an organization goes back to 1974. Our first annual conference took place in 1976 and the first volume of the Yearbook was published in 1985. (1) Back then, the camera-ready copy was prepared on typewriters. Today it appears that journals published as bound volumes may soon go the way of carbon copies and mimeographed newsletters. It is important for WiG to engage in reflection and planning not only to keep pace with change, but also to become a more vital force in the profession. What does the future hold for our organization and for the Yearbook? How, to use a clich6 from strategic planning, can we take WiG to "the next level"? The climate for feminism, higher education in general, and German Studies is much different than twenty years ago.

How the Yearbook Got Legs

Jeannine: The Yearbook grew out of a need to find venues for feminist publications, and it emerged at a time when some academic feminist groups were experiencing a crisis in growth and development. American feminism had survived a struggle over separatism and other issues that divided or mortally wounded many feminist collectives and coalitions. Academic feminists were trying to decide if and how much they had sold out to the establishment. Amazingly enough, the Coalition of Women in German survived the troubled waters of early feminism, partially because of long-term and long-distance friendships nurtured by the organization and its annual conference. But it survived as well because the members, isolated in small, beleaguered German departments strewn across America, needed WiG to recharge and reconnect. Women who had edited free feminist circulars and newspapers found themselves finished with graduate school and landing in the academy. But what would their next feminist writings look like? We knew we could produce a lively, important, witty newsletter. We knew we could create a collaborative, spontaneous hilarious artwork known as the WiG Cabaret. Could we carry that verve and vitality into different forms?

Jeanette: What we began with was mostly enthusiasm and a sense of urgency: where were we going to publish our work if we didn't have our own journal? The first issues of the Yearbook were modeled in part on the volumes produced every year by the GDR Symposium in Conway, NH. Published by the University Press of America, each volume contained a selection of papers from the previous year's symposium. WiG, we thought, could pull together papers from our annual sessions at AATG, MLA, and, of course, the WiG conference. However, we quickly saw the need to cast a wider net and in fact to solicit contributions from feminist scholars who probably wouldn't have sent their work to WiG at the time.

Jeannine: We knew how great the papers were in the WiG sessions at the various conferences--I am thinking about the double session on Romantic women at the MLA in 1985, for example--and we wanted to capture this energy to show what the organization's members were really doing. Another source of inspiration was the first conference of Frauen in der Literaturwissenschaft (Women in Literary Scholarship) in Hamburg in 1983, organized primarily by Inge Stephan and Sigrid Weigel. Several of us attended that conference and presented papers there. Even though the West German feminists had organized much later than we, and their group was much smaller and localized, they were preparing a conference volume right then and there. WiG had to get moving! Their first conference volume, Feministische Literaturwissenschaft: Dokumentation der Tagung in Hamburg im Mai 1983 (Feminist Literary Scholarship: A Documentation of the Conference in ...