Celebrating its 30th and 35th anniversaries in this decade, the Penn Women’s Center expanded its role as Penn’s institutional home for feminist advocacy, while national debates over sexual violence and women’s rights increasingly shaped its work. The decade brought new federal support for violence prevention, nationally recognized feminist speakers to campus, and opportunities to reflect on the PWC’s own history and evolution.
Department of Justice Awards PWC $270,000 Grant in 2008
The PWC’s longstanding work addressing sexual violence received significant federal recognition in 2008, when the Department of Justice’s Office on Violence Against Women awarded the Center a $270,000 grant. The funding supported Penn’s efforts to address sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking and allowed the University to hire its first full-time Violence Prevention Educator. The grant represented a broader national shift toward treating campus sexual violence as an institutional responsibility rather than an individual problem, providing the PWC with resources to expand decades of feminist activism into a comprehensive prevention program.
Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and Maya Angelou Headline Women’s Week
Throughout the 2000s, Women’s Week remained one of the PWC’s most visible annual traditions, bringing nationally recognized feminist thinkers and activists to campus. Gloria Steinem, Angela Davis, and Maya Angelou each served as keynote speakers during the decade, connecting Penn students to broader conversations about feminism, race, civil rights, gender, and social justice. Their appearances demonstrated the PWC’s ability to bring national feminist movements into the campus community while giving students opportunities to engage directly with some of the most influential women activists and intellectuals of the twentieth century.
Penn Women’s Center Celebrates its 30th and 35th Anniversaries
The PWC’s 30th anniversary in 2003 and 35th anniversary in 2008 provided opportunities to reflect on the Center’s origins in the feminist activism of the 1970s and its transformation into a permanent University institution. By the end of the decade, the PWC had expanded considerably beyond the issues that had defined its earliest years, incorporating violence prevention, student programming, women’s leadership, and community outreach. The anniversaries therefore marked not simply the passage of time, but the institutionalization and continued evolution of the feminist activism that had created the PWC.
From 2008 to 2018, Felicity “Litty” Paxton served as Director of the Penn Women’s Center. During her tenure, she helped expand the PWC’s work beyond traditional women’s advocacy to encompass violence prevention, sustainability, caregiving, and community-building. As a co-principal investigator on a Department of Justice grant, she helped establish Penn Violence Prevention, while also overseeing initiatives including the PWC’s first lactation room and Environmental Education Kitchen.
Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, Donna Gladstone served as the Penn Women’s Center’s Building Manager, playing an important role in maintaining the PWC as both a physical space and a community hub. Beyond her day to day responsibilities, Gladstone represented the PWC on University committees, including the Committee on Open Expression in 2014-2015.
From 2004 to 2022, Amy Gutmann served as the President of Penn, making her the longest-running president in the University's history. Throughout her tenure, Gutmann oversaw the expansion of financial aid and increased student diversity, which she coined the "Penn Compact". Key initiatives under the Penn Compact included grant-based financial aid programs and the foundation of the Office of Social Equity and Community, Penn World Scholars, and the Action Plan for Faculty Diversity and Excellence.
Penn Consortium for Undergraduate Women (PCUW) was a major student organization affiliated with the Penn Women’s Center during the 2000s. The group provided a forum for undergraduate women to organize around gender equity, leadership, and feminist issues while collaborating with the PWC on campus programming. PCUW later became the Penn Association for Gender Equity (PAGE), reflecting an expanding understanding of gender advocacy beyond undergraduate women.
Just weeks before the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election between Al Gore and George W. Bush, the Penn Women’s Center served as a central hub for encouraging students to be politically active. Held on September 28, 2000, the Penn Women’s Center co-sponsored a leadership forum titled “Women: Reclaim the Power of the Vote.” This campus-wide event gathered high-profile politicians, localized community leaders, and a wide array of feminist advocacy organizations to mobilize female voters across party lines.
This schedule of events for the day captures a concrete moment in politics during the early 2000s where diverse, often conflicting factions of the women’s movement united under a singular banner of civic empowerment.
The lineup of speakers brought local, state, and national political figures to Penn’s campus, showcasing a deliberate effort to blend grassroots organizing. Such speakers included:
– Ed Rendell: mayor of Philadelphia and future governor of Pennsylvania
– Marian Tasco: Philadelphia City Council member
– Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky: President of Women’s Campaign International
– Rebecca Lieberman: alumna of Penn Law and daughter of U.S. Senator and Vice Presidential nominee, Joe Lieberman
– Lyann Cutler-Deputy: Senior Advisor to Vice President Al Gore and Chief of Staff for women’s issues
– Mardee (“X”) Xandeferris: Pennsylvania Campaign Manager for Al Gore
To understand why the Penn Women’s Center and its partners organized this event, it is pertinent to contextualize the political climate during the late 1990s to 2000s. While politicians during this era increasingly sought out the swing votes of white, middle-class, suburban mothers – dubbed as “Soccer Moms”, college educated women became one of the strongest voting blocs in elections. The pamphlet underscores how women with college degrees are the “least threatened by change” and have a duty to vote in primaries and elections. Furthermore, one particular page lists ten action items that attendees could take over the next few weeks before the election occurs. Based on the messaging, the Penn Women’s Center wanted to empower women on campus to be leaders in discussing the election and particular issues with those who are not as involved or informed.
The most fascinating aspect of the pamphlet is the diverse, bipartisan coalition of participating organizations. In an era before the widening ideological gaps between political parties, the Penn Women’s Center successfully brought together highly progressive national organizations alongside moderate conservative groups. The participating organizations included:
– Emily’s List and the NARAL-PA (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League): mobilizing heavily on pro-choice, progressive platforms
– The Republican Pro-Choice Coalition: representing a sect of moderate Republicans who actively fought for reproductive rights within the GOP
– The League of Women Voters and AAUW (American Association of University Women): providing a non-partisan, structural foundation for voter registration and civic education
– The Five County Democratic Women’s Coalition and The National Women’s Political Caucus of Pennsylvania: working to actively recruit women to run for local and state offices
Ellie DiLapi, the Director of the Penn Women’s Center, wrote in the opening pages of the pamphlet: “Women who are fortunate to have a college education are the least threatened by change. But women who ignore politics are leaving our democracy in the hands of those threatened by change.” This recognition that college women could be influential in shaping politics was important, especially in 2000. DiLapi’s call to action captures the the forum’s purpose to engage more college women in politics. By framing civic disengagement not merely as a missed opportunity, but as a direct threat to democratic progress, the Penn Women’s Center positioned college women as essential actors in the political landscape. In the context of a razor-thin presidential election where strategist focus often drifted toward suburban “soccer moms,” this leadership forum demonstrated that campus mobilization extended far beyond student politics.
In the mid-2000s, the Penn Women’s Center supported and sponsored powerful and informed programming around international conflicts. Two standout examples here from 2005 and 2006 highlight the conversations being had around global anti-war resistance and the intimate struggle for reproductive justice.
In the first flyer advertising “Grandmothers Against War”, the world-renowned poet, activist, and temple of the Black Arts Movement, Dr. Sonia Sanchez, was joined a group of traveling women activists between the ages of 60 to 90 who speak out against war. During this period of the mid-2000s, the United States was deeply entrenched in the post-9/11 War on Terror, with the invasion of Iraq (2003) yielding massive casualties and escalating public disillusionment. Across the country, veteran feminist activists and elder women of color formed coalition groups like the Grandmothers Peace Brigade.
These activists refused to let the state weaponize the language of “protecting women and children” to justify imperialist violence abroad. By bringing Sonia Sanchez, a well-known Philadelphia activist, to campus, the Penn Women’s Center bridged generational organizing. Sanchez’s presence highlighted a matriarchal anti-war philosophy: grandmothers utilizing their revered societal status to protect youth globally, framing anti-militarism as a core feminist idea.
In the second flyer, advertising a luncheon in 2006 hosted by the Women of Color Networking group on campus, featured Luz Marín presenting: “Sterilization, Population Control, and the Question of Self-Determination for Puerto Rican Women.” This seminar underscored the micro-violence of state-regulated bodies, unpacking one of the darkest chapters of American medical imperialism.
To understand the gravity of the presentation, it is necessary to look at the history of La Operación, the federally funded sterilization campaign in Puerto Rico. From the 1930s to 1970s, the U.S. government, in tandem with local authorities, aggressively promote sterilization as a solution to poverty and population growth in Puerto Rico. By the late 1960s, over one-third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age had been sterilized, making this the highest rate in the world at the time. Many of these procedures were performed without informed consent, during childbirth, or under extreme economic coercion.
Furthermore, Puerto Rican women were systematically used as trial subjects for the development of the the early, high-dose birth control pill in the 1950s, which caused severe unmonitored side effects.
Within the context of the question of Puerto Rico’s sovereignty in 2005, the United States Navy withdrew forces from the municipality of Vieques in 2003, which was used as an active bombing range, weapons testing site, and military training ground for over sixty years. In the following years the removal of naval forces, studies conducted by universities and agencies within Puerto Rico showed that the soil, produce, and marine life were contaminated with toxic heavy metals. Residents of Vieques faced higher rates of bronchial and lung cancers, asthma, hypertension, and diabetes compared to other regions of the country.
Placing these two flyers side by side, these program descriptions provides a glimpse into conversations had within feminist circles at Penn. Within these two flyers share concerns voiced by feminists at Penn and beyond: the fight for bodily and territorial sovereignty. As the third wave of feminism swept through the country beginning in the mid-1990s, more women critiqued western imperialism and underscored the trauma experienced by women in militarized areas of the world.
By the 2000s, Women’s Week had become a custom for many students across Penn’s campus. Organized by the Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women, the annual event featured lectures, performances, workshops, and social events. In 2009, the program included everything from a women-only sexuality workshop at the Penn Women’s Center to a sold out keynote address by poet, author, and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.
Angelou’s appearance was particularly significant. Previous Women’s Week keynote speakers had included Gloria Steinem and Angela Davis, placing the event within a tradition of inviting prominent feminist, political, and intellectual figures to campus. Angelou’s selection continued that tradition while also reflecting the breadth of Women’s Week itself. By 2009, the celebration encompassed not only women’s political and professional accomplishments, but questions of sexuality, identity, culture, and empowerment.
This Women’s Week celebration in particular coincided with the Penn Women’s Center’s 35th anniversary. More than three decades after its founding in the aftermath of the 1973 sit in, the PWC had grown into an institution whose programming addressed a much wider range of women’s experiences, from health and safety to education, professional development, sexuality, and community.
The keynote addressed delivered by Angelou in Irvine Auditorium. During the night, the audience resonated with many comments offered by Angelou about persistence, life, and education. On the question of what being a woman meant to her, she shared that she was thrilled “to be here celebrating being a woman, like I had anything to do with it.”
In 2015, the Penn Consortium for Undergraduate Women would change their name to the Penn Association for Gender Equity. Seven years later, Women’s Week would rebrand to become Penn Gender Equity Week, reflecting a broader movement in pushing for inclusivity of identities.
In 2008, the University of Pennsylvania received a $270,000 grant from the Department of Justice Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) to address sexual violence, dating violence, and stalking on campus. The grant was part of the federal Campus Program, a national initiative created to help colleges and universities develop comprehensive strategies for preventing and responding to violence against women. This program was initially authorized by Congress in 1998 under the Higher Education Amendments, and was subsequently reauthorized and expanded in 2000 and 2005. These reauthorizations broadened the federal framework for addressing violence against women, including sexual assault, dating violence, and stalking. Furthermore, the reauthorizations emphasized promoting victim services to survivors from underserved populations. At Penn, the grant worked to expand the foundational work of the Penn Women’s Center by hiring the University’s first full-time Violence Prevention Educator.
The grant came at a significant moment in the national history of violence prevention on college campuses. During the 1990s and 2000s, federal legislation increasingly moved beyond addressing violence against women solely through the criminal justice system and toward developing structures specifically suited to colleges and universities. The creation of the Campus Program in 1998 reflected the federal government’s growing investment in combatting gender based violence on campuses. Colleges and universities were increasingly recognized as institutions with a distinctive capacity and responsibility to prevent and respond to instances of violence.
OVW’s investment in funding prevention programs in higher education settings reflected a broader strategy: if violence against women was a systemic problem, then prevention could not be limited to responding to individual crimes after they occurred. Colleges represented particularly important sites for intervention because they brought large populations of young adults into shared residential, educational, and social environments. Federal funding could be used not only to improve responses to individual incidents, but to build the educational programs, institutional policies, partnerships, and professional expertise necessary to prevent violence and support survivors.
The passage and reauthorizations of VAWA throughout the 1990s and 2000s transformed violence against women from a private matter to a public problem that institutions have that responsibility to address. Penn’s 2008 grant sits at the intersection of a long history of feminist organizing against violence and the emergence of federally funded models of campus violence prevention. Its importance lies in the creation of an inaugural role to combat and prevent violence on campus through educational and support services.
