Content Warning: The following timeline includes mentions of sexual violence and discrimination. Please skip this timeline if that content feels too heavy for you right now. Should you want to talk with someone about this timeline or other matters related to interpersonal violence or mental health, please reach out to PWC.
Now in our fiftieth year, Penn Women’s Center (PWC) is one of the oldest campus women’s centers in the country — we owe our existence to those courageous enough to protest in 1973, but also to generations following that have sustained our mission through advocacy.
Title IX, Roe v. Wade, and the Federal Mandate for Equity
The activism trail blazed by Penn students and faculty unfolded alongside a pivotal moment in American federal policy. In June 1972, Congress passed Title IX of the Civil Rights Act, stating that, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from he participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” For the first time, institutions like Penn faced legal accountability for inequities that had been named already in the Cohn Report – such as faculty hiring, admissions, athletics, and access to resources. Title IX propelled the women’s movement forward.
Two months before the sit-in took place at College Hall, the Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. Constitution protected a woman’s liberty to choose to have an abortion based on the implication of a right to privacy in the 14th Amendment. This decision rocked the women’s rights movement at the time. Although the sit-in was focused on campus safety and the acquisition of resources for rape victims, the decision in Roe v. Wade gave momentum to the cause.
The passage of laws and creation of court precedents did not automatically transform the campus, as enforcement was slow and contested. When 200 women occupied College Hall the following spring, they were acting within a new legal landscape – one in which Penn’s obligations to its women and faculty were no longer a matter of goodwill alone.
1973: The Sit-In That Started It All
In early April of 1973, 200 women at Penn staged a four-day anti-rape sit-in inside College Hall to protest the administration’s response to a series of rapes on and around campus. Their list of demands were concrete: hire more female doctors and security personnel, install more lighting and emergency phones, offer free self-defense courses, improve the process for reporting sexual assault, and establish a campus women’s center. As negotiator Dr. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg stated at the end of the demonstration, “We got everything we wanted, plus more.”
The Cohn Report and WEOUP
The fight for equity amongst women began earlier. In 1969, a committee led by Dr. Mildred Cohn recognized severe gender disparities throughout the University. Across Penn, women made up only 7 percent of faculty members and 14 departments had none at all. When the University failed to respond to the report, five women faculty members — Phoebe Leboy, Helen Davies, Madeleine Joullie, Phyllis Rackin, and Mildred Cohn — formed Women for Equal Opportunity at the University of Pennsylvania (WEOUP). The organization was committed to equality in campus life and became the voice of the women’s activist community.
Dr. Rackin joined the English department in 1962. Despite receiving a majority vote to receive tenure, Rackin was denied a promotion. She pursued a sex discrimination lawsuit against Penn in 1973 and won, reinstating her as a professor with tenure.
Dr. Cohn joined the Medical School as an associate professor of biophysics and physical biochemistry department in 1960. Cohn was deeply involved with the advancement of women at Penn, as she served as the chairperson for the ad hoc Committee on the Status of Women in 1970.
Dr. Smith-Rosenberg joined Penn in the 1960s as an instructor in the College of General Studies. In 1972, she received a joint appointment in the history and psychiatry departments, making Smith-Rosenberg one of few women across the Ivy League institutions to hold such a position. She was a key negotiator alongside Carol Tracy during the College Hall Sit-In in 1973 and became a central figure in the founding of the Women's Studies program at Penn. From 1982 to 1995, Smith-Rosenberg served as one of the early directors of the Women's Studies program.
The spring of 1973 marked a profound time for student activism on college campuses. As the United States military officially withdrew combat troops from Vietnam earlier that March, a seasoned generation of campus anti-war protestors suddenly pivoted their strategic focus inward. The infrastructure of student resistance — which had mastered the art of building takeovers and mass rallies throughout the late 1960s — was rapidly adopted by a rising feminist coalition. Crucial to this momentum was the cultural influence of radical feminist poet Robin Morgan, whose campus visit in April 1973 deeply inspired Penn women to translate their growing fury into organized, direct action.
The epicenter for this radical planning was in the basement of the Christian Association building on Penn’s campus. This meeting spot served as a hotspot for grassroots organizing, bringing together a coalition of students, community activists, and campus staff. Among them was a powerful, clandestine network of university secretaries exchanging information. Of this group, Carol Tracy was a secretary, undergraduate student, union organizer, and president of Women for Equal Opportunity at Penn (WEOUP). These staff members were uniquely positioned to act as intermediaries of giving and receiving intel within their departments.
Leading up to the sit-in, women gathered in the basement of the Christian Association to debate which issues will be prioritized. After weighing the establishment of a women’s studies program and unequal employment amongst other issues, the trajectory of the protest was solidified by activist and artist Jody Pinto — a founder of Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR). As the group debated what their demands would include, Pinto stated, “You have one issue. It’s rape. Stick with that issue.” Recognizing the undeniable urgency for physical safety, Tracy and the organizers agreed to streamline their focus, resolving to press exclusively on rape and campus safety.
While junior women scientists on campus who had been previously involved with organizing supported the list of demands, they were consumed by writing grants and faced the risk of being denied tenure if they publicly engaged in radical feminist politics. Consequently, the heavy lifting of institutional confrontation fell to the head negotiators of the sit-in: Carol Tracy and history professor Dr. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg.
On the afternoon of April 3, 1973, two hundred women gathered on the College Green for a rally to bring awareness to Penn’s lack of action taken to address a series of recent rapes. Following the rally, they marched directly into College Hall Room 200. This large auditorium was a well-known battleground on campus, having been used many times before for anti-war sit-ins and student protests. Fifty-five women slept inside overnight, vowing to remain until Penn met their demands: installing campus lighting, extending night bus hours, hiring more women in security and medical roles, and establishing both a safety task force and a dedicated women’s center.
As reported in the Daily Pennsylvanian, many protestors felt that this sit-in was necessary to feel safe. One protestor, Debra Hania, remarked: “When we’ve looked to men for protection, protection has not been coming.” During the tense standoff, Dr. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg read a statement to the crowd, clarifying that the protest’s purpose was to “to impress upon the administration the deep concern and fear felt by women of the University”, rather than to place them in an adversarial position.
The strategic clarity of Pinto’s “one issue” mandate worked. Faced with an occupied historic auditorium and an unyielding coalition of secretaries, faculty, and students, Penn safety personnel capitulated, committing to founding safety task forces and allocating funds for lights, alarms, extended shuttle routes, and safety escorts. By enacting these measures in 1973, Penn became one of the first universities in the countries to systematically address campus sexual violence.
Released a week after the College Hall sit-in, this issue of the weekly Almanac detailed the administration’s immediate blueprint for implementing the safety demands raised by protesters across campus. As a direct result of intense negotiations, Penn formally established the Committee to Implement and Monitor Measures to Improve Security for Women, creating an institutional mechanism through which the new policies could be coordinated and evaluated. The administration also agreed to improve lighting across campus, extend the hours and stops of bus routes, and seek out a security specialist specifically concerned with women’s safety.
On the second page, a detailed map explicitly highlighted the future locations of emergency phones and campus bus stops. A new escort service was also established to accompany students, faculty, and staff to destinations on campus or to the closest bus stop. These measures demonstrate how quickly demands that had originated with feminist activists were translated into changes to Penn’s physical infrastructure. Safety was no longer framed solely as an individual’s responsibility to avoid dangerous situations; the university was beginning to acknowledge that the design and operation of the campus itself could contribute to vulnerability.
The administration also deliberately framed safety as a collective responsibility. The Vice President of Facilities Management wrote, “The recent attacks on women have greatly emphasized the need for safety precautions by all of us. By taking the time to see to each other’s safety, we can all greatly increase our own.” This language is notable because it positioned the problem of sexual violence as a community concern rather than solely a women’s issue. At the same time, the policies themselves recognized that women experienced particular vulnerabilities in navigating campus and the surrounding city.
President Martin Meyerson likewise released a formal statement reassuring the University community of Penn’s immediate action plans. To scale up these efforts, Meyerson announced a partnership with Drexel’s security personnel and ongoing negotiations with SEPTA for extended transportation hours. He also noted that the city was working with Penn to install additional emergency phones and lighting. This municipal collaboration highlights a significant shift in Penn’s relationship with Philadelphia. As campus boundaries became increasingly fluid in the early 1970s, student safety could not be addressed solely within the University’s gates. Transportation, lighting, policing, and public infrastructure all became part of the university’s responsibility.
The speed with which these measures appeared is particularly significant. Penn did not simply respond to the sit-in with symbolic statements; it committed to tangible changes in its physical environment and institutional procedures. The episode illustrates the capacity of student activism to reshape university policy when protestors successfully transformed an individual tragedy into a broader argument about institutional responsibility.
It also reveals a larger transformation occurring across American higher education during the 1970s. Feminist activists were increasingly challenging universities to recognize sexual violence as an institutional problem requiring prevention, survivor services, and structural reforms. Penn’s emergency phones, escort services, lighting improvements, and transportation changes anticipated practices that would become increasingly common on college campuses in subsequent decades.
The Almanac therefore documents a pivotal moment in the PWC’s early history: feminist activism was beginning to change not only the policies of the University, but the physical landscape of campus itself. The safety measures announced here established a precedent that Penn would continue to build upon as its understanding of institutional responsibility for gender-based violence evolved.
Published seven months after the College Hall Sit-In, this early issue of Penn Women’s News captures a pivot toward the academic legitimacy of women’s studies. The writers emphasize the importance of women being more involved in providing input on the direction of the newly emerging women’s studies program at Penn. This push mirrors a massive national debate within Second Wave Feminism throughout the 1970s over whether the discipline should exist in its own radical, independent space or integrate into traditional, conservative departments. At the helm of this local effort was the Governing Board for Women, which organized three distinct task forces that students could become involved with: Curriculum Development, Foundation Proposing, and CTS (College of Thematic Studies) Programming.
The newsletter utilized popular culture to mirror its radical perspective on women’s rights and issues. On the second page of the issue, a four panel cartoon from the Washington Post features a woman and a reappearing character, Doonesbury, having a conversation. After the woman character asks Doonesbury if what she just explained made sense, Doonesbury patronizingly responds, “Well, of course. I’m not totally insensitive, you know I agree completely that women are equal to men in all respects.”
The comic delivers its punchline in the final panel, with the woman sharply correctly him: “No, no, Doonesbury! You missed my point entirely! Women aren’t equal… we’re better.”
This issue heavily highlights the College of Thematic Studies (CTS). Established in 1971, the CTS was the first college at Penn to offer the major in Women’s Studies beginning in January 1973. At the time, other institutions such as Cornell University, San Diego State University, and the College of Staten Island began paving the way for other universities to create women’s studies majors. A vital figure behind the creation of the women’s studies program at Penn was Dr. Elsa Greene, previously a professor in American Studies at the University of Minnesota. In September 1973, the University appointed her as the first academic coordinator for the program. Greene would become a leading figure in professionalizing the field of women’s studies. Three years after her appointment, she published “The Case for a National Women’s Studies Association” arguing that establishing a unified National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) would foster future feminist scholarship and boost the power of their coalition.
Each year, the CTS structured its entire course catalog around a singular, multidisciplinary theme. As celebrated in the newsletter, CTS selected “Women” as its core theme for the second consecutive year. Though this radical, experimental space was eventually dissolved in 1975 during a broader university-wide consolidation of undergraduate colleges, its early catalog remains a testament to Penn’s early adoption of women’s studies.
The issue closes on a deeply personal note, dedicating its final pages to student creative writing selections that explore raw themes of personal growth, psycholigical resilience, and institutional exclusion.
In response to Playboy magazine’s targeted corporate campaign to recruit undergraduate women across the Ivy League to pose for a “Women of the Ivy League” photo spread in 1979, women at Penn and sister institutions launched campus counter-protests. This corporate exploitation effort ignited a massive national debate within the late 1970s Second Wave feminist movement, serving as an early stage for what historians term the “Feminist Sex Wars.” This deep ideological schism pitted anti-pornography activists against sex-liberationist feminists over the politics of commercial erotica and bodily autonomy.
During the Playboy controversy erupting across Ivy League campuses, Penn like its sister institutions mirrored a fierce national divide among feminist theorists of the era. While there were many students who participated in protests against the magazine, many students volunteered to pose for the shoot. Those against Playboy were heavily influenced by anti-pornography radicals like Andrea Dworkin and legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon. They argued that pornography was a primary mechanism of male supremacy, thereby establishing a continuum of violence that subordinated and objectified women. In the opposing camp, sex-positive feminist theorists such as Gayle Rubin and Audre Lorde cautioned against aligning with conservative moral panics and that reclaiming the “erotic as power” meant that women could exercise agency over their bodies and pleasure.
Carol Tracy, the director of Penn Women’s Center at the time, released a statement on February 22, 1979 on the controversy. In the statement, Tracy stated that although public demonstrations opposing Playboy are giving the magazine publicity, it had also “rekindled more feminist activity on this campus than any other single issue in the past few years.” Students were facilitating discussions about sexual exploitation and objectification of women. As Tracy sharply concluded, “Playboy, through this sales campaign, has done a lot to raise the consciousness of a new generation of college women.”
The resistance quickly led to boots-on-the-ground protest. On the morning of February 22, 1979, Carol Tracy and Judy Leventhal, a senior and Penn Women’s Alliance coordinator, organized a demonstration outside the University City Hilton Hotel, where Playboy photographer David Chan was staying to shoot for the photo spread. Eighty women and men converged on the sidewalk to disrupt the recruitment process.
Concurrently, Tracy, Leventhal, and Anne Beuf (the Women’s Studies coordinator) submitted a joint letter to the editor of the Daily Pennsylvanian advised for women not to pose for Playboy. Instead, the authors urged students to look past immediate financial compensation and evaluate the long-term professional costs they might face in their future careers. Beyond corporate blacklisting, they issued a powerful appear to intersectional solidarity and psychological privacy by writing: “What else is there to consider besides consequences in your life, the rage of your sisters, and being undressed by the eyes of every male co-student who has seen the ‘spread’?”
The letter exposed the deep ideological hypocrisy of Playboy‘s corporate brand. Throughout the 1970s, founder Hugh Hefner had systematically funded progressive legal initiatives, heavily backing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), reproductive healthcare access, abortion rights, and early LGBTQ+ protections to position the magazine as an ally to the left. However, the PWC leadership critiqued the magazine for choosing to profit from from women’s bodies. They close their letter by stating no woman should cooperate with any oppressor, including Playboy.
The Penn Women’s Center’s first annual report from 1973-1974 offers a rare glimpse of the PWC at the moment when a demand born from feminist protest was becoming a functioning institution.
Created in the aftermath of the April 1973 “Stop Rape” sit-in at College Hall, the Penn Women’s Center was one of several concessions Penn made in response to demands for greater safety and support for women. The protest had called for improved campus security, education, victim services, and the creation of a Women’s Center and Women’s Studies program.
The report’s emphasis on organization and collective decision-making is particularly revealing. Rather than presenting the Center as a conventional administrative office with a defined hierarchy, the report describes a developing institution shaped by staff, work-study students, volunteers, and a Provisional Steering Committee. This structure reflected the influence of second-wave feminism, in which consciousness-raising, collective organizing, and skepticism toward traditional hierarchies were central to feminist political culture. The PWC was being built to provide services and to create a community in which women could collectively identify and address problems.
The breadth of its early work is equally striking. Alongside counseling and referrals, the PWC held programs that provided information about childcare, organized consciousness-raising groups, and offered practical workshops on skills such as carpentry, bicycle maintenance, and automobile repair. These programs reflected a fundamental principle of 1970s feminism: women’s equality required changing both institutions and everyday life.
Safety remained at the heart of the PWC’s mission. The report’s attention to rape and assault and its collaboration with WOAR connected Penn’s new institution to Philadelphia’s emerging feminist anti-rape movement. WOAR itself was founded in 1973 and provided direct services including hospital support, court accompaniment, and a 24-hour hotline. The relationship between the organizations demonstrates that the PWC became part of a broader regional network responding to sexual violence through survivor support, education, and advocacy.
The report also reveals an important tension that would shape the PWC for decades. The PWC existed within the University, yet its priorities emerged from activism that had challenged the University’s treatment of women. Its request for resources and institutional support therefore represented an ongoing negotiation between feminist independence and institutional legitimacy.
The 1973-1974 annual report ultimately captures the PWC before its mission had hardened into a fixed institutional structure. It was still experimental, collective, and responsive to immediate community needs. The document shows that the Penn Women’s Center was never simply a space created by Penn for women; it was an institution won through activism and then continually shaped by the women who used it.
Weeks before the College Hall sit-in, the Penn Women’s News released their sixth issue on March 22, 1973. This issue captures that the program was beginning to take institutional shape. The newsletter’s discussion of a new Steering Committee, student coordinators, faculty collaboration, curriculum development, and grant writing reveals the considerable organizing required to make women’s studies a permanent part of the university.
The document is particularly significant for the way it presents collective organization as a form of feminist practice. Rather than relying on a single director or established department, the emerging program depended on students and faculty taking responsibility for different aspects of its development. Student coordinator Marivonne Basten and others are identified as organizers of specific projects, while the Steering Committee was intended to coordinate this work and establish a more sustainable structure. This reflected a central characteristic of second-wave feminism’s push to challenge traditional hierarchies through collaboration, participation, and collective decision-making.
The push for a Women’s Studies program was also fundamentally an intellectual challenge to the university itself. In the early 1970s, women remained dramatically underrepresented among Penn’s faculty, while scholarship across disciplines often treated male experiences as universal. In 1970, only 7 percent of Penn’s professorial faculty were women, and women held just 2.5 percent of full professorships. Feminists consequently argued that achieving equality required changing not only who attended universities, but what universities taught and whose experiences counted as knowledge.
Penn was part of a rapidly expanding national movement. Women’s Studies programs had begun appearing on American campuses only a few years earlier, and by 1973 there were already hundreds of courses and dozens of programs nationwide. Penn’s own Women’s Studies program began offering an interdisciplinary set of ten courses through the College of Thematic Studies in January 1973, following an earlier proposal for a Department of Women’s Studies developed by the Penn Women’s Studies Planners.
The newsletter’s attention to fundraising is equally revealing. Establishing a new academic field required more than student enthusiasm – organizers had to convince administrators and outside funders that women’s scholarship deserved institutional resources. This became an ongoing feature of Women’s Studies at Penn, which subsequently received grants to develop interdisciplinary courses and expand faculty engagement.
Finally, the newsletter appeared weeks before Penn’s April 1973 sit-in, when students, faculty, and staff demanded both a Women’s Center and a stronger institutional response to sexual violence. The proximity of these events is important. Women’s Studies and the Penn Women’s Center emerged from overlapping feminist activism, addressing how should the university protect women, and how should it transform what the university teaches about them.
The newsletter therefore documents more than the creation of an academic program. It captures the early stages of a broader feminist challenge to Penn – one that sought to transform the university as both a physical institution and a producer of knowledge.
