A Woman's Place is in the Yard

The women’s center that students have long been advocating opened last night, marking another victory for supporters of women’s issues on campus. The long-awaited and oft-debated women’s center opened in the freshly renovated basement of Canaday B, drawing scores of students to tour the new center and listen to 300th Anniversary University Professor Laurel T. Ulrich’s keynote address.

Ulrich, a Pulitzer-Prize winning author, addressed attendees about how women were never “recent arrivals” to Harvard but have been marginalized in the College’s history.

“I want to remind you that well-behaved women seldom make history,” she said.

The new center is staffed by Director Susan Marine—recently lifted from the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response—her assistant, and around 14 paid undergraduate and graduate interns.

“Our focus is to create a welcoming space that is maximally student-friendly and that serves the needs of student organizations on campus, particularly but not exclusively the groups that consider women to be a focus area,” Marine said.

Marine added that the social and educational programming of the center will be designed to raise the visibility of women and women’s issues on campus by engaging the entire Harvard community.

Modeled after the Harvard Foundation for Race and Intercultural Relations, the women’s center serves as an umbrella organization that provides institutional and logistical support, physical space, and sources of funding for women and gender groups on campus.

The women’s center is also the new home of The Ann Radcliffe Trust, a $60,000 a year entity that provides funds to women and gender groups. The trust may soon be renamed the Women’s Center Community Fund, further cementing it’s ties to the new center, according to intern Noa Grayevsky ’07-’08.

The center also plans to pilot a new leadership curriculum before the end of the semester geared towards training groups of students in areas such as goal setting, retreat planning, and outreach. All student organizations will be able to participate on a first-come, first-serve basis including co-ed groups, Marine said.

The center is also equipped with a library of gender-and-sexuality-related works, a conference room, a lounge, a kitchen, and computer stations accessible to all students. The facilities will be open for drop-ins from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m. on weekdays.

Grayevsky said that the January 2005 remarks by former University President Lawrence H. Summers about women in science may have affected the College’s decision to allocate funds towards a women’s center.

“After some of the remarks that were made last year, we had a follow-up meeting with the deans and it seemed like things were getting done more promisingly,” she said.

Money to support the new women’s center comes from the dean’s discretionary fund for undergraduates as well as several endowments and donors, Marine said.

In a show of support for the fledgeling center, Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71 introduced Ulrich.

“This is the first attempt [to establish a women’s center] where the administration and students have worked together over a considerable period of time to formulate a real vision and to commit some real resources,” Gross said at the open house yesterday.


A ROOM OF ONE’S OWN

Though the creation of the new center was viewed as victory for many, attempts to allocate a centralized space for women has lasted for over three decades.

“Three hundred and how many years and now they finally have a women’s center at Harvard?” asked one attendee in the audience at the opening.

In 1971, not long after women were first integrated into Harvard Houses, an ad-hoc group established the College’s first women’s center and library staffed by volunteers in the basement of what is now Pfrozheimer House. Plagued by problems such as insufficient funding and lack of institutional support, the make-shift center shut down in a just few years.

Other attempts in the following three decades were met with similar results.

In 2004, the Radcliffe Union of Students revived the cause and drafted a seven-page proposal lobbying for a women’s center at the Hilles Library in the Radciffe Quandrangle. Endorsed by 15 student groups and support organizations on campus, the report established a case for the “urgent need” of a dedicated space to support the experiences and initiatives of women at the College.

The proposal spurred discussions and in the fall of 2005, the College assembled a search committee, headed by Associate Dean of the College Judith H. Kidd, to select a women’s center director.

That committee chose Marine after a national search in spring of 2006.

—Staff writer Ying Wang can be reached at yingwang@fas.harvard.edu.