Commemorating and Collaborating
An Editorial

by Barbara Guy and Betty Donaldson

CCLOW has persisted 20 years! To celebrate, the CCLOW Board wants you to have this retrospective sample of publications from Women's Education des femmes (WEdf) between 1984-1996 and a few new items that prescribe the future.

It has not been easy to sustain the role of providing quality articles about issues of interest to women with perspectives that might not be published elsewhere. In doing so, how- ever, authors such as those represented in this special Commemorative Issue are being given a voice and they, in turn, have helped educate others. In this editorial, we briefly summarize how the selections were made and some of the thoughts of the two co-editors of the committee that prepared this issue.

As always, this issue is a collaborative adventure. It includes the CCLOW Board of Directors, Joanne Lindsay, Executive Director, and CCLOW office staff as well as Luciana Ricciutelli, Editor of Canadian Woman Studies/les cahiers de la femme, who helped co-ordinate production of this issue. It includes a volunteer group of graduate students at the University of Calgary and CCLOW Board and staff members who read every issue that was ever published and who made recommendations regarding a "long short list" from which the final selections were chosen. And, most importantly, it includes the authors, poets, and artists whose work is reprinted or printed in this issue.

Much effort was made to contact all the contributors included in this issue. It proved to be a daunting task and there are several we were not able to reach. We sincerely hope all will be honored that their work was included as relevant and important milestones of the CCLOW journey and will see the reprint as recognition of that longevity.

The issue also includes information about the current status of the organization and current program or publication offerings. We attempted to include each region of Canada and the range of publication years of the magazine. We searched for representative articles about diversity, disability, abuse, employment problems, re-entry, creativity, identity, and abuse. We wanted the range of joy and frustration, empowerment and oppression, voices and silences, values and victimization that women experience.

We selected articles that cover the process and the goals. We sought balance between perspectives: articles about policy and about experience, for example. We tried very hard to make the Commemorative Issue reflect our growing consciousness of women's diversity, but we know that some voices are absent. The content is arranged within five meta-themes: moving forward with a mission for women-centred education; claiming/reclaiming our own learning and our own lives; defining our own needs/building our own knowledge; joy and power beyond the home sphere.

Barbara Guy and Betty Donaldson co-edited this Commemorative Issue. Barbara Guy is the Board Director from New Brunswick and a consultant specializing in labour market analysis and human resource development planning. Betty Donaldson is the Alberta CCLOW Director and a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Calgary. Her research interests include students in transition, women and education, and comparative policy analysis.