AAUW promotes education and equity for all women and girls, lifelong education and positive societal change. |
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What We Do
AAUW's History |
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AAUW -Our History AAUW challenged the 1885 assertion by esteemed Boston physician E. H. Clarke who decried the idea that women benefited from higher education as much as men did. In his book Sex and Education, Clarke wrote, “Identical education is a crime before God and humanity that physiology protests against and experience weeps over.” Other prominent men of the time espoused similar views. Harvard president Charles William Eliot, expressed his sentiments at the 1899 inauguration of Caroline Hazard as president of Wellesley College. With another woman college president, Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr College, in the audience Eliot described the education of women as an experiment, wondering aloud about women’s intellectual capacities and about the ability of women’s colleges to inculcate good manners while providing an education that would not injure women’s “bodily powers and functions.” Eliot evidently overlooked his own lack of the “good manners” he espoused in delivering this message at a woman’s college, at the installation of that institution’s distinguished woman president, and in the presence of another female college president of distinction. AAUW's roots go back to that time when equal educational opportunity for women had few backers. Later, in 1920 AAUW participated in a coalition of women’s organizations to raise $156,000, an astronomical sum in those days, to allow Marie Curie to buy a gram of radium for the research that would lead to her second Nobel Prize. Although she had already performed Nobel Prize winning research on radium with her husband, the French Academy would not fund the continuation of her work because she was a woman. Florida AAUW was founded in 1939. Please see www.florida-aauw.org. Today: AAUW is a nationwide organization with over 100,000 members and 1,300 local branches such as Miami Branch in every state. Our organization is one of the largest groups lobbying for women’s rights in Washington. Our issues include pay equity; Title IX for women’s athletics; protection of women’s reproductive rights; keeping public funds for the public schools; preserving social security; prevention of violence against women and girls; and ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Please see www.aauw.org. |
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| Welcome What We Do AAUW's History |
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