Women’s Center Will Improve Female Students’ Experience

To the editors:

Your Feb. 16 editorial “True Equality” rests on several faulty assumptions, including that women are a “special interest group” rather than fully half of the Harvard population; that women’s major problems on the Harvard campus are social rather than structural; and that the new women’s center is unimportant.

In suggesting that the real problem is lack of non-final clubs parties on campus, your piece trivializes the fundamental inequalities that women face at Harvard. From the instant we arrive on the campus, we are confronted with reminders of our “visitor” status, from the lack of tenured female professors in the classroom to the lack of depictions of women among the portraits and statuary adorning the hallowed halls. The entire history of women at Harvard and Radcliffe is marked by separation, inequality of resources, and reluctance on the part of male-dominated Harvard to adequately care for female students. As early as a few decades ago, women were not allowed in the libraries and (when my dad was an undergraduate) were not considered full Harvard students, though they took the same classes and did the same work. To think that simply integrating women into existing male structures will create full equality for women on the campus is folly. And to suggest that the real problem is that women can’t get into Final Clubs parties is insulting.

The women’s center has important purposes, including the centralization of gender-related resources that are currently dispersed around the campus, some in hard-to-find areas. The center will have its own staff and programming to better integrate women into the still male-dominated environment. And the women’s center will finally be what Virginia Woolf asked for women, the better part of a century ago: a “room of our own.” Call it safe space, call it centralization of resources, call it much-delayed justice—it will be a place on the campus created by, for, and about women, a place that I felt the need for every day as an undergraduate.

SHAUNA L. SHAMES ’01
Washington, D.C.
February 17, 2006