THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Cheryl Scott Williams

“I feel so honored to be asked to tell my story. It also reminds me of how lucky I’ve been to be able to grow, and to continue to grow, which is why I like still being involved in AAUW and in Miriam’s Kitchen, because curing homelessness is like one of those issues that you wonder, when will we ever figure it out? I feel a lot of that has come from the experience that I’ve gotten with the support of women.”

Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, February 2025

CSW:  I’m Cheryl Scott Williams. I was born February 18, 1949, in Columbia, Pennsylvania, while my parents were living with my paternal grandparents. My father was getting ready to take the bar exam, and that’s how I ended up being born in Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County.

JW:  I see. Well, tell us a little bit about your childhood and what you think maybe led you to become who you ultimately became.

CSW:  Well, first off, I realized the older I get, how fortunate I was to have two parents who were really focused on their family. They weren’t perfect people, but I realized as I get older and work with and try tocollaborate with people who come from different places, that having a troubled early life affects people profoundly throughout the rest of their life.

My biggest luck in life was my mom and dad. My parents met in Washington, DC, during World War II. I tell people I’m from a mixed marriage. My mother’s from a small rural town in South Carolina, and my father’s from a small town in southern Pennsylvania. They really are two different cultures. We’re all White people, but two different cultures.

I grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, when Bethesda was an outer suburb. We always talked at the dinner table about cultural issues, because we would spend a lot of the summer in rural South Carolina with my mother’s family. She was one of seven children, six of whom were girls. I loved going down there because my aunts were so much fun.

Everybody had maids, like two maids, and my relatives weren’t rich people. So, we didn’t have to do any chores, and we didn’t have to pick up our clothes, and we didn’t have to put our toys away. the maids would cook the meal, and then they’d go watch TV while we ate the meal.  When we finished our meal they came in and ate the leftovers.

The maids were such lovely people. My father would say, “Well, number one, we can’t afford a maid, because if we had a maid, we would pay her fairly, and she would sit down and eat with us.” He was from a small town inPennsylvania. There weren’t any Black people there , but we talked about racism from the very beginning.

The schools were segregated until the early ’70s in my mother’s hometown. Then when they were forcibly integrated, the two churches, the Baptist and Methodist, set up Christian academies for the White kids. We talked about this stuff. Montgomery County public schools were integrated, but I didn’t go to schools with any Black kids in Bethesda. We were all middle class, White kids.

When you went up county, Sherwood and those high schools had a lot of Black kids, and we would play them in football, that kind of thing. I graduated from Walter Johnson High School. Walter Johnson was a pitcher on the Washington Senators when they won the World Series in 1924. I’m a baseball fan.

I went to University of Maryland, College Park because mostly that was what my family could afford to pay for. I graduated from college with no college debt because it was affordable for in-state people. I lived on campus the whole time and was in a sorority, I learned a lot from that, too.

After graduation I taught school for three years in Montgomery County. I was a secondary English teacher. One of the things, since we talk a little bit about different eras and how much things have changed, there are many things that are changing now that are horrific, but for women’s situation, up until right now, things have been moving forward.

When I went to college, all my friends, 98% of the kids that graduated from Walter Johnson High School went to college. So you went to college because that’s what everybody did. And I didn’t have any career plans. I started out in the School of Nursing, and after getting the only D in my whole life, a four-credit D in second semester chemistry, I became an English major

The nursing majors took the same courses that the pre-med students took. You did two years in College Park, and then three years in Baltimore, which is also where the med school is.. I would sit there in these big chemistry classes, and the boys were all pre-med and the girls were all nursing students. That was it. You were either a nursing major, or you were going to be a teacher.

After I had this disastrous D, which my father was not happy about, and neither was I, it affected my GPA for the rest of my career. Anyway, I said I was going to be an English major because that was my favorite subject. He said he wouldn’t pay for my education unless I was in the education program, too.

At the time, it was a double major. I still get separate letters asking me to put them in the will from both the College of Education and the College of Arts and Humanities in Maryland, so it’s still kind of like that. That was it. In your mind, you were either a teacher or a nurse.

JW:  I was a teacher.

CSW:  What did you teach?

JW:  Fourth grade.

CSW:   I student taught at my own high school, 11th grade classes My brother was in the 11th grade then, so I had some of his friends in my classes. Ultimately, my first teaching job was in a junior high school. At the time junior highs school was grades seven, eight, and nine. There’s no way I was qualified to teach the seventh grade., I taught grades seven and nine.

I think the three years I taught school were probably the most challenging because I realized the challenge of it. And now, there’s a whole specialty for middle school students because it’s developmentally so important, which I had no introduction to. But it is the job, I think, that was the most challenging because I realized how different kids are, and how to reach kids in a way that engages them.

I worked the longest hours. I made the least money, and I think, except for being a mother, I think it was the most important work I did in my entire career. I think we undervalue, particularly elementary school teachers, where it’s even more complex if we really delve into development issues and that stuff.

I got married the week after I graduated from Maryland, which was also a thing. You got married right away. I married a good man, and he was an excellent father. I had my son in 1974. He turned 50 last year. We had a big celebration.

I subsequently taught adult education through Fairfax County. We were living in Vienna, Virginia because my husband wanted to live in Virginia. Then when I wanted to go back to work, English teachers were a dime a dozen. But between when I had Derek and when I wanted to go back to work, I was unable to have a second child. I went through a lot of surgery, and I had two ectopic pregnancie. It was a very traumatic time for me.

One of those years, we lived in England while my husband was on a scientific exchange with the British government. When we came back, without getting into the details of my marital relationship, he wasn’t supportive of adopting. So, I said, “Fine, I’m going back to work.”

But in the meanwhile, the time I was home with Derek, I got really involved in the McLean area branch of the American Association of University Women. That’s when my work, both volunteer and paid, began to be focused on issues surrounding women.

JW:  Now, what year was this, would you say?

CSW:  I joined AAUW in 1977, and that’s when I met Betsy, who joined the branch in ’74. I know because she just hit her 50th year. Some of the mprograms opened my eyes to things.  For instance, my parents occasionally fought and they would bicker but, I mean, I didn’t know men hit their wives.

I can’t tell you how naive I was. The first battered women’s shelter in Fairfax County was established in Reston during the ’70s, and the woman who was the founder came to speak to us. And at that time in the state of Virginia, it was legal to hit your wife the first time. She said that if your husband hits you, you need to report it to the police because it has to be on record.

JW:  Let me ask you something. It’s okay for him to hit you once? Is that it? So that’s why you need to record it?

CSW: Yes. If he hits you again. It’s against the law.

JW:  I see. Wow.

CSW:  That law no longer exists. This is the irony, because then we get into working on ERA ratification. But before we get there, what Virginia did quite oddly, is legislators one by one got rid of the laws because they never voted ERA out of committee. It was never voted out of committee and never even went to a floor vote.

But Maryland, instead of dealing with their laws, they just ratified ERA, just like that, which would have thrown everything out. So then when it failed, Maryland was sitting on these laws. They had to clean up their act. But anyway, that was just the irony of the whole ERA thing.

The other thing the Shelter Director) said, “And let me tell you, if he hits you once, he’s going to hit you again.” She said, “Forget the makeup sex and how sorry he is and how he loves you. He’s going to do it again.” I’m just sitting there with my mouth agape.

The other person who spoke to us was Wilhemina Holladay. She’s the woman who founded the National Museum for Women in the Arts downtown. She was fundraising at the time, and she was going around to speak to all the Northern Virginia branches. She’s the one that opened my eyes to the fact that there were, over the years, so many women artists who were never recognized. Mary Cassatt and many others were largely overlooked.

This museum is a very successful today.. We also had a speaker, and I forget her name, who was at the beginning of the hospice movement. Again, this is back in the ’70s. And she talked about how medicine needed to move away from the notion that you must save everybody. That sometimes prolonging life in a way that’s painful, that there’s no help for, there’s no hope, that we should begin to develop a system of palliative care that helps people who are with terminal diseases to live their last months and days as well as possible.

Sometimes that’s in a facility, sometimes that’s coming to help you in your home, and these were concepts that in the ’70s were new.

Then, when I wanted to go back to teaching, the common belief in Fairfax County was if you took a long-term sub position  you were more likely to land a contract position.I knew I didn’t want to do daily substitution, that’s babysitting and I didn’t want to have anything to do with that The two long-term jobs I took were for women who were going on maternity leave. This was in the early ’80s.

JW:  Before we get to the early ’80s, I want to hear more about the ERA and what you did there.

 CSW:  There were two things that we were involved in. We knew that the state of Virginia was ruled by those boys down in the Southwest portion of the state and conservative Republicans up north too, [so the ERA] wasn’t being voted out of committee. And so, our strategy was to try and get the right people in the legislature. I’m trying to remember what year this was because ERA ratification was extended.

JW:  Yes, it was extended into 1982.

CSW:  I may be easing into the ’80s here, but our strategy was, we ran Elaine Lailas for the Virginia House of Delegates. She lived in McLean whichat the time was a three-person district, but was going to change to single representative district after this election. Elaine is Greek, and this is when I learned that having an ethnic community is important.

One of her Greek friends gave us an office, and I was her volunteer coordinator. We went door to door handing out flyers, because in Virginia, you don’t register with a party so you can vote in either [primary]. I’ve always been a Democrat but if there was no Democratic primary, I voted in the Republican primary. I voted every chance I could get.

So, we didn’t really know. The only way we knew if someone was going to be supportive of us was from a list of voters that included which primaries they voted in. So, if it was primarily Democratic, that’s how we pulled out the names. I would be on the phone getting volunteers to go door to door with Elaine, and in the general election for this three-person district, she was the highest vote-getting Democrat, but she didn’t get elected.

If she had run again when they redrew the districts for single representative districts, almost everyone had said she would win. You should talk to Elaine, but I don’t know if she’s going to tell you this. She and her husband had to go to the Greek Orthodox priest, for counseling because her husband was so angry that she missed dinner all the time.

This whole campaigning thing took her away from her wifely duties. That’s why she just said, “I can’t run again or my marriage is over.” It’s just such a ’70s, early ‘80s, women’s story.

JW:  It really, really is.

CSW:  The other thing I want to tell you about the ’70s, that doesn’t have to do with my advocacy work, but just had to do with my real life. I was married in ’71, in ’72, we were both working, were frugal, and were living in a tiny apartment in Arlington,when we bought our first house.

When we went to get a mortgage, I was working full-time, full benefits in Montgomery County Public Schools, and the bank would not count my salary towards our mortgage qualification . And then the other story like that, I think it was 1979, ’80, when Macy’s moved into the DC area. I got a phone call from Macy’s offering a Macy’s credit card to which I responded that I would. However, they wanted my husband’s name for the card and would not issue the card in my name.

I said, “Keep your card.” That was ’79 or ’80.

Those were two stories I tell some of the younger women in our book club. We read the book The Way Things Were, and they didn’t believe it was true. They said, “Oh, that’s ridiculous.” So, this is like, when things are going backwards right now, I think about how far we’ve come.

JW:  We have come a far way, and as I like to say, we still have a far way to go. But it’s true, we can get our own credit cards.

CSW:  For our starter home in 1972, my salary was not included in our income calculation , but in 1978. I was working part-time teaching adult education for Fairfax County at night for $13 an hour, and they counted every penny of that for the mortgage for our second home.. The other work I did for AAUW as a volunteer before I went looking for work, was onLobby Corps.

At the time, Lobby Corps pushed for the extension for ERA and got the extension. But the other thing was when Reagan was elected, we visited members of the Senate’s office to advocate for appointment of women to the cabinet, which we were not successful with either . That was another thing that I did through AAUW.

It was because of all these things I learned through my involvement in the McLean area branch of AAUW, that when, and this is classic, I got two jobs at Falls Church High School. The first one, I started in January for a teacher who had been there a long time taking maternity leave.

In 1981, Fairfax County public schools paid long-term substitutes, and these are professionals with a master’s degree who took over everything, all 150 students, all classes, $65 a day. Even in 1981, that was slave labor. But the thing was, if you did that, you got your foot in the door. The principal would know you were available when a permanent spot opened.

I was an English teacher. If you were math or science, you could go where you wanted, but I was an English teacher. There are so many names I don’t remember, like the name of Western Junior High, which is where I taught school. But I can remember the name of the principal, Ed Ryan. He was a young guy. He told me that because they thought I was doing a great job, that if they had an opening in the Fall, then it would be mine.

Summer came, I never heard from anybody. I wasn’t that assertive at that point in my life. Except in September, I got a call saying they had another long-term sub-opening, and could I come do it? Another teacher, and I don’t think she was very responsible because she started the year and then went on maternity leave, but she was only there about a month.

Anyway, I show up and take over her classes, and there’s a young guy there who’s a new permanent English teacher. And Ed Ryan comes up to me and says, “Cheryl, I know I told you that if we had a position open, it was yours, but I needed a basketball coach.” Now, he never asked me if I could coach basketball.

So, this must have been 1982, because 1982 to 84, I was President of the McLean area AAUW branch and I was doing this long-term subbing. AAUW started sending out job openings to their area branch presidents. I received a notice for an opening for a job share position. I don’t know if you remember when job sharing came about and was kind of cool, for a manager of the executive office.

JW:  Of what organization?

CSW: The American Association of University Women. At the time, their headquarters were at 2401 Virginia Avenue, just up from the Watergate. And so, I applied. Because I was still making $65 a day, and the assistant principal in charge of the English Department had told me they don’t have any contracts for me this year. There’s not going to be any contract coming up.

So, I interviewed for the job, and I got it. I put in my resignation at Falls Church High School right before Christmas break because I was going to start at AAUW just after the first part of January. The English Department head, who was a woman who I really liked and who liked me, she said, “Cheryl, why are you leaving?” I said, “Well, they told me I was going to get a contract if I put in my time.” I said, “I put in my time,” the Assistant Principal, whose name I don’t remember, “He’s told me there’s not going to be a contract. There are no available contracts.”

She just blew up. And I remember seeing her slam her classroom door and walk down to the office. The next day, the assistant principal comes to me, and he says, “Cheryl, we got in touch with the county office, it turns out we can give you a contract.” I said, “Well, I’ve already accepted this job.” He said, and I’ll never forget this as long as I live, ‘Oh, you’re just their first choice,” he said. “They can always have their second choice.” He said, “But before you decide,” and this is where he nailed his coffin, “Before you decide, go home and talk it over with your husband.”

The thing about teaching is, you didn’t even get to know your colleagues. We had no way to communicate with each other. I mean, this is way before internet and cell phones. There was no phone in the classroom. I learned later why; schools were charged business rates because they were left out of the Telecommunications Act of 1937.

So, there wasn’t a community of teachers. We didn’t collaborate. If someone used my ditto, they were stealing. But the kids, I really liked working with kids, and I missed that part of the job. But at AAUW, I worked half day Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and my partner worked Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday morning. There was very little travel involved.

She was married to an Iranian man and the only reason she was working was because when the Shah had been thrown out, he was trying to figure out how to be financially okay here and that’s why he agreed to let her work. But he did not like it when she traveled and so I was supposed to do the traveling, of which there wasn’t much.

There were half benefits. That’s where I got my first TIAA CREF It was half time for AAUW. It was full benefits, and they had a month’s leave so, I got two weeks, and I only worked half. And that’s how I got into nonprofit management, and I learned so much.

Then there was a leadership change of the board that was ugly. They didn’t have their roles worked out very well. I decided I needed to leave at that time, when Quincalee Brown, the executive director that had hired me left. It wasn’t handled well because she was great.

That’s when I had to think about what did I care about? Where was my skill set? I did take a job for about a year that was a bad fit, and so I had to really do some thinking. I cared about K-12 education, and so that’s how I went to work for the National School Boards Association (NSBA), managing what was a brand-new program in education technology.

I worked there for 14 years, and then I worked as Vice President for Education at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB). Then I worked for a startup for three years in San Francisco. It was a nonprofit too because it never made a profit. But anyway, I learned a lot, and I got to live in San Francisco. The next to last full-time job I had was, I was CEO Executive Director of a coalition of 16 of the national K-12 organizations, and the CEOs of the nonprofits were my board.

I’d only been retired about six months when I got a call from some former colleagues. I sat on a lot of boards. I sat on the Consortium for School Networking Board, and I sat on the International Society for Technology in Education. Board service for me, was a way to get to know people in the community who were working in schools, who were trying to work through all the changes associated with the new technologies and how they might appropriately and affordably be part of the public-school experience.

One of the organizations, ISTE, International Society for Technology and Education, called me after I retired. They were firing their CEO, and they asked, “Would I take the interim job?” which I did. I was paid more money than I’d ever been paid in my whole life for seven months and tried to fix the mess this guy made. After I retired, I realized managing people and project was my best skillset, and that I’ve never really advocated for myself in these kinds of positions. But I had a great career.

JW:  Let me ask you in terms of the woman path, particularly that you got into technology stuff. Did you see encouragement of the young girls and women moving into technology?

CSW:  Well, no. But I have to say my whole staff was women and we ran a for-profit in the nonprofit organization. I tell people now, one reason I think we were profitable was they didn’t pay us as much as they should have, but we learned so much, and I don’t want to badmouth the NSBA.

I had young staff people, and they were women, and they were willing to learn. We had the first website in our organization, and it was just for our program. I was at a staff meeting where a senior person said, “Why would an association ever need a website?” This is a direct quote. Then once, only 18 months, two years later and it’s cool, the same woman who said this who had IT under her, she took over the website. I insisted , “This isn’t an IT thing. This is a communication thing.” Because it was now cool.

There were still senior executives who were men who did not understand what we were doing. I, truthfully, was the education part. I had a woman who was a whiz at all this stuff. We got a lot of underwriting and partnering with technology companies who wanted to get into the market, and they were as ignorant of the market as the market was ignorant of the products.

I mean, it was an exciting time to be doing this because what we were doing was bringing people together. You can’t build a business if you don’t understand how the market you’re selling to works and is funded. Anyway, they probably should have paid us more, but I have to say, I just learned so much.

The other thing that was interesting, was the different cultures: the corporate culture and the education culture. The educators had a great deal of suspicion of corporations or businesses. Apple computer was brilliant in the early days. They hired the best educators to be their evangelists. When they sold stuff into schools, it came with professional development.

You can see now how all these people will stand in line for hours to get the latest iPhone, and school districts would pay more for Apple computers than what Dell or anybody else was selling. They just sold the concept. And they were good partners with us. They underwrote some of our publications and we would get corporate support for our publications. They could put their name on the back, but the deal was we had total editorial control. It was our publication with their sponsorship. That’s essentially the way public broadcasting works, too.

JW:  As we wind down, is there anything you want to say about how those years getting you into women’s issues and learning about who you are, how that affected your whole career?

CSW:  Well, yes. Not just my career, but my personal life. I was married for 25 years. Again, my former husband was a good father, but if I had stayed a classroom teacher my whole career, and was home when he got home, and dinner was on the table, and his shirts were ironed, he would have been fine.

When I was working at AAUW and serving as local branch president, we met at night.  One day I just said to him, “Do you think you could do dinners on Thursday night? Because I come home from work and then have to get dinner on the table and then off to my meeting.”

He said, “Why would I do that?” I ran a big education conference when I worked in NSBA, and I always had a suite. I said, “Why don’t you come down the last day?” He said, “Why would I do that?” We just moved apart as I became more self-confident, and as I became more focused on my work.

We have only one child, and as Derek got into high school, my husband always resented my work. . Then in the end, he said, “You’ve changed. All I can say is you’ve changed.” I said, “I was 22 when we got married, of course I’ve changed.”

I live in DC now, but I still go across the river to the McLean AAUW because it was such an important part of my life as a young woman. And it was women saying, “You can do this,” or it was women collaborating. I’ve never been a supporter of single-sex schools of any kind, but now I say, whatever works.

But this for me, just opened up me thinking about what I was able to do. And being branch president then, and how we would get together and collaborate and people would follow up, and we had successful fundraisers, and we had lots of people in our meetings. And it was just a dynamism that I wouldn’t have known if I just continued teaching school.

Maybe I would have developed it, but differently. The things I learned in the ’70s and ’80s working at AAUW, even professionally working at AAUW, were such an important part of my personal growth and change.

Anyway, during  my son’s senior year in college, I don’t think my husband even saw himself as being cruel, but he would just make these put-down comments all the time to me that were just hurtful. At one point, I said, “Either we get help in repairing our communication strategies,” because we never really fought so much, which is probably part of the problem, “Or I think I need to leave.”

He said, “Leave,” so I did. And it was the hardest thing I ever did – to leave my marriage. But it’s been better for him, he’s remarried and he has a great wife whom I like, and we all get together when we’re in the same spot. I think that it’s not what I wanted, but in the end, there’s just so much that happened there in my 20s.

My personal health, my plan to have two children that blew up in smoke, and then the support of the branch and the work we did that was really meaningful. And then professionally, that was the transition out of a classroom. Because I could see myself as a classroom teacher. I could see myself as head of a department or even principal, I guess. I don’t know. But this sort of opened it up. Then just falling into this education technology thing, I didn’t know a squat about technology.

JW:  But nobody did, though. That’s the thing.

CSW:  Nobody did, right. The trick was to hire young people. I’ll tell you, that was the trick. And I just happened to hire young women, and they were great. I just find that the focus on the knowledge that I gained, and the focus on women’s issues in my 20s and early 30s, was that transition period from the early feminists.

And finally, one of the things I’ve been doing as a retired person is working part-time for a woman owned walking-tour company called Washington Walks, and it’s owned by a woman named Carolyn Crouch. I think they’re going into their 25th year. She’s changed her business model, and I won’t be working so much.

But one walk that she developed that I did a lot of in 2019 because it was the lead up to 2020, which was the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote. The tour was called, Women Who Changed America. We started at the Patent Office, which Clara Barton actually worked in. We talked about Mary McCleod Bethune, but also Mary Church Terrell who led a group of African Americans demonstration outside what was then the Hecht’sbuilding, which is no longer, where they demonstrated outside with signs that said, Don’t shop where you can’t eat. Because Hecht’s restaurant would not serve African Americans.

Then we stand in front of the Canadian Embassy, and we talk about that women’s march of 1913, where they were attacked. Then up to the National Women’s Party headquarters, which was the last national monument that Barak Obama designated before he left office.

There’s this whole women’s history thing. We stop at the Department of Labor; Frances Perkins is my personal hero. That also, I think, has put in perspective how things have changed, and what women have done through the years that I was just totally unaware of until AAUW introduced me to it, and gave me concrete things to do to try and work towards.

JW:  Sounds fabulous.

CSW:  Well, I’m a lucky person.

JW: Any final thoughts?

CSW:  I feel so honored to be asked to tell my story. It feels very self-centered, but thank you. It also reminds me of how lucky I’ve been to be able to grow, and to continue to grow, which is why I like still being involved in AAUW, in Miriam’s Kitchen, because curing homelessness is like one of those issues that you wonder, When will we ever figure it out? And I feel a lot of that has come from the experience that I’ve gotten with the support of women.