Association of Women Soil Scientists "Genesis"
By Barb Leuelling, AWSS Founder
AWSS Newsletter, June 1993
AWSS Meeting, November 3, 1992, Minneapolis,
MN
There I was at a remote Ranger Station working with
the US Forest Service in Isabella, Minnesota, embarking
on my career with the Forest Service. I was the
first "professional" woman on the District.
And in soil science. No one knew what to do with
me.
No longer having my family as a support network,
no college peers nearby, it was an especially isolated
professional circumstance.
Fortunately, and quite by accident, I started to
meet a few women in other professional positions.
In fact, that is how I first met Carol Wettstein;
we crossed paths on a fire fighting situation.
In 1980, Linda Donahue had started routing around
a few handwritten letters stapled together--the
beginnings of a magazine! You all know this magazine
today as Women in Natural Resources, being published
out of the University of Idaho, Moscow. It started
out as a pile of letters stapled together, then
a Xeroxed booklet called Women in Forestry. I figured
that if she could do it, so could I.
That's how this organization started in early 1982.
I wrote to ten people I didn't know but who had
the fortune of being female soil scientists. I got
a call from Donna Duffy who was working with the
Forest Service at the time who said she was going
to an Ecological Land Classification conference
in upper Ontario and would I see her there? Was
I going? Up till that moment, I hadn't planned on
going! So I said, well, I'll send in my registration
today! This was my first meeting with another female
soil scientist. It was heaven. Double heaven: her
husband, like mine, was a land surveyor. They got
bored looking at soil pits and spent the next couple
days chasing after land monuments while we peered
into pit after pit. And developed AWSS, and one
of those lifelong friendships.
UPDATE
There is still "distance" today--because
many of us work alone in the woods, in urban field
mapping situations, or pretty much "alone"
because there are simply very few of us in the workforce.
It has been enjoyable to see through the newsletter
the professional and personal growth of each of
us, and my hope is that we continue to foster this
growth through support of one another. My hope is
that we expand our networking situations to encourage
others and ourselves to meet our needs as soil scientists,
as parents, pet-owners, gardeners, attorneys, bikers,
rollerbladers or however else we define ourselves--and
to do this in an increasingly complex work force.
I think we can best do this by participating in
as many facets of our work environment as we can,
to foster partnerships with our coworkers and partnerships
with other agencies and private businesses.
In fact, AWSS is doing its partwe are helping ourselves
to position ourselves for the future by developing
those professional relationships that will last
a lifetime.
That's why we must have this luxury to make frequent
encounters among us and among other professional
societies a common occurrence. We can share, respect,
and support one another. The luxury of networking:
it's one of the most effective tools to help others
be effective and help ourselves be effective. That
is one reason we gathered, annually, at the last
two national ASA meetings.
Carol Wettstein had the insight to keep offering
to set up a meeting--this was in the mid-80's! But,
it took a few of us others to get to point in our
careers so that we could attend national meetings
so we could arrange such an AWSS meeting!
I encourage this networking to expand. I encourage
each member to make a commitment to pick up your
latest directory and just contact someone else--maybe
a new friendship, a new business contact, a new
piece of information will emerge--no question about
it! Meet at other regional meetings, develop more
local AWSS meetings, and use the newsletter to let
us hear more about you and your activities--it can
only help us develop our own professional effectiveness
and be more human at the same time.
LATER (March 1993)
One thing that stands out in my mind is thinking
about women soil scientists in upper responsibility
levels, who have gone on to tackle positions in
Washington, DC or elsewhere. I have heard this from
similar women, though not all soil scientists, that
say, "Believe me, it's lonely out there."
That phrase says it all. From entry level positions
to higher leadership positions, it's still pretty
darn lonely. Younger entry level women see some
of the older and more experienced women in the work
force and just can't believe the workforce is as
unyielding as it is. To those experienced folks
who are charting the paths for others to follow,
thank you very much for taking those first steps
AND to those younger folks, thank you very much
for following in others footsteps, validating the
pioneers' efforts. I recommend EACH of us write
or call someone more experienced, and someone less
experienced to keep up the "community of us."
I think somewhere along the way in our careers we
sometimes forget about other segments of the workforce
and get stuck seeing only that around us.
We need to support others, not just those growing
new into their careers, but those who are growing
longer, shall I say, in their careers.
For more on the history of AWSS, see:
History of AWSS: At the first
AWSS meeting in 1991, founder Barb Leuelling talks
about the beginnings of AWSS.
AWSS History Timeline
: Margie Faber, AWSS Historian, gives a concise
chronology of AWSS from 1981-2000.
