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 AEUW, 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 I work with and try and collaborate 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 were always focused and 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 they were so much fun and my aunts were so much fun.

Everybody had maids, like two maids, and they 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. We would come home and say to dad, “Why can’t we have a maid?” Well, first off, they would cook the meals, and then they’d go watch TV while we ate the meals, and then they came in and ate the leftovers.

They 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 them fairly, and they would sit down and eat with us.” He was small town, Pennsylvania. There weren’t any Black people there either, but we talked 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, either Baptist or 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, or really much of any diversity. 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. Then I graduated from Walter Johnson High School. He was the pitcher of the Washington Senators when they won the World Series in 1924. I’m a baseball fan.

Anyway, 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 really affordable for in-state people. I lived on campus the whole time. I was in a sorority, I learned a lot from that, too.

Then 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…

We took the same courses that the pre-med students took. You did two years in College Park, and then three years. It was a five-year program in Baltimore, and that’s where the med school was, too. 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 I got 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:  Well, I student taught at my own high school. I student taught third grade. It was just so weird. I just got assigned at that. And ultimately, the job I got was in a junior high school. We used to have [grades] seven, eight, and nine. There’s no way I was qualified to teach the seventh grade, which is, I taught seven to nine.

I think the three years I taught school were probably the most challenging because you realize 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 you realized how different different kids were, and how to reach kids in a way that engaged 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.

Anyway, 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 to Fairfax County. We were living in Virginia because my husband wanted to live in Virginia. We lived in Vienna, 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 ectopics, and 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 AEUW in 1977, and that’s when I met Betsy. I was in the branch in ’74, I know because she just hit her 50th year. Some of the programs opened my eyes to things. My parents, I mean, occasionally they fought and they would bicker and that thing, 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 gets you again. It’s against the law.

JW:  I see. Wow.

CSW:  Now, 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 they one by one got rid of their laws because they never got ERA out of committee. It was never voted out of committee. It never even went to a floor vote.

But Maryland, I mean, they weren’t that bad, but 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 she (Betsy) 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. Of course, we now know it was something that was a problem.

The other person we had speak 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. I mean, Mary Cassatt and a few others, but they were largely overlooked.

This museum is a very successful museum now. 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 have to 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 knowledge in Fairfax County was if you took a long-term sub 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 – but the two long-term jobs I took were 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:  Okay. 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 think 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 Lylis, who had a big community. She lived in McLean. At the time, it was a three-person district, but they were going to change it to single representative districts after this election. She’s Greek, and this is when I learned that having an ethnic community is important.

One of her Greek friends gave us an office. We ran her for the House of Delegates in Virginia. I was her volunteer coordinator, and 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 mean, 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, they had a list of voters and they had a list of 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 whatever the Greek Orthodox priest, or whatever he’s called, for counseling because her husband was so pissed 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, and we were frugal, and we were living in a tiny apartment in Arlington, and 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. 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. My husband never answered the phone. I answered the phone.

They wanted to know if I wanted a Macy’s credit card. I said, “Sure, why not?” They wanted my husband’s name. I said, “He’s never going to shop at Macy’s. He doesn’t shop. He doesn’t do that.” I said, “So we’ll just put in my name.” And he said, “No, we won’t.” I said, “Keep your card.” So 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. And the fact that there are generals that they can fire, or whatever the general was who was running the Coast Guard, back then, there wouldn’t have been those votes.

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:  So that was our starter home in 1978. I was working part-time for Fairbanks County at night for $13 an hour, and they counted every penny of that for the second mortgage. So, there were some laws passed there in the late ’70s. And then the other work I did for AEUW as a volunteer before I went looking for work, was on lobby corps.

At the time, of course, lobby corps, we 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 you can see how successful we were in both instances. So that was another thing that I did through AEUW.

It was because of all these things I learned through my involvement in the McLean area branch of AEUW, that when, and this is classic, I got two jobs at McFalls 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.

I was an English teacher. I mean, 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 North Bethesda 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 all of her classes, and there’s a young guy there who’s a permanent English teacher. And Ed Ryan comes up to me and he 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 AEUW branch and I was doing this long-term subbing. AEUW started sending out job openings to their area branch presidents. It was a job share. 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 right before Christmas break because I was going to start at AEUW 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. I mean, 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 AEUW, 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 AEUW. 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 Quincy Lee, 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, 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. Then I worked for a startup for three years in San Francisco. It was a nonprofit, too. 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 and Education Board. Outreach for me, was 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, ISTI, International Society for Technology and Education, called me. 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 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 MSBA.

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 all of the website. I would say, “So 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 AEUW, we met at night. Now we go back and forth because everybody’s older. But anyway. 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 SBA, 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, he always resented it. 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.”

I live in DC now, but I still go across the river to the McClane AEUW because it was such an important part of my life. 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.

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

Anyway, on the senior year of my son’s 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 Claire Barton actually worked in. We talked about Mary McCleod Bethune, but also Mary Terrell. We go to the old Hex building, which is no longer, where they demonstrated outside, Don’t shop where you can’t eat. 

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 Barack 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 AEUW 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 AEUW, 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.