Creating a Successful Women’s Center

The opening of the proposed women’s center in the fall has the potential to be a watershed for female students at Harvard. If the center is to be successful, however, it must both overcome the problems that past women’s centers have faced and cater to the needs of students.

In 1970s, there were three failed attempts at creating a women’s center. These attempts—centered on small rooms in Phillips Brooks House and the basement of Lehman Hall—failed because of a lack of funding and adequate space in an accessible and central location.

The new women’s center shares none of these qualities. It will be located in the basement of Canaday Hall, which provides ample space along one of the campus’ main arteries. The center also has unprecedented institutional support—Associate Dean of Harvard College Judith H. Kidd and Assistant Dean of Harvard College Paul J. McLoughlin II are tremendously committed to this endeavor. Evidence of this commitment is the College’s decision to hire a full-time director of the women’s center by the end of this semester. We can confidently say that this time, the women’s center will not fall prey to the pitfalls that have doomed it in the past.

The director will also add a tremendous amount of vitality and support to the center. She or he will serve as a liaison to both the faculty and the administration, whose support is crucial to the center’s success, and to the student body. This second role is particularly important, and the Undergraduate Council (UC) has encouraged the College to choose a director who will prioritize students and their input when creating the center and maintaining it once it opens. We hope that the director will be someone who will create a dynamic institution that will adapt to the needs of students. Although the director’s personality and values are important, an interactive relationship between the director and students is an essential component to creating a student-friendly center that is continually relevant to student life.

In order for the women’s center to succeed, it must respond to the needs of students from the day it opens up. To that end, we were part of a UC-led team that conducted a poll of students and student groups to better understand how a women’s center could best serve the entire Harvard community. Based on the data, we suggested, and the UC passed, three main suggestions about what the women’s center should have in it.

First, the center should centralize resources geared towards serving women. This will include information about women’s groups (including contact information and literature), health-related resources, and career services. It will also include centralizing and pooling the currently disparate and far-flung resources for women’s groups, creating more efficient and robust groups.

Second, the center should provide a flexible meeting space for student groups. Among the thirty women’s groups on campus, only one group, the Radcliffe Choral Society, has a regular meeting space, and even they share that space with the Glee Club. A central meeting space would go a long way to improving the quality of these groups. It should also provide some social space in a relaxed but professional atmosphere.

Third, the center should be politically neutral, and this should be written into its mission statement. A great fear of opponents of the women’s center—and even many of its proponents—is that the center could be too leftist or politicized. That is not to say the center should not host events and discussions about divisive issues—it should—but it must commit to being open to all ideas and opinions. As such, we feel that it should not be called “The Harvard Woman’s Center,” a name that in the minds of many connotes a particular political stance and ideology. Instead, the center should be called “The Radcilffe Center,” a title is that reflects in the rich history of women at Harvard and that alludes to the center’s purpose without alienating students.

The lack of a women’s center has concerned women on campus since the movement for a women’s center began in 1971. We hope that the structure of the Radcliffe Center supported by the administration will create an institution that will live up to 35 years of expectations.

Jieun Baek ’09 lives in Straus Hall. Amadi P. Anene ’08 is an environmental science and public policy concentrator in Eliot House. They co-sponsored the Undergraduate Council’s recent position paper on the women’s center.