Why We Need Women’s Week

Today marks the last day of Women’s Week, an annual six-day series of events that aim to “celebrate women’s achievements” and explore the role of gender at Harvard and beyond. Co-sponsored by the Harvard College Women’s Center and The Seneca, Inc., Women’s Week offers a diverse array of programs related to womanhood at Harvard, in the United States, and abroad. Women’s week addresses a real need for visible discourse on gender at Harvard: while global feminist movements have been enormously successful in raising public consciousness of gender inequality and equalizing men and women in both the public and private spheres, it is undeniable that there still remain significant social barriers to the realization of full gender equality in the U.S. and abroad.

The admirable work of the organizers of Women’s Week is certainly not unprecedented—Harvard boasts a vibrant history of feminist activism that has resulted in meaningful gains for women of the Harvard community. In 1971, for example, a group of women occupied a Harvard-owned building in protest of gender inequality at the University and ultimately founded The Cambridge Women’s Center. Significantly, the protest commenced on March 8, International Women’s Day, which was also the date of Feminist Coming Out Day, a Women’s Week event that encouraged students to “come out” as feminists and showcase the diversity of voices that constitute the contemporary feminist movement. It is due in no small part to the work of feminist activism that Harvard has become and will continue to become a more female-affirming university.

Today, thanks to the work of the activists of the 1960s and 1970s, women at Harvard are supported in their endeavors and encouraged to succeed much more than they are in many parts of the country. Harvard women are also uniquely poised to become leaders in a huge diversity of fields and serve as role models to other women across the U.S.

Yet Harvard, as a microcosm of the United States at large, naturally retains many elements of its patriarchal history. Countering gender inequality is particularly challenging today because sexism tends to be expressed in subtler forms. Though female Harvard students are officially granted all of the same privileges and opportunities as male students, the barriers to gender equality are still many, in part because discrimination is much more social than institutional. The significant gender disparity among Undergraduate Council representatives and the continued influence of Harvard’s male-dominated Final Clubs, for example, are both indicative of an insidious form of sexism that cannot be eliminated by protesting institutional policies or appealing to Harvard administrators. In this way, though Women’s Week 2012’s awareness- and discussion-based events represent a kind of activism that is markedly different from that of protesters of the 1960s and 1970s, it can rightfully be understood as a continuation of the feminist activism that shaped Harvard’s history decades ago. Women’s Week’s events span a wide range of relevant and challenging topics—such as gender in children’s literature, succeeding in the workplace, gender in hip-hop, and the concept of virginity—and in doing so explore expectations and representations of women in all areas of society: in popular culture, in the public sphere, and in the private sphere.

Despite the remarkable success of the modern women’s movement, the issues of gender and gender inequality remain as important as ever, and the conversations that have been incited throughout Women’s Week will, we hope, continue to be addressed on Harvard’s campus every week of the year.