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In any history of mathematics one is hard pressed to find mention of women mathematicians. One wonders if there were any and, if any, why so few? To answer this question, it is perhaps necessary only to consider the lives of some of the few there were. We do this in the first part of the paper, when we look at the lives of six women mathematicians from six different countries, the first born in 1718, the latter dying in 1935.

In the name of institutional autonomy and federal deregulation, some faculty are joining administrators and those in government in proposing sweeping changes in the enforcement of nondiscrimination and affirmative-action requirements. While we could agree that the results of the past decade leave much to be desired, we would also argue that, attractive as the notion of "getting the feds off our backs" may be, the costs in terms of denial of equality of opportunity are simply too great to permit complete institutional autonomy in this area. In the face of the threatened total collapse of equal-opportunity and affirmative-action programs, we offer an alternative proposal, one that would make enforcement both more effective and