1969 marked the first year that Yale College began admitting women. That fall, 540 women, including both first-year students and transfer students, enrolled in Yale College. A year later, in the fall of 1970, the first feminist group at Yale was formed. Known as the Sisterhood, the group’s first meeting laid out an agenda that included starting a women’s rock band, lifting existing quotas on the number of female students admitted by Yale, and expanding the fledgling Women’s Studies program. Soon after, the Women’s Center was founded. Throughout the 1970s, the Center grew, and new residence groups were established; in 1978s, the first group for feminists of color, the Council of Third World Women, was founded. The Women’s Center became a hub of feminist activism: students fought to expand reproductive health services, including abortion, at the University Health Services; organized in solidarity with Local 34 workers on strike; and filed a federal sexual harassment lawsuit against Yale. Throughout the 1980s, the annual Take Back the Night march drew hundreds of Yale students.

Today, the Women’s Center continues working on issues at the heart of earlier feminist battles, from sexual violence to reproductive justice. Our mission remains the same: to serve as a “safe space” for all women at Yale, to “enable all students on campus to find their feminist voices,” and to organize in solidarity with other activist groups “to achieve broad social change.” We are a large and diverse community that includes a seven-member student board, a team of student staffers, and a coalition of residence groups working on feminist and queer issues.In 2010-11, the Women’s Center has unfolded a series of new initiatives to build feminist community at Yale, including a series of Open Forums on feminist issues at Yale; the launch of a men’s feminist group; social events like screenings of feminist films; a reading group that discussed selections from Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape; and a series of dinner-discussions on issues impacting women in different communities at Yale, from Muslim communities to sororities. We’ve also organized a number of campus-wide events, including Intimate Partner Violence Awareness Week, a workshop on sexual culture at Yale (“Do You Want to Have Sex?”), and a talk on the importance of a feminist movement that embraces intersecting issues and identities with Miriam Zoila Pérez, editor of Feministing.com, the most widely-read feminist blog. Finally, we organized a group of students to attend Hampshire College’s Reproductive Justice conference, one of the largest activist conferences in the country.

In addition, we’ve worked with a diverse range of student groups to organize projects and events that spark discussion and action on issues of gender and sexuality at Yale, in New Haven, and around the world. We helped organize a rally to protest the federal de-funding of Planned Parenthood. We co-sponsored a women’s work day at the Yale Farm and a panel discussion, “Women’s Work: Farm and Table.” During the LGBTQ Co-op’s Trans/Gender Awareness Week 2010 and Pride Month 2011, we co-sponsored several exciting events, from a lecture by trans feminist Julia Serano to a self-defense workshop for LGBTQ students to a talk with the founder of the popular blog Effing Dkyes. In collaboration with the Yale Afghanistan Forum, we organized a talk with Sunita Viswanath, the co-founder of Women for Afghan Women, on the status of feminist organizing in Afghanistan. And we co-sponsored a workshop with MEChA de Yale called “How to Be a Modern Revolutionary,” featuring Yale alumnae working for change through community organizing, writing and art, and academia.

The Women’s Center does not intend to speak for all women at Yale, nor for all feminists at Yale: we recognize that feminism takes many forms on this campus. But we do aim to ask provocative questions about gender and sexuality, to foster vibrant activism that advances social justice, and to build an inclusive, creative feminist community at Yale.

Natalia Thompson, Yale College 2013