After all, why would they? The Women’s Center has been touted over the years as everything from a “safe space” to a “community-building resource center.”
The first appellation rings hollow because of its less than truthful implication that Harvard at large is somehow unsafe or threatening.
The other perhaps seems more appropriate, but equally unnecessary. Here we are in the 21st century and in case you hadn’t received the memo, women are now men’s profound equals in the academy—indeed, more than equals in some instances, like in the matter of what qualifications one must possess to be admitted into graduate study in the sciences.
Remember those halcyon days when feminism had something to fight for, like the segregation of the sexes between Radcliffe and Harvard? Over the past six decades, the campus has seen that distinction weaken and slowly slip into the realm of history. In the beginning, courses and housing became gender-integrated. And by the 1990s, the only remaining distinction—the name on the degrees women and men were awarded—was eliminated.
So when the feminist Radcliffe Union of Students (RUS) resurrected its proposal for a women’s center in 2004—riding on the coattails of Larry Summers’ consequence-rich gaffe, which the group claimed was merely the exposed tip of his “anti-woman-agenda” iceberg—their justification seemed an about-face in logic.
“For over a century,” read the report RUS issued that year, “women at Harvard enjoyed a huge amount of physical space designated as theirs.” That this was no longer so made it “vitally necessary” for the College to secure and finance a “female-controlled space.”
Guys, guys, that’s what you were fighting against, remember?
RUS’s 2004 report contains other amusing highlights—my favorite is a description of the psychic oppression women must bear when attending class and living in lecture halls and dorms named after men — but none of them quite seems, how shall we say, reasonable?
RUS called for a center in the Quad—where well-intentioned plans go to die—and their overall vision for the center was underwhelming.
The remedy to places with masculine names? Why, of course, locking glass cases featuring rotating displays about the history of women at Harvard. (I think my local library in Montana has the same type of approach to celebrating Black History Month).
And there was to be a filing cabinet, brimming with gender-related internships; and a rack with a full stock of the usual self-help pamphlets; and a rec room replete with “a hammock...where students could congregate and idle away the afternoon.”
The report induced a good deal of eye-rolling: Not only was the center’s raison d’être dubious, but the proposed floor plan was incorrigibly lame.
The good news is that when College administrators okayed the women’s center last year, they seem to have injected a healthy dose of reality and vision into the plans.
A Women’s Center relegated to the campus’s periphery was sure to be a failure, so College administrators instead evicted The Independent from its long-time office and installed the Women’s Center in the basement of Canaday B.
To entice undergraduates to visit, the place is overflowing with give-aways: free coffee and tea in 15 varieties, free photocopying and printing, a fridge full of free food, free Women’s Center travel mugs, free stylized Post-It notes. There’s an iPod deck, and a plasma, flat-screen television is on its way.
The center has two full-time staffers and 10 paid interns. The center spent at least a couple thousand dollars on its opening reception—eschewing Harvard University Dining Services catering and hiring a private, “socially conscious” professional caterer. Its annual budget easily reaches into six digits.
For those who worried that the Women’s Center would just be another way of describing a College-funded clubhouse for RUS, reality has put this rest to doubt. Susan B. Marine, the center’s director, is adamant that people of “all genders” and political persuasions are welcome. The warm and receptive treatment I’ve met with in three, prying visits over the past week makes a strong case for taking that claim seriously.
But what hasn’t much improved is the reasoning behind the center these days.
As told by deans, the center’s director, and its paid interns alike, the logic goes something like this: Students have been advocating for the center for 30 years, and there must be a reason for that, no? And when pressed for specifics—Well, just look at the imbalance between men and women on the Undergraduate Council (UC).
Color me underwhelmed, especially so given that at one of the first formal meetings held in the Women’s Center—to encourage women to run for UC, as it happens—total attendance amounted to five people. And one of these was male.
We’ll just have to wait and see if future programming—including a meditation seminar, a discussion of spirituality and womanhood, and movie nights—draws a bigger crowd. But when it comes right down to it, it seems to be the center’s insurmountable flaw that women today simply do not need it. And no amount of money or wise direction can change what is a fundamentally bad idea into so pivotal a center.
Travis R. Kavulla ‘06-‘07. a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Mather House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.
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