HISTORY LESSON: The Evolution of the Women's Center

Long before it was renamed in 2020, Haverford College’s Center for Gender Resources and Sexual Education (GRASE) was founded as the Women’s Center. The on-campus resource dedicated to supporting women dealing with gender-based discrimination and violence opened its doors in spring 1982.

The need for such a facility arose from a series of events that occurred soon after Haverford went fully coed in fall 1980. After classes started, multiple women reported being sexually assaulted on campus by men. What became known as the “Barclay Incident” occurred that October, forcing a community conversation about just what is and is not consensual sex. Amid a firestorm of protest and debate in the Bi-College News, the case resulted in the College’s first joint student-administration disciplinary panel.

The following March, an organization known as the Association for Women’s Concerns wrote a letter to President Robert Stevens requesting the creation of a women’s center “with a sizeable budget for programming” led by a director who would report directly to Stevens. The purpose was not to “segregate women” but to provide support for them, said the letter writers, noting that “Haverford’s history of sexual harassment of women and the degrading attitudes toward women … point out the urgency for every office of the college to work toward the improvement of the status of women here.”

Formally established in 1981, the Women’s Center opened in the basement of the Dining Center in spring 1982 with one staff member, four work-study students, and a start-up budget of $2,500. Its first director, Marilou Allen, was also director of Eighth Dimension, Haverford’s community outreach program, and she held both positions until her retirement in 2015. Allen helped create a campus space focused on issues of gender, sexuality, and women’s rights with a growing library that became an all-College resource. Early organized events included letter-writing campaigns in support of the Equal Rights Amendment, lunchtime “brown bag” talks, a book of the month discussion series, self-defense workshops, and a “Sapphire Concert Series.” Throughout those early years, the Women’s Center brought prominent feminist scholars and artists to campus, and sponsored performances by Sweet Honey in the Rock and the Indigo Girls.

In a 1987 report, Allen recalled that the center’s first years included “some very bad times.” Reported Allen, “doors and posters were defaced, letters were sent to the center with very vicious statements in them, the staff was accused of being lesbian troublemakers … and there was a time when Security was asked to keep an eye on staff who worked late…”

Through its first two decades, the center continually sought to increase its reach and appeal, hosting a Women of Color Group and publishing a “Women of Color Anthology” of writings, sponsoring a student assistant hotline to provide support to anyone who had experienced or witnessed a sexual assault, and seeking ways to get a broader audience involved with its work.

Eventually the center moved from the DC to a room in the Whitehead Campus Center, and in 2013 the Women’s Center became the Women*s Center, with an asterisk replacing the apostrophe. According to a newsletter published that year, the asterisk was meant as a “visible footnote” emphasizing that the center “is a resource for all members of the Haverford community, regardless of their sex and gender.” In 2020, another name change, to the Center for Gender Resources and Sexual Education (now located in Stokes Hall), further signaled a renewed mission to “provide resources for all students … to live authentically as well as engage knowledgeably and compassionately with regard to gender and sexuality.”

—Natalie Pompilio