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.
Within the Penn Women’s Center first decade of operation, the center broke new ground and quickly became a safe haven for students on campus.
“Take Back Our Lives” Protest in 1983
Ten years after the College Hall sit-in, a Penn undergraduate woman attended a party at the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house and was sexually assaulted by men at the party in February 1983. The student reported that five to eight men carried her to one of the upstairs bedrooms of the house where she was raped for an hour. Carol Tracy, the director of the Penn Women’s Center at the time, was the first person that the survivor called after the incident. Once news of the violence circulated, the Penn student body called for the removal of the fraternity from campus. On March 10, 1983, 600 students gathered for a demonstration calling for action to be taken against the fraternity and raise awareness surround violence against women. This protest would be the largest student demonstration in years on Penn’s campus. Following an investigation conducted on Alpha Tau Omega, Penn withdrew their recognition of the fraternity.
Sexual Harassment Survey and Violations to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act in 1985-1986
While the Alpha Tau Omega case exposed overt violence, the University was also forced to confront systemic, everyday hostility. In 1985, Penn conducted a survey on the prevalence of sexual harassment on campus — expanding on similar studies at Harvard — to measure the baseline of the campus climate. The results were staggering, as 35% of undergraduate women reported experiencing sexual harassment on campus, with 33% of that harassment coming directly from other students. Strikingly, zero undergraduate women filed a formal complaint through the University’s existing channels, exposing a total lack of faith in institutional reporting.
In the year following the publishing of the survey, the Supreme Court decided in the case of Meritor Savings Bank v. Vinson that sexual harassment was a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act. With both the local data and new federal backing, the PWC prioritized the safety of women on campus and beyond through offering programming addressed to empower students to defend themselves.
National Coalition Against Sexual Assault Conference in 1989
By the close of the decade, the Penn Women’s Center had evolved from a local crisis sanctuary into a nationally recognized pioneer in the anti-rape movement. In 1989, Penn and local organizations, such as the Philadelphia Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), served as central hubs for National Coalition Against Sexual Assault Conference.
The conference held its 11th annual conference in Philadelphia that centered its panels around the theme of “Diversity, Strength and Freedom: A New Declaration of Independence”. Over the course of a few days in July 1989, 600 participants across the country attended and participated in panels and workshops that focused on the experiences of women of color. Notably, Angela Davis was the keynote speaker at the conference — a prominent activist, scholar, and author of Women, Race and Class (1981). The Penn Women’s Center facilitated workshops over the course of two days to address how rape crisis centers can challenge racism in the workplace and improve care provided to women of color.
Carol Tracy (pictured in middle) earned her B.A. from Penn in 1975 after beginning her career at Penn as a secretary and taking classes in the evening. Tracy was a key negotiator in the College Hall Sit-In in 1973 and continued to advocate for the establishment of a women's studies program and the safety of women across campus. Tracy oversaw the PWC in its beginning years.
Ellie DiLapi graduated from Penn's School of Social Work in 1977. Before becoming the Director of the PWC in 1985, DiLapi was a counselor for Penn's Faculty-Staff Assistance Program, lecturer in the school of Social Work, consultant on staff relations, training coordinator for Planned Parenthood, and director of the Women's Health Concerns Program of Philadelphia.
Gloria Gay graduated from Penn with her Masters in Social Work in 1980. After graduating from Penn, she was the director of professional training for Planned Parenthood of Philadelphia and a clinical social worker for the Navy Service Center of Philadelphia. Beginning in 1985, Gay returned to Penn as a a social worker. Within a year of coming to Penn, Gay became the associate director of the PWC.
Two years after the rape in the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity on campus, the Committee to Survey Harassment concluded and released their findings. This particular survey emerged from a two day workshop on sexual harassment held in June 1983. The report begins by reflecting on the improvements made to campus since 1980. These improvements and additions included defining resources for students to turn to after facing harassment and requiring training for faculty and staff on identifying sexual harassment. The report begins its findings by stating that they “confirm the need for the significant policy changes taken by the University during the last five years” and that there was more work to be done to eliminate sexual misconduct.
The most striking numbers from the survey were as follows: 35 percent of undergraduate women, 19 percent of graduate women, and 11 percent of women faculty experienced some form of sexual harassment. Of the women who reported experiencing sexual harassment, no undergraduate women filed a complaint, whereas only six percent of graduate women and three percent of women faculty did.
Although the report concludes that the most common form of sexual harassment was in the form of unwanted teasing, jokes, remarks, or questions of a sexual nature, there was likely less women willing to report their experiences for the survey. Nine women reported that they experienced an attempted rape or sexual assault, but no reports were made. The fact that there were low numbers of reporting sexual harassment and assault in the survey speaks to a wider culture of women not being believed or taken seriously.
Of the women faculty who filed formal complaints of sexual harassment, an astounding 92 percent reported that it made “no difference.” Comparing this against a question asked in the survey between male and female respondents, This sentiment likely spoke to a wider audience of Penn women who faced sexual harassment and violence and felt that reporting would only well up more pain for themselves, rather than justice served.
This program for a conference co-sponsored by the Women’s Studies Program and Penn Women’s Center was distributed in 1980. The theme of the conference was planning what the women’s studies program at Penn would look like during the new decade. On the second page of the program, the excerpt outlines a brief history of the program. The reflection is entitled “The Seven Year Itch”, which was a reference to the popular movie from 1955 starring Marilyn Monroe. The phrase denotes the feeling of boredom or lack of novelty within a relationship or long term project. The reflection begs the question, “How do we reenergize ourselves and gain the momentum of seven years ago?”
This feeling of a loss of momentum by Penn women at the institutional level is a reflective of a broader pattern that was happening within the women’s rights movement in the United States toward the tail end of the 1970s. In 1977, the first and only federally funded national women’s conference took place in Houston, Texas. At the National Women’s Conference, feminists and conservative women came head to head. Phyllis Schlafly, an activist and attorney, led the movement of conservative women against the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Even though the conference was meant to unite women, women concerned with preserving women’s role in the household, fighting against abortion, and reducing welfare, were vocal in their disapproval of ERA. For those opposed to ERA, they believed that the legislation would disrupt traditional gender roles, lead to women being on the front lines of war, and propose unisex bathrooms. The purpose of ERA was to have an explicit mention in the U.S. Constitution that extended equal legal rights to citizens regardless of sex.
Schlafly and her followers were able to halt the ratification of ERA across many states. Feminists advocating for making ERA a part of the Constitution faced a longer, uphill battle because they needed 38 out of 50 states to ratify it. Time was running out, as they had until 1979 originally to ensure that three-fourths of states would ratify ERA. To the dismay of many activists, they missed their 1979 deadline and later their extended 1982 deadline. It would not be until 2020 that three-fourths of states chose to ratify ERA – however, today, ERA is still not a part of the Constitution due to expired ratification deadlines.
This conference happening at Penn in the 1980s was happening during the fervent fight by feminists to ratify ERA, marking a dreary time in the women’s rights movement.
Led by the director and associate director of Penn Women’s Center, Ellie DiLapi and Gloria Gay were leading a pivotal conference in Philadelphia on sexual assault. DiLapi and Gay co-organized this conference with Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), a social service established in Philadelphia in 1973 to provide services to survivors of sexual assault. Many of the panels focused on addressing issues within WOAR’s services.
When looking closely at the different events for the conference, it is striking that many of the panels account for the double impact of race and rape together. Panels such as “Racism in Rape Services” and “Challenging Racism: Staff Training Process” were addressing themes of how Black survivors of sexual assault were receiving inadequate services compared to their white counterparts. DiLapi and Gay were leading conversations on how the white women’s rights movements was embedded with racism and the how to dismantle racism within rape crisis centers.
Within the same year as this conference meeting, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a scholar of race and law, coined the term “intersectionality.” This refers to looking at the interlocking identities (e.g. race, gender, class) of an individual to understand compounded experiences and forms of discrimination.
Throughout the following decade, Crenshaw was a key figure in continuing to highlight the high rates of violence that immigrant women of color faced compared to other populations. Her research highlighted how the feminist movement privileged the experiences and concerns of white women. Crenshaw’s studies of immigrant women of color and their experiences of violence and racism in women’s shelters would set the stage for the feminist movement focusing on intersectionality within issues faced by women.
Similarly, DiLapi published an article in 1989 that covered themes of intersectionality and motherhood. In her article, “Lesbian Mothers and the Motherhood Hierarchy”, DiLapi makes the claim that there are three levels of motherhood. The “ideal mother” is one who is a married, heterosexual woman from a middle or upper-middle class background. Her exploration of themes of class and sexuality demonstrate the critical reflections that feminists were having during this era about the intersections of identities – particularly how certain classifications can further marginalize women.
At the end of 1986, Ellie DiLapi wrote in the annual report detailing all of the new developments over the year with the Penn Women’s Center.
The highlights from 1985 to 1986 included hiring DiLapi as the new director as well as Gay as the assistant director. Over the year, the PWC provided multiple counseling sessions to 16 students and 16 staff. 60 people total came to the PWC seeking advice or guidance from staff. In total, the PWC hosted 75 programs, most notably 15 educational programs and 14 co-sponsored events. One of the key partnerships made was with the Victim Support Services Office to respond to the needs of victims on campus and provide resources.
As highlighted in the type of events attended by DiLapi, the 1980s was reflective of broader political movements in the United States and abroad. The PWC was involved with anti-Apartheid protests led by students on campus. Penn, much like other institutions, called for their institutions to divest from companies that conducted business in South Africa. Furthermore, Black South African women were at the brunt of discrimination in South Africa, as many were relegated to low wage positions as domestic servants and agricultural workers. Black South African women had limited opportunities and access to education compared to their white counterparts.
Other popular demonstrations led by students happened in response to the devastating impact of the AIDS epidemic on the LGBTQ+ community in the 1980s. On college campuses, this often translated into hosting workshops on practicing safe sex. In the case of the PWC, they hosted a program in 1987 debunking misconceptions about sexual preference.
Finally, concerns about campus safety and sexual violence were still pressing issues throughout the 1980s at Penn and on other college campuses. Ten years after the sit-in at College Hall demanding increased safety precautions, a Penn student was raped at a party held at Alpha Tau Omega fraternity house. In response to the filed report, 600 Penn students participated in protests across campus demanding for the fraternity to face consequences. By the 1980s, Take Back the Night marches and rallies had happened across the world, but even more rallies of this kind ramped up throughout the 1980s that questioned the culture of fraternities.
Similarly to the annual report from the previous year, the Penn Women’s Center reported increased numbers in how many Penn students and faculty members were using the resources offered. From 1986 to 1987, the PWC provided multiple counseling sessions to 24 students and 6 faculty members in addition to providing advice and guidance to 85 people.
To meet this growing demand by the Penn community, counselors pivoted from strictly individual support to programmatic group therapy. These sessions targeted two defining battlegrounds of 1980s feminism: sexual awareness and assertiveness in the workplace. Americans vested interest in how to practice safe sex, as many grappled with the broader anxieties of the ongoing HIV and AIDS crisis of the 1980s. From 1981 when the disease was first identified to the end of 1990, 100,000 Americans died from complications related to AIDS. Beyond raising awareness around safe sex practices, women’s participation in the work force increased drastically from the 1960s to 1980s. Following the Supreme Court’s landmark 1986 ruling that workplace sexual harassment violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, women increasingly sought strategies to advocate for themselves. With the law affirming that harassment by male superiors and colleagues would no longer be tolerated, the PWC’s assertiveness workshops provided women with the practical tools to claim these new legal protections.
In this report, DiLapi details many of the programs conducted over the course of the year:
– Community Outreach: The PWC launched a teen summer program addressing sexual harassment and teen pregnancy, directly addressing the vulnerabilities of youth in Philadelphia.
– Physical Infrastructure and Safety: Following a year after the rape and murder of Jeanne Clery in her dormitory at Lehigh University, college campuses across the United States installed “blue light” emergency phones across campus to meet student demands for increased security and resources at nighttime. The PWC was at the forefront of leading new students through a tour of campus to locate the blue light phones.
– Intersections of Race and Class: Before Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989, the PWC hosted presentations explicitly addressing unequal pay for Black women, challenging the mainstream feminist movement to look beyond the experiences of white, middle-class professionals.
– Queer Visibility: In an era that coming out as LGBTQ+ could result in discrimination and stereotypes, the PWC hosted events structured around the experience of coming out and accepting yourself — a few of these include: “Out of Bounds: A Lesbian Journey”, “Freedom as a Constant Struggle: The Organizing of Lesbians and Gay Men of Color”, and a panel by the School of Social Work on Human Sexuality. During this time, the PWC solidified its role as an incubator for LGBTQ+ advocacy.
Overall, many of the issues that the PWC supported throughout the year was related to divestment, safety, alcohol concerns, and the needs of workers and students with families.
