Susan: You are assuming the Presidency of CCLOW this month. What do you hope the organization will accomplish this year?

Martha: My main concern as the incoming president of CCLOW is that governmental funding cuts might cause us to lose the exciting momentum achieved to date. CCLOW has a number of important projects in the planning stage. Such as a Strategies Colloquium on Women's Education and training in Canada.

The organizational review presently in the planning stage could become a model of how voluntary organizations can build in evaluation procedures to enhance effectiveness and maintain organizational integrity despite constant changes in leadership.

It will be a shame if short sighted restraints cause CCLOW to limit its initiatives at a time when so much needs to be done to assure equitable educational and training opportunities for women.

Susan: What links would you like to see between CCLOW and women teachers?

Martha: As a group, women teachers have been somewhat complacent about the need for advocacy and action re education and training for women. For one thing, women teachers have enjoyed a large measure of job security and pay equity. But that is changing.

In Manitoba women use to comprise 80% of the teaching force; now only 52% of teachers are women. Of these, many teach part-time. As in other occupations, in teaching part-time is almost synonymous with female: 9 out of 10 of all part-time teachers in Manitoba are women.

While many teachers have sought part-time work voluntarily, others have been forced into it by declining enrollments and layoffs. Particularly in rural communities, school boards often view women teachers as being second-income earners and there- fore less in need of a job than their male counterparts. The right to work for personal satisfaction is not valued and the importance of the woman's salary to the family is often hidden behind a face-saving facade of the family farm. Thus women teachers have suffered more job losses during staff cutbacks.

My hope is that women teachers will become a more integral, a more vital link in the many, many initiatives that need to be taken to re-educate society generally and young women in particular.

Susan: What is your future vision for CCLOW?

Martha: I would like to see the need for organizations like CCLOW disappear as we move into a future where gender-equity is entrenched in all aspects of our society.

I hope that the time will come when my granddaughter will be as surprised to learn that women once were not entitled to training allowances and universal child care as my daughter was surprised to learn that when I was young it was illegal for a married women, much less an unmarried woman, to be provided with information about birth control and that when I married I was required to quit teaching because it was considered improper for a married woman to flaunt herself in front of innocent students.

I would like more bright patches -- enough to piece together from the vibrant lives of women a patchwork quilt to dazzle the imagination and herald a many- patterned, many-coloured future for all of us.