Rethinking the Historical Roots of Women's Centers: Deans of Women, Continuing Education for Women (CEW), or Feminist Activism?

• In Event: Complicating the Past, Present, and Futures for Feminist Spaces in Higher Education

Abstract

This paper explores and challenges the disparate origin stories for U.S. campus-based women's centers. Most commonly linked with second-wave feminist activism in the 1960s and 1970s, this narrative minimizes the importance of deans of women and the continuing education for women movement as precursors and concurrent origins of women's centers. It also relegates the origins of women's centers to decades past, neglecting the complicated beginnings of more recently founded centers and centers founded at historically Black colleges and universities. This paper puts these multiple histories in conversation with each other to envision a more complicated and pluralistic origin story.

Presenter

• Amber L. Vlasnik, Wright State University