The 2010s marked a period of significant expansion for the Penn Women’s Center. As the Center approached and celebrated its 40th anniversary, its programming increasingly reflected a broader understanding of gender equity— one encompassing sexual violence prevention, environmental sustainability, caregiving, and intersectionality. At the same time, longstanding feminist traditions were being reconsidered as students pushed for more inclusive approaches to gender advocacy.
Penn Environmental Education Kitchen Opens in 2011
In 2011, the PWC opened its Environmental Education Kitchen, expanding the Center’s work into environmental sustainability, food, and community-building. The kitchen provided a space where students could learn about sustainable cooking and food practices while gathering together in a communal environment. Its creation demonstrated how the PWC’s understanding of feminist advocacy had expanded beyond issues traditionally associated with women’s rights. Questions of food, environmental sustainability, health, and community could all be understood as connected to gender and social equity.
Penn Violence Prevention Opens in 2014
Building upon the PWC’s 2008 Department of Justice grant, Penn Violence Prevention (PVP) became a formal University program in 2014 under the leadership of Jessica Mertz. PVP expanded Penn’s institutional response to sexual and relationship violence through prevention education, awareness campaigns, and survivor support. Its creation represented a significant development in the PWC’s history: work that had originated through feminist activism and the Women’s Center was becoming embedded within the University’s broader institutional infrastructure for preventing violence.
Vagina Monologues Raises Funds for WOAR
The Vagina Monologues remained an important part of Penn’s feminist programming during the 2010s, combining performance with activism and fundraising. Productions raised roughly $50k each year for Women Organized Against Rape (WOAR), connecting Penn’s campus activism to Philadelphia’s broader movement against sexual violence. At the same time, the coexistence of The Vagina Monologues with the student-created Penn Monologues reflected changing understandings of feminist representation. As students increasingly emphasized intersectionality and LGBTQ+ inclusion, Penn began reconsidering whether the original production adequately represented the diversity of its community.
Penn Women’s Center Celebrates its 40th Anniversary in 2013
In 2013, the Penn Women’s Center celebrated its 40th anniversary, marking four decades since students and activists had demanded a dedicated institution for women on campus. The anniversary provided an opportunity to recognize the Center’s history while highlighting how dramatically its mission had expanded. By this point, the PWC had become involved in violence prevention, sustainability, parenting and lactation support, student leadership, and gender equity. Its 40th anniversary demonstrated how an institution born from protest had become an established and a continually evolving part of Penn’s campus life.
Jessica Mertz joined the Penn Women’s Center in 2009 as Penn’s first full-time Violence Prevention Educator, funded through the Center’s Department of Justice grant. She provided crisis counseling and referrals, developed educational programs on sexual violence, dating violence, stalking, and harassment, and advised student organizations including ASAP, One in Four, and the Vagina Monologues. In 2014, Mertz became the inaugural director of Penn Violence Prevention, institutionalizing much of the violence-prevention work developed through the PWC.
Nina Harris served as the Penn Women’s Center’s Violence Prevention Educator in the early 2010s. Her position continued the Center’s growing emphasis on sexual violence prevention and education following the federal grant that had initially brought the position to Penn. Harris also participated in broader University initiatives, including intercultural civic training developed with the Undergraduate Assembly.
In 2015, the Penn Association for Gender Equity (PAGE) emerged from the Penn Consortium for Undergraduate Women as an umbrella organization for gender and social justice advocacy. During the 2010s, PAGE worked closely with the Penn Women’s Center on programming, advocacy, and community-building. Its activities included Gender Equity Week (previously known as Women's Week), leadership programs, and initiatives addressing sexual assault, reproductive health, and gender equity.
Jessica Mertz’s career at the University of Pennsylvania provides a useful lens through which to examine the institutionalization of sexual and interpersonal violence prevention on American college campuses in the late 2000s and 2010s. Mertz began working at Penn in January 2009 as the University’s first full-time Violence Prevention Educator within the Penn Women’s Center. Her position was created through a three-year Department of Justice grant funded by the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), demonstrating how federal policy and funding increasingly shaped universities’ responses to sexual and domestic violence.
Mertz’s original position was significant because it represented a shift from treating violence primarily as an individual or criminal justice issue toward understanding prevention as an educational and community responsibility. At the Penn Women’s Center, she provided crisis counseling and referrals, organized workshops on sexual violence, sexual harassment, dating violence, and stalking, and worked with student organizations including Abuse & Sexual Assault Prevention (ASAP), One in Four, and the Vagina Monologues. Her work therefore connected institutional resources with the student activism that had historically driven conversations about gender violence on campus.
The creation of a permanent, campus-wide position in 2014 marked an important transition. Following recommendations from Penn’s Commission on Student Safety, Alcohol and Campus Life, the University established the Director of Student Sexual Violence Prevention and Education position to expand existing efforts and educate students about sexual violence, dating and domestic violence, and stalking. Mertz, who had become Associate Director of the Women’s Center and chaired the university-wide Penn Violence Prevention Committee, was selected for the position. Penn Violence Prevention thus moved from a grant-funded initiative housed within the Women’s Center into a standalone institutional department. Penn later described PVP as having been created as a standalone department in 2014, with its mission encompassing prevention, education, survivor support, and cultural change.
This transformation reflected a much broader national context. The 2010s brought increasing attention to sexual assault on college campuses, particularly through Title IX enforcement, the 2013 reauthorization of VAWA, and the Obama administration’s 2014 “It’s On Us” campaign encouraging bystander intervention and collective responsibility. Penn itself participated in the national campaign and developed its own “It’s On Us” programming the following year.
Mertz’s trajectory therefore illustrates a broader transformation in campus culture: what began as feminist advocacy and federally supported programming increasingly became an institutional responsibility. Her movement from the Penn Women’s Center into a university-wide leadership position demonstrates how concerns historically advanced by feminist organizations were incorporated into the university’s formal structures of safety, education, and student life. The significance of 2014 lies not simply in Mertz’s promotion, but in what that promotion represented – the recognition that preventing sexual and interpersonal violence had become a permanent institutional obligation.
The 2011 Penn Women’s Center flyer announcing the opening of its eco-kitchen offers a useful window into the growing relationship between feminism, community-building, and environmental sustainability during this era. The kitchen, later formally named the Penn Environmental Education Kitchen (PEEK), was not presented simply as a renovation or student amenity. Rather, it was designed as a space for education, social interaction, and collective action. This reflected a broader transformation in American higher education during the late 2000s and early 2010s, when sustainability increasingly became an institutional priority and was incorporated into everyday campus life.
The timing of the project is particularly significant. In 2007, more than 280 colleges and universities had signed the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, pledging to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and incorporate sustainability into campus practices and education. Penn was especially prominent within this movement: its president became the first Ivy League president to sign the commitment in 2007, Penn established its Green Campus Partnership that same year, and it developed its first Climate Action Plan in 2009. Other universities were similarly institutionalizing sustainability. Yale, for example, adopted its first Sustainability Strategic Plan in 2010, while promoting sustainable food, composting, green buildings, and student environmental programs. The PWC kitchen therefore emerged within a national movement in which universities increasingly presented themselves as environmental leaders.
The kitchen itself embodied this new approach. Developed through collaboration between the Penn Women’s Center and the Green Campus Partnership, it incorporated recycled wood cabinets and countertops, energy-saving appliances, and a worm composting system. Nearly half of its financing came from Penn’s Green Fund. The project was explicitly conceived as an educational space: Penn planned tours, tutorials, and other programming to demonstrate sustainable practices. The flyer’s promotion of an “open house” is therefore significant. It invited members of the Penn community not merely to observe sustainability but to experience it in a familiar domestic setting.
The choice of a kitchen also carried gendered significance. Kitchens and food preparation had historically been associated with women’s domestic labor. By placing an environmentally innovative kitchen within the Penn Women’s Center, the project transformed a traditionally gendered space into a site of feminist education, environmental activism, and public engagement. Sustainability became connected to food, consumption, health, and community – all of these being issues that the PWC incorporated into its existing mission rather than treated as a separate environmental concern.
The project’s subsequent recognition demonstrates how successfully these goals became institutionalized. In 2013, the Penn Women’s Center became one of the first university offices to receive Level 4 Green Office certification, the program’s highest designation. Penn specifically highlighted the environmental education kitchen alongside the Center’s rainwater-capture system and sustainable purchasing and housekeeping practices. Thus, the 2011 flyer captures a moment when sustainability was moving from a specialized environmental issue into everyday institutional and social life. PEEK illustrates how the Penn Women’s Center simultaneously participated in Penn’s broader “greening” movement and redefined what a feminist campus space could be: not only a place for advocacy and community, but also a place for sustainable living.
By 2014, The Vagina Monologues had become an established part of Penn’s feminist calendar. Created by playwright and activist Eve Ensler in the 1990s, the production became the centerpiece of the international V-Day movement, which used performances to raise awareness and funds to combat violence against women. At Penn, the production similarly combined theater, activism, fundraising, and education.
Its popularity reflected a broader transformation in feminist activism. During the 1990s and 2000s, sexual assault and other forms of violence against women increasingly became subjects of public advocacy rather than private experience. Performance offered an especially powerful way to bring these issues into campus life. At Penn, the production’s serious message was paired with humor and provocative imagery, making conversations about sexuality and violence accessible to a large student audience.
The production also connected feminist activism to concrete community support. In 2012, Penn’s production raised more than $43,000 for Women Organized Against Rape, a Philadelphia organization providing services to survivors of sexual violence. By 2013, the V-Day campaign had expanded beyond the performance itself, involving numerous student organizations and events addressing sexuality, relationships, and violence. Organizers increasingly emphasized positive sexual relationships alongside the prevention of sexual violence.
Yet by the 2010s, the framework of The Vagina Monologues was also becoming subject to new questions. Written in the 1990s around women’s experiences and the reclamation of the female body, the production reflected an earlier moment in feminist activism. By the 2010s, students increasingly approached gender through an intersectional lens, emphasizing differences of race, sexuality, gender identity, and other forms of experience. The question was becoming not simply whether women were represented, but which women – and which experiences – ere represented.
Penn’s response was initially not to abandon the production, but to develop another form of feminist storytelling alongside it. Penn Monologues, launched in 2010, allowed students to write and perform their own stories. The Pennsylvania Gazette described the two productions as complementary parts of Penn’s spring programming.
The 2014 flyer thus captures a moment of transition. The Vagina Monologues remained a successful and influential vehicle for feminist activism, while a new generation of students was beginning to ask how that activism could become more inclusive. By 2016, Penn organizers were publicly considering concerns about the production’s representation of transgender students.
The eventual shift away from The Vagina Monologues was therefore not simply a rejection of the tradition. Rather, the production’s success helped create a campus culture in which students felt empowered to ask what feminist storytelling should look like next.
