Artifacts from Swarthmore College
Peace Collection, Women's Resource Center, and author's
collection.
Photo by George Widman.
By Alisa Giardinelli
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Artifacts from Swarthmore College
Peace Collection, Women's Resource Center, and author's
collection. |
So when Alice Paul celebrated the day on which the 19th amendment was proclaimed law, it was with characteristic flair. A crowd of women gathered outside the ivy-covered National Woman's Party headquarters in Washington, D.C., as Paul unfurled a long, silk banner from the building's second- floor balcony.
Paul stood proudly over the banner--gold, white, and purple with a double row of stars down the middle, representing each of the 36 states that had ratified the amendment. Just days before, she had sewn on the last star--for Tennessee--herself. Among those at her side was Mabel Vernon '06, a good friend from Swarthmore and a fiery public speaker Paul had recruited to run the party's New York operation.
The date of the banner's public unfurling--Aug. 26, 1920.
Eighty years later, the 2000 presidential election marked an anniversary for women that passed with little, if any, fanfare. Alice Paul's contributions, like those of many suffragists, are now largely unknown. But Paul's legacy enjoyed a brief resurgence on Swarthmore's campus in the 1970s when some women students named the newly established women's center for her. The name didn't last, and, although feminism is alive and well among current students, the women's center is no longer its public face on campus. The reasons why say as much about the challenges confronting feminism as they do about the evolution of one of the College's long-standing student organizations.
Feminists in the 1970s--widely considered the movement's "second wave"--had a commitment to social change much the same as their predecessors. But rather than focus on any one issue, as did many suffragists, these activists advocated a broader definition of equality and freedom.
As a student, Christina Crosby '74 was part of the campus group Swarthmore Women's Liberation, and she wrote a column for The Phoenix called "A Feminist Slant." Recalling the Women's Center's origins, Crosby, now a professor of English and women's studies at Wesleyan University, says she and others saw themselves as part of this feminist social movement.
"We were not just in our moment," Crosby says. "We imagined ourselves as part of a tradition of social justice. Those aspirations and imagination are not beyond criticism, but it's very important to honor that effort, excitement, and outrage.
"Yes, outrage--I was pissed off all the time, and I still am," Crosby chuckles. "That's a very motivating emotion."
Crosby explains that the organizing efforts of the African-American students at Swarthmore preceded those of Swarthmore Women's Liberation and showed her and others that movements for social justice could have a lasting impact on academic institutions. "Perhaps it's this commitment to making a more just and equitable world that's the most important link between our youthful feminism of the early 1970s and Alice Paul's work," she says.
The Women's Center, as it was first known in the spring of 1974, consisted of two rooms on Bond's second floor when Mary Rubin '79 arrived at Swarthmore that fall. Her involvement began during her second semester.
According to Rubin, the center was run like a collective, complete with a modest but prized collection of books and articles people could drop in and use. "It's incredible to think now that there weren't any women's studies books in McCabe," she says. "The information sources were so few. It was a big deal to get a subscription to Ms. magazine."
Increasing the services available for women on campus is an example of the kind of work on which students at the center focused their efforts. "Maybe a gynecologist was on campus two hours every month. I'm not sure if birth control was even provided," says Rubin. "And mental health services were ludicrously sparse."
In response, Rubin says the center sponsored a survey to determine women students' views of the quality of what was provided. They then used the results to successfully lobby the Dean's Office for improved services and facilities.
Despite such victories, running the new center was not easy. Rabbi Julie Greenberg '79 served on the center's steering committee with Rubin. "In my early years at Swarthmore," she recalls, "feminism in the country was a divisive and tense issue, and that was reflected in the student groups working on campus. It was not a warm, welcoming place. We were allies with many groups, yet our ideological differences set up social barriers."
The Phoenix describes other kinds of barriers. Numerous editorials and articles from the mid-1970s chronicle the bitter fights over funding the center had with the Student Budget Committee. "There was definitely a backlash from male students who were freaked out," Rubin explains, "especially in the initial years of the center's activities." Despite the difficulties, Rubin, now a philanthropy consultant, is proud of how much effort she devoted to the center. "We worked our guts out," she says. "There was an incredible excitement about doing this work. Our energies were focused on pushing into new territory while also honoring our foremothers."
The foremother they specifically chose to honor was Alice Paul. A dedication ceremony for the center took place on Dec. 5, 1975, at the then-new Lang Music Building. Paul, 90 and living in New Jersey, was invited. Although unable to attend, she was reportedly very pleased by the news.
Alice Paul's Swarthmore connections predate her arrival on campus. She was raised in New Jersey, a descendant of a long line of influential Quakers with ties traceable to William Penn. Among them was William Parry, her grandfather, who shared a spade with fellow College founder Lucretia Mott for the planting of the first trees on campus. Her mother, Tacey Parry Paul, was among the College's first class of students.
Paul decided against English and Latin, then popular majors among women students, to major in biology. However, inspired by political science and economics courses with the legendary Robert Brooks, who arrived her senior year, Paul became interested in social work and earned a grant to work at a settlement house on New York's Lower East Side after graduation.
Her interest in the field took her to England, where she studied economics and sociology. There, she joined the campaign for women's rights led by the charismatic Pankhurst family. The series of arrests, imprisonments, hunger strikes, and forced feedings Paul endured as a result solidified her resolve for the suffrage cause.
Upon returning to the United States in 1910, Paul joined the National American Woman Suffrage Association but soon left to form what became the National Woman's Party. Paul thought it more effective to concentrate suffrage efforts on the national level, as opposed to state, thereby limiting the number of men she and her members needed to successfully lobby for a constitutional amendment. She was also freer to stage the nonviolent protests her peers considered detrimental to their work.
Throughout Paul's life, colleagues and scholars noted her tenacity, her businesslike manner, and her ability to recall the voting records of each member of Congress and then direct lobbying efforts accordingly. A supporter once said of Paul, she "had the quiet of a spinning top."
Several reasons fueled the steering committee's choice of Paul's name for the center. "It was hard to get the center started," Mary Rubin explains, "and then it was immediately under attack. By naming it, we felt like we were institutionalizing it, even though it was a tender, young organization."
Another rationale was the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). "The push to pass the ERA was front and center in the women's movement in the 1970s, and Paul was its architect," Rubin adds. Paul submitted the first version of the amendment to Congress in 1923 and campaigned tirelessly for its passage until her death in 1977.
In addition, an explosion of new scholarship called attention to the role women played in the suffrage and abolition movements. "The idea that 1970s feminism should be seen as a 'second wave' was a new concept," Rubin says. "Uncovering and rediscovering women as political actors and agents of change was terribly important, and choosing her name was a move in that direction."
But perhaps most important was Paul's connection to the College. "It's pretty damn fabulous that one of the major players in American feminism is a Swarthmore alum," Rubin says. "Swarthmore didn't think of itself as a feminist campus, and Paul was part of the heritage that had been ignored and forgotten. We wanted to make that visible to the campus and honor her for what she had done."
In many ways, their efforts worked, and the Alice Paul Women's Center enjoyed increased success. In the 1980s, the center moved to the former Kappa Sigma fraternity house near the tennis courts. The move allowed for more space for the library as well as for a living room and kitchen. The center also obtained funding for paid interns each year and, in 1985, hosted some of the events held during the College's two-week celebration of the 100th anniversary of Paul's birth. These gains marked a high point in the center's history, given the events that soon followed during the early 1990s.
The center's efforts to reach out to other campus women's groups, for instance, were not a new priority but had varying degrees of success. Elizabeth Volz '90, who was an active member before starting a separate pro-choice task force, remembers how conscious she and others were of the need for wider recruitment.
"I can't remember how many times we discussed this, we did it so often," Volz says. "We would ask our roommates, our friends, 'Why didn't you come Sunday night?' We knew we had to better understand why we had the same 20 faces all the time."
Volz remembers these discussions as ongoing self-evaluation. "I was not aware of any outside pressure," she says. "All the pressure was coming from ourselves."
That soon changed. Elsewhere on campus, a wholly different conversation was happening in the fall of 1990. It consisted of provocative, sometimes inflammatory, messages posted on the walls in Parrish Hall that, at first, questioned the all-white male subjects of the portraits in the parlors, then quickly grew to cover race and diversity issues on campus in general (see May 1991 Bulletin).
Some of these discussions on race at the College carried over to an electronic bulletin board the Women's Center had recently started hosting. Libby Starling '92, a center intern at that time, thinks that through the postings to the board, the center became a lightning rod for some of the racial tensions on campus. "We became the symbol of white liberalism at Swarthmore," she says. "The conversation made us feel very defensive."
"The center was not seen as particularly open and diverse," admits Alida Zweidler-McKay '92, who also worked as an intern that year. "It was primarily white, but it was something those of us inside the center were trying to deal with."
"From our perspective, the doors were open," Starling says, "and we didn't fully understand why people of color weren't coming in."
Exacerbated by external criticism, internal conversations on the subject became increasingly tense. "For instance," says Veronica Green Ross '95, an intern in 1991, "someone had an idea and wanted to know how 'women of color' might respond, as if I were the voice for colored women on campus. That's what I resented."
Ross says she did not identify as a feminist when she was hired as an intern and did not leave any more educated about feminism. "I had thought, cool--I'll get a job at the Women's Center," she says, "make some contacts, do some great things, and learn about feminism. But it didn't quite happen that way."
At the time, Ross says she caught a lot of flak from her friends for getting involved at the center at all. "[They] clowned and ridiculed me about it," she says. "They didn't know why I was there."
Another issue complicating recruitment was the center's history--some say reputation--of welcoming women of all sexual orientations. In trying to understand the limits of the center's appeal, members got clear reminders that not all students were comfortable in a space where homosexuality was accepted. "I
didn't care who you slept with," Ross says, "but for many people in the black community, [that kind of] sexuality was taboo. So if you want a black woman to go to a group that's stigmatized for being lesbian, she ain't going."
In contrast were those who thought, perhaps unfairly, that the Women's Center was not welcoming enough. Rebecca France '93 was active in the gay, lesbian, and bisexual student organization; with a friend, she once wrote a "nasty letter" to The Phoenix, criticizing the center for not doing enough for lesbian and bisexual women.
"As an adult, I don't know how real that was," France says today. "In the real world, women of color and lesbian women have often been excluded from the mainstream feminist movement, and that's awful. But at Swarthmore, I sometimes felt like we had all just read an article about some issue and then needed to play it out in our own lives."
How to attract and include women of color is one of many issues that has long been debated within the women's movement. In the early 20th century, some women saw suffrage as a threat to women's influence in partisan politics and campaigned against it.
"There has always been passionate disagreement," says Elizabeth Volz, recently elected to her third term as president of the National Organization for Women's (NOW) New Jersey state chapter. "It is spirited debate that keeps our movement vital and growing. Alice Paul had people who thought her actions were too extreme and who painted a negative picture of her."
Criticism of Paul, including charges of racism and anti-Semitism, resurfaced during the center's discussions about race. "I saw the whole women's movement as racist," Veronica Ross says. "Having Alice Paul's name on the center was like hanging a confederate flag on the door."
Zweidler-McKay says she remembers having several, often difficult discussions about the name. "If someone did a lot for a cause but was not absolutely perfect," she recalls asking, "could you still use her name? [The early 1990s] were pretty harsh times, and the answer kept being no."
The result: Alice Paul's name was quietly dropped, and it became simply the Women's Center.
"Sometimes I'm concerned about the way we treat our heroines," Volz says. "We can be so critical, we forget to acknowledge the good they did. That said, the center went with the right decision to get out of the argument."
Ironically, Volz says one of NOW New Jersey's strongest chapters bears Alice Paul's name. Almost 30 years old and located in Paul's home territory, its members named it for Paul shortly after her death.
"Members of the Alice Paul chapter are very comfortable with the name, including the minority women," Volz says. "Paul's house is in their jurisdiction, and there's a certain amount of pride in that. That overrides any other concerns."
Dropping Alice Paul's name from the Women's Center was one of the relatively simple remedies available to those who wanted to broaden its appeal. Another was moving the center's weekly meetings to Monday nights to avoid conflict with those at the Black Cultural Center. More substantive change, at least initially, proved difficult.
"Some of the tensions were around different ways of being an advocate or activist for women," Starling says. "[They] mirrored the same tensions between the historically white feminist movement and the womanist movement led by women of color."
"The idea of not being a feminist center, and instead [being] a center for multiple points of view, was difficult for some of us to imagine," says Zweidler-McKay. "If you recall the early '90s, feminism was seeing a backlash. We faced dwindling participation and involvement, but many of us who were active in the center were reluctant to give up [that] feminist identity."
Although small consolation, Starling agrees that those issues she and others dealt with were not unique to Swarthmore. "A lot of what we were experiencing was probably the growing pains of feminism," she says. "The battles and victories of the 1960s and 1970s had been won, at least to some degree. The early 1990s were a time of feminism needing to identify new battles and restructure the playing fields."
Efforts to build new student interest in the center took time but ultimately paid off. Their culmination occurred in the spring of 1993, when the Women's Center hosted a well-attended Collection for all women on campus. Although it included brief presentations by more than a dozen different campus women's groups, the main topic of conversation was the center itself.
"People were getting involved, so it was a good thing," says Miriam Greenwald '94, who had been an intern the previous year. "[But] people who were not involved in the center were discussing what was wrong with it. This is always frustrating."
The Collection lasted several hours. At its dramatic height, the center's three current interns--Asahi Pompey '94, Emily Walker '96, and Bethany Wiggin '94--stood up and said they thought the center was ineffective. Then they resigned.
"It's the reason I took the job--to change it," says Pompey, now a member of the Board of Managers. "It was really not living up to its name. We wanted groups and ideas to breed and incubate there, then be disseminated to the larger community."
"I didn't know this was coming, and I don't think a lot of people knew," says Kathryn Bowman Grisbacher '94, who was in attendance. "They basically said, 'You guys take it and do something with it.'"
After the meeting, Grisbacher and a few others volunteered to form a transition team. Over the next year, they held several campuswide votes that addressed questions such as whether there should be a board and who should be on it. The process raised many of the same issues that had been stumbling blocks in the past. According to Assistant Dean and Gender Education Adviser Karen Henry '87, a proposal submitted by Women of Color, a campus group of students, faculty, and staff, suggested that making the center apolitical was a good way to ensure it could serve all women on campus.
"We didn't have racial or sexual orientation 'quotas,'" Grisbacher says. "There were political things about the language, so we had 'minimums.' The next spring, we had a week of activities leading up to the election of a board. Nine women were elected, including about three women of color and three queer women."
"I got involved out of a sense that this was important," says Eman Quotah '95, who was among those elected. "I was interested in how the center might become something bigger than what it was."
"There was a lot of division, and it would have been very easy to let it drop," Grisbacher says. "It was gratifying to see it come together. After I graduated, I was really pleased to hear there was a fresh group of women with lots of energy [and that] things were going well."
In the process of reinvigorating the Women's Center, another name change took place. The new board was elected to run the renamed Women's Resource Center (WRC). "A resource center was more accurate for what we had in mind--a space for lots of different groups to get together, share a computer, a library, a kitchen," Grisbacher says. "Changing the name was an easy change to make."
Today, the only apparent connection the WRC has to its former namesake is limited to a third-floor shelf with two framed but unlabeled pictures of Alice Paul during her heyday with the National Woman's Party. Given students' lack of institutional memory, perhaps it is not surprising that Paul's legacy is as obscure now as it was before its mid-1970s resurrection.
When told of the center's name changes, those involved in its founding sympathized with the students who made them. "Those questions about the limitations of '70s and '80s feminism and trying to rename the center are really important," Christina Crosby says. "If the students wanted something that didn't signify white, middle-class feminism, I can understand getting a name that suggests a different feminist tradition."
"It's a strategy question," Mary Rubin agrees. "What is going to draw women to the center--some set of services or useful resources or a locus for collective action? Those are very different characterizations."
Unfortunately, neither of these conceptions captures the present-day WRC. Its current mission statement describes its board as a "nonpartisan organization" that, rather than taking particular stances on issues, "initiates and facilitates discussion and events concerning women." Drawing women, feminist or not, to the WRC remains a challenge, as is determining what to draw them to.
By broadening its mission in order to attract women with a wide variety of political and social views, some students, including former board members, think the center has lost the strong sense of direction that galvanized its members in the first place. Although the WRC's mission closely resembles the center's original intent of being a place for all women on campus, the lack of a clear identification with feminism poses the question: Can a designated space for women be apolitical, and should it even try to be?
The answer depends on whom you talk to. "A lot of politics can make some students feel unwelcome," says board member Siobhan Carty '01, a psychology and history major. "I feel a board with eclectic politics and values can better serve the community."
"I think the board should have a more defined purpose and take a more political and feminist standpoint," counters board member and Honors biology major Tanyaporn Wansom '02. "I think that you can have something by just being women, but it can be so much more when you have similar beliefs and are fighting for a cause."
The current state of the WRC contrasts sharply with other centers and groups at the College, most noticeably with the Swarthmore African American Student Society and the Black Cultural Center, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary with a year's worth of events. Both centers--albeit with different origins and goals--were founded within a few years of each other, but the differences in their vibrancy could not be more striking.
"Our political dreams for a comprehensive center didn't happen, but it was a consolidation of feminism at Swarthmore," Crosby says. "That's an achievement, and it's a real triumph that it still exists."
"Nobody knows what we do or what we're supposed to be doing," says Wansom. "A lot of times, I don't have a clear idea myself and often bring it up during meetings. I think the WRC is making progress, but I believe it could have a much larger presence on campus."
Whether the WRC can achieve a presence on campus similar to or even greater than what it once had is difficult to predict. The center has proven it can reinvent itself. Can it revitalize itself as well?
Women Organize: Somerville, Sororities, and Student Government
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