Students in several graduate seminars, who were toddlers or not yet born when I entered the profession, have asked me to talk on several occasions about what the ASA and the Held were like “back then.” Each telling of my memories has resulted in a lively discussion, more questions and requests that I write up what I had to say. I was spurred on to do this by Doris Wilkinson’s invitation to give a paper on “Women in the Liberation of the ASA, 1964–1974” and later to submit it as an article. After my ASA presentation, Janice Drakich and Eleanor Maticka-Tyndale of the Canadian Sociological and Anthropological Association (CSAA) asked me to write them about women’s organizing in the ASA so that they could compare our organizing with that in the CSAA (for an account of the Canadian experience, see Drakich and Maticka-Tyndale; Maticka-Tyndale and Drakich). When she invited me to be part of the Plenary Session, Doris asked me to speak personally and said that I would be the panelist who was a young Euro-American woman in the field between 1964 and 1974. She asked those of us on the panel to speak about the 1964–1974 period because it was not only a time of considerable change for women and minorities in the larger society but in the ASA. To understand changes occurring in this decade we must of course examine, to at least some extent, the situation of women before and after this period.

From a personal perspective, 1964 is also the year I began my graduate studies in sociology. Although 1 participated in the ASA annual meetings each year between 1964 and 1974, presented papers several years, organized and chaired sessions in 1972 and 1973 and was chair-elect of the ASA Section on Sex Roles in 1973–74, I was most active in other professional associations during the period that Doris asked me to talk about. During those years, I was chair of the Eastern Sociological Society’s (ESS) Committee on the Status of Women (1971–72) and a member elected-at-large of the ESS Executive Council (1973–74). In the International Sociological Association (ISA), I was a founding member of Research Committee 32 on Women in Society (1970) and a member of its Coordinating Committee in 1973–74; in the Massachusetts Sociological Association (MSA), I chaired the Program Committee and served on the Executive Council (1971–72); in the Society for the Study of Social Problems (SSSP), I chaired the Division on Poverty and Human Resources (1972–74); and in Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), I co-chaired the lively Social Issues Committee from 1973–74. It was not until shortly after this period that I chaired the ASA Section on Sex Roles, now named Sex and Gender (1974–75), and served as an ASA Council member (1975–78) and as SWS president (1978–80).

I thank Angela Ginorio, Herbert Costner and others of the Northwest Center for Research on Women and the Department of Sociology, University of Washington, for the colleagueship and research support they provided me as a Visiting Scholar; and James Blackwell, Jane Knowles and other Schlesinger Library staff, Patricia Yancey Martin, Bill Martincau, Tahi Mottl, Athena Theodore, Michelle Walczak, Doris Wilkinson and Carolyn Winje for information they provided. I thank Jessie Bernard, Arlene Daniels, Alice Rossi, Pat Sexton and other senior feminist sociologists who, each in their own way, have supported me and so many other once “younger women.” I thank Lynet Dual, Amanda Konradi, Pat Mcrriwcther and other members of graduate seminars for their persistent and insightful questions about women in U.S. sociology and their comments on my responses; and Joan Acker, Evelyn Nakano Glenn and Janet Saltzman Chafetz for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.