During the January 30 meeting of the Rotary Club of Tehachapi, the speaker was Jane Custer, president of the Tehachapi mountain branch of the American Association of University Women and a local resident. She presented “the story of Aauw and the formation of our local branch”.
Custer retired in 2019 after 33 years in education and likes to live in Bear Valley Springs. During her career, Custer taught biology at the Bakersfield High School for 15 years, before becoming high school advisor, where she continued to serve BHS students for another 12 years. She then took a position as an advisor at the Bakersfield Regional Professional Center, where she spent six more retirement years.
The AAUW was launched in 1881 in Boston and is the main organization of the country advocating equity for women and girls. AAAUW has a national membership of 170,000 members. The AAUW is open to all graduates who have a partner, a baccalaureate or a higher diploma in an accredited university.
The AAUW headquarters is located in Washington, DC, and the current CEO is Gloria L. Blackwell, which has occupied the position since 2021. AAUW has a 4 -star charity navigation note, with an overall 97%score, recognizing The organization’s note commitment to best practices and industry standards in matters of responsibility, finance, culture and community. There are countless notable historical members of the AAUW. Some include the first ladies Eleanor Roosevelt and Lou Henry Hoover, and the writer and novelist Pearl S. Buck, the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature.
The AAUW was founded in 1881 by a small group of women’s graduates who wanted to support the professional advancement of women and encourage more women to continue higher education. Custer shared that an important objective in the early years was to provide scholarships and subsidies to support this objective. After the civil war, the country had an increasing middle class and more women were trying to go to university to continue their studies. The founder of the AAUW, Marion Talbot, wanted to create a fund for the higher education of women. She and the president of the scholarship Christine Ladd Franklin called all the members to contribute one dollar per year. The objective was to allow gifted women to use their intellectual powers for the good of humanity. In the 1950s, barely 70 years later, AAUW had financed scholarships for more than 1,100 women in more than 40 countries. Many women who received funding in the 1950s and 60s later became the first college presidents.
In 1980, Evelyn Seaman and Marti Sprinkle began to exhort women in Tehachapi to join Aauw and recruited around 25 women to join the Aauw Bakersfield branch. After four years, around fifty women in Tehachapi had joined themselves, which was a group large enough to form their own independent branch. In 1984, the mountain of Aauw Tehachapi became the 93rd Aauw branch in California. The local branch of the AAUW is proud in March 2024, they marked the 40th anniversary of the charter of the Tehachapi mountain branch and currently have a member of around 75 members.
To thank Jane Custer for her presentation, President Jennifer Palakiko presented her a certificate, and a donation was made to the Rotary Foundation in her honor. The Tehachapi Rotary Club meets at noon every Thursday at Kelcy, and is the time to come together for the Stock Exchange, to discover important and relevant subjects and to work together to support our local community.
Rotary is the largest organization of services in the world and is committed to “service above oneself”, devoting time and resources to projects that make a difference worldwide. For more information on the Rotary Club, you can visit their Facebook page in http://www.facebook.com/rotarycloboftehachapi/.
Susan Andreas-Bervel is secretary of the Rotary Club of Tehachapi.