Women Do Need A Center

For the bulk of its history, Harvard has been run by and for men, with women relegated to the margins. Despite what we like to think, the campus is far from woman-friendly today. The new women’s center is a badly needed first step in changing this, and, in addition, it will have many practical benefits for the entire student body.

A few historical anecdotes illustrate Harvard’s male-centrism. Prior to 1967, Radcliffe women were excluded from Lamont library. Throughout the 1970s, male students outnumbered women by a ratio upwards of three to one. The 1999 merger of Radcliffe College with Harvard caused the disappearance of both the financial support and the space Radcliffe provided for female students. A particularly large loss was the Lyman Common Room in Radcliffe Yard, which served as a de facto women’s center and left Harvard as the only Ivy League institution without a comparable space. Even as recently as 2002, Harvard changed its crime reporting rules, making proving a rape accusation nearly impossible–a change that was widely protested and later overturned.

The “add women and stir” approach that the University has thus far taken in regard to gender integration has failed to adequately address women’s needs or create full equality on campus. Some have suggested that final clubs and the lack of female friendly social space are the real root of gender inequality. While this is certainly part of the problem, the truth goes much deeper than the lackluster social scene. Consequently, women at Harvard need a center that will serve three main purposes.

First, the center will centralize women’s and gender resources. Harvard already has a patchwork of different resources that serve women’s specific needs, but they are often dispersed in the basements of houses and uncoordinated. For instance, there are many peer mentoring programs that help students deal with a slew of gender-related issues, yet these programs do not work with each other or with the University-sponsored programs that attempt to do the same thing.

Centralization will have two main advantages. First, the women’s center will provide infrastructure to network similar groups and improve the efficiency of existing resources. This is the same type of role that the Phillips Brooks House Association does for community service organizations and the Harvard Foundation does for cultural groups.

Another advantage of centralization is that it will provide a portal for women’s related issues. This will improve public relations and outreach for these groups. It will also make finding and using Harvard’s women and gender-related resources easier. This is a big problem on campus, as evidenced by the fact that the women, gender, and sexuality studies program constantly fields calls from people trying to get information on women’s issues and resources at Harvard when it is an academic program, not a resource center.

The second role of the women’s center will be institutionalizing support for women. Women on campus today constitute half of the student body, yet generations of exclusion, separation, and marked inferiority do not disappear immediately. The new women’s center, run by and for women and their supporters, will be a symbolic “room of our own,” a place where women who otherwise feel like the “outsiders” will feel at home. On the practical side, the center will provide a “safe space” for women to go when they have been harassed, assaulted, or otherwise harmed or discriminated against because of their gender.

Third, the women’s center will institutionalize support for women’s groups. In 2001, a little-known report was written by Harvard undergraduates calling for, among other things, a women’s center to provide space, assistance, and institutional support for undergraduate women’s groups. The report found that women’s groups, only one of which had office or meeting space, were constrained in their ability to reach students, hold meetings in a central location, keep records, and pass the knowledge and work of their groups along to the next generation of leaders. The new women’s center will provide institutional means that fix all of these problems currently faced by women’s groups.

In 1869, University President Charles W. Eliot said, “The corporation will not receive women as students…because the world knows next to nothing about the natural and mental capacity of the female sex.” We have left behind this primitive idea but have not stepped up to demonstrate our commitment to respecting women by making institutional changes to welcome them. A women’s center isn’t going to fix all of the sexism at Harvard, but change has to start somewhere, and the women’s center is a long-overdue beginning.

Dara F. Goodman ’07 is a government concentrator in Dunster House and Chair of the Radcliffe Union of Students. Shuana L. Shames ’01 is former co-chair of the Radcliffe Union of Students.