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Changing Houston, Changing Women's Lives: "A bunch of us separately went down to IWY and they had an art section where we discussed the old question, 'Are there any good women artists?' That was the question that rocked the art world then. It's terrible it could have been asked. All of us were affected. We questioned ourselves and each other. The men had social places to gather, bars and other places they comfortably hung out, but the women had nothing; we were in our garages and our homes," Lynn Randolph recalls. Toby Topek remembers, "There were all these women in the room [at IWY] discussing what women could do - it was so exciting! My life began that day."7
Power was vested in an Executive Board of officers and two advisory committees of members and community representatives. Respect for individual viewpoints and concern about preventing the use of volunteer roles for personal promotion were and still are top priorities.8 The chapter regularly revisited their political standards in the early years. When founding president Roberta Graham Harris handed incoming president Jan Beauboeuf five handwritten pages of advice, the values she passed on were a direct development from the procedures that had guided the organizing meeting.9 Three years later a membership survey described the organization's functions as "(1) a support group, (2) an educational and professional resource, (3) a collective, 'political' force and (4) a community service and non-profit organization." The political origins of the Caucus were evident, however, in the introduction to the survey:
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