Women Disunited

The Radcliffe-Harvard Women's Center is the latest addition to the list of University women's organizations, and, at least in theory, it will accomplish what no previous organization has even attempted: the common involvement of all women affected by the University--undergraduates and graduate students, employees and faculty members, and even women who just live in the Cambridge area.

Organizers of the center say they hope that it will serve both as an informational clearinghouse on women's affairs and "as a pressure group to assure that all women be granted greater rights." The center is sponsoring a variety of projects this fall, including a series of medical self-help groups; a program of informal workshops dealing with such issues as birth control, rape and female sexuality; a course in self-defense; and a number of consciousnessraising groups focusing on personal and political issues.

So far, the center has suffered mainly from a lack of publicity. Tucked away in a tiny room on the second floor of Phillips Brooks House, it is rarely visited by anyone except the women who staff it five days and two evenings a week. Its small but growing collection of feminist literature goes largely unread. Staffers often sit idle, waiting for an occasional phone call.

What publicity there has been has mostly been directed at undergraduates, with the result that women from other segments of the University and from Cambridge are barely represented in the center's activities. Although some faculty members, women employees, law students and graduate students have participated to some extent, the bulk of the 60 or so women involved in the center have been Radcliffe students.

But the center is still young, and there are some organizational problems that have yet to be worked out. Informal staff meetings are held over dinner once a week, when various projects are proposed and discussed at length--some might say endlessly.

"We're hoping all decisions will sort of be collective," says Shanta Driver '75, the founder of the center. "But there's not a whole lot of time when people can get together." When they do get together, discussions are apt to be heated and noisy. Staffers of the center represent a fairly wide range of feminist opinion and sometimes find it difficult to reach a consensus--but most seem to agree that this method of group decision-making, although perhaps relatively inefficient, is worthwhile.

But is yet another women's organization really necessary? Driver thinks it is. "A lot of women I know had expressed a need for a center for women," she says. "And we wanted to involve working women and community women. We've tried to avoid duplicating services that already exist--for instance, we don't do anything on careers, because the OGCP is already doing that."

Driver hopes that the center will help alleviate the sense of isolation that many women feel as members of a Harvard minority group. "Women here have had no organized way of getting together," she says. "Women are scattered, women are few, and that contributes to women not getting together."

Perhaps more than any other Harvard women's organization, the Women's Center has the potential to act as an instrument for getting women together and for furthering their common interests and common needs. Now it's up to the women here to realize that potential.