A Space in Canaday

Seventy-seven years ago, Virginia Woolf declared that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” And for nearly 35 of those years, proponents of a women’s center, women and men both, have asked for the same tools in order to battle what they call female “marginalization” at Harvard.

The newly opened Harvard College Women’s Center, and the connected offices of the Ann Radcliffe Trust, are the long-awaited products of those calls for support. Located in the refurbished Canaday B basement, the Women’s Center is designed to serve as an umbrella organization that will “serve the needs of student organizations on campus, particularly but not exclusively the groups that consider women to be a focus area,” Director Susan B. Marine told The Crimson last week.

For many on this campus, however, the semantics of the center’s title—the fact that it specifically denotes one gender—destroys the idea of integration that Marine addresses in the mission.

On a conceptual level, we agree; during the planning of the Women’s Center, we argued that our campus and community did not need another divisive and specialized space. This community desperately needed (and still needs) spaces in which all feel welcome and involved. But Harvard now has a Women’s Center, a warmly decorated and comfortable space in a central and valuable campus location, and so students and student groups might as well use it as much as they can.

So far, the main sources of publicity about the center are a less-than-a-sentence shout-out in the massive welcome-to-school e-mail from Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, an op-ed in The Crimson, and a small signboard outside Canaday. These opening weeks of school—although understandably hectic for the 10 student interns who monitor the center along with its professional staff—are essential in forging relationships with new, and newly returned, students. What the Women’s Center has provided in its initial days are enormous amounts of free goodies, some of which will continue throughout the year: free coffee, tea, snacks, lip balm, coffee mugs, printing and copying, and, best of all for many students once the Lamont Library Café opens on October 17, quiet. This is all a good start. But goodies alone are not enough to bring co-ed groups to the center. The center must advertise itself a little better.

We now worry that it will be underutilized. Even though students might be frightened by the library of Women, Gender, and Sexuality coursepacks or the sign-up sheets for feminine counseling, students should not allow their fears of tampons or semantics to limit the use of the center’s resources and the diversity of the center’s inhabitants. But more importantly, do many student groups know that they can meet at the Women’s Center? Do most students even know where it is? The center’s opening days were marked by a single kickoff party, followed by an information session for the Undergraduate Council. A wider slate of events during its opening week would have generated more buzz for the center and helped it to advertise its resources.

The rooms are nice, the coffee is warm. Go and use them. The school and private donors, namely Corporation Senior Fellow James R. Houghton ’58, have thrown an enormous sum of money at the Women’s Center, and all students—many of whom complain loudly and frequently about the lack of communal and easily accessible space on this campus—should take a hold of the ample resources. But the most valuable resource that the center is consuming is its physical space, and convincing students to use it will require some active recruiting on the part of the center’s staff.

In the meantime, embrace freshmanesque memories, and head to Canaday. The coffee is great.