Women Dominate Campus Activism

The voice of activism heard on campus this semester was overwhelmingly female.

From isolated incidents to long-range calls for a Harvard community based on equality and openness, feminist commentary dominated campus discourse.

The most visible activism took place in the wake of a rape of a Harvard employee in a Science Center office one December afternoon. More than 150 students--mostly women--marched through the Yard and to the Science center the day after the incident.

The rape victim spoke to the marchers, asserting that campus safety needed to be improved. The Harvard University Police Department later upgraded security at the Science Center.

Later in the month, organizers at the Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW)--which now represents a support staff that is 83 percent female--said that campus safety could become a bargaining issue when the University and HUCTW sit down for their first contract negotiations. Adding safety to HUCTW's longstanding advocacy for better child care services indicates that the union's agenda will be weighted heavily toward women's issues.

But beyond mobilizing around single issues such as campus security, Harvard felt the stirrings of more long-term feminist activism as a Women's Alliance formed to unite women's students groups on campus. The founders of the Women's Alliance have an issue--the lack of women on Harvard's faculty--but they say that the group will formulate its agenda around the broad spectrum of campus women's issues.

The newly formed Women's Alliance--and the Minority Students Alliance (MSA) from which women activists say they have taken their cue--will have its hands full in the next month responding to the forthcoming Verba Report on affirmative action in the faculty. The product of a high-level faculty committee's deliberations over the past semester, the report is expected to be released sometime in the next few weeks.

Members of the committee, which is chaired by Prorzheimer University Professor Sidney Verba '53, have been closemouthed about the group's deliberations, but the panel has nonetheless generated controversy among students throughout the fall. MSA members charged that the faculty panel's potential impact was diluted by the inclusion of women faculty members in Verba's mandate. And the Women's Alliance announced it would try to insure that women were property considered in the forthcoming report.

Another elite corps also felt the pressure of women's activism. The nine all-male final clubs once again were the object of debate in the dining halls and in the Undergraduate Council. This time around the council took a stand, calling on the clubs to admit women. Meanwhile, the gender discrimination suit against the Fly Club filed more than a year ago with the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination dragged on.

But regardless of the outcome of the case, it is clear that women's voices--on a variety of issues--will continue to be heard.