The 2020s opened with the Penn Women’s Center entering its sixth decade amid renewed national conversations about racial justice, gender equity, reproductive rights, and the lasting effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. The decade has emphasized both representation within the Center itself and an expansion of the communities and issues it serves, culminating in Penn’s 50th anniversary celebration.
Sherisse Laud-Hammond Becomes the First Black Woman to Direct the PWC
In 2019, Sherisse Laud-Hammond became the first Black woman to serve as director of the Penn Women’s Center, marking a significant milestone in the Center’s history. Having spent years working within the PWC before assuming its leadership, Laud-Hammond entered the directorship with a vision of the Center as a welcoming space for a diverse Penn community. Her appointment reflected the growing influence of intersectional feminism within the PWC and acknowledged the importance of considering race alongside gender in the Center’s mission.
Penn Women’s Center Expands its Initiatives
During the 2020s, the PWC continued expanding its programming to address the increasingly interconnected nature of gender equity. Initiatives surrounding reproductive justice, survivor support, parenting, wellness, gender identity, and intersectionality reflected an understanding that gender equity extends beyond any single issue. The PWC also adapted its work during the COVID-19 pandemic, moving programming and community-building online while continuing to provide resources and support. These initiatives demonstrated the PWC’s continuing ability to adapt its original feminist mission to the changing needs of the Penn community.
Penn Women’s Center Celebrates its 50th Anniversary
In 2023, the Penn Women’s Center celebrated its 50th anniversary, marking five decades since its establishment in the aftermath of feminist activism at Penn. The anniversary provided an opportunity to look back at a history that had taken the Center from a small collective addressing rape and women’s access to a multifaceted institution addressing violence prevention, reproductive justice, parenting, sustainability, and gender equity. Fifty years after its founding, the PWC’s history also demonstrated the continuing influence of student activism: many of the issues that had once been radical demands had become recognized responsibilities of the University, even as new generations continued to redefine what gender equity at Penn should mean.
Sherisse Laud-Hammond was a longtime member of the Penn Women’s Center leadership team before becoming its director in 2019, making history as the first Black woman to serve in the role. During her years at the PWC, she helped expand its programming and community engagement while advancing a more inclusive approach to gender equity. Her leadership emphasized the PWC as a welcoming space for gender, sexual, and racial minorities and reflected the increasingly intersectional direction of its mission.
Elisa Foster joined the Penn Women’s Center in 2017 as Associate Director after previously managing a women’s leadership and mentorship program at Robert Morris University. At Penn, she has focused on educational programming, community outreach, and mentoring student organizations such as PAGE. Foster became the director in 2022, bringing her experience in gender equity, racial justice, nonprofit strategy, and community-building to the PWC. Her tenure has emphasized wellness, reproductive justice, parenting support, and creating an inclusive community space.
Jasmine Greene serves as Associate Director of the Penn Women’s Center, where she leads programming and student engagement initiatives and advises organizations supported by the Center. Her background spans K-12 and higher education, including work in diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging offices. At the PWC, Greene’s work reflects the Center’s contemporary emphasis on gender justice and intersectionality, particularly through educational programming, advocacy, and support for student leaders.
Catharine Sciolla serves as Associate Director of the Penn Women’s Center, where she provides confidential support to students and advises student-led initiatives including Take Back the Night. A social worker specializing in trauma-informed care, she has supported survivors of gender-based violence. At the PWC, Sciolla’s work reflects the PWC’s contemporary emphasis on survivor support, prevention, reproductive justice, and creating an inclusive campus community.
When 6abc reported in March 2021 that Sherisse Laud-Hammond had become the first Black woman to lead the Penn Women’s Center, the story marked both a historic appointment and a moment of institutional reflection. Founded in 1973 following student protests over sexual violence, the PWC had spent nearly five decades advocating for women’s rights and gender equity. By 2021, however, the meaning of that mission had expanded considerably. Laud-Hammond’s appointment illustrated how the Center’s understanding of feminism had evolved alongside broader conversations about race, intersectionality, and inclusion.
Laud-Hammond’s own description of her achievement was notably collective: “I’m the first but that’s because of many firsts before me.” Her comment placed her appointment within a longer history rather than presenting it as an individual breakthrough. That perspective is particularly significant for the PWC, whose history was built through generations of students, staff, faculty, and activists. Her reference to figures such as Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander also connected the Center’s history to Penn’s much longer history of Black women’s struggles for access and recognition.
Her appointment also reflected a broader transformation in women’s centers and feminist institutions. Earlier generations of women’s centers emerged largely from the women’s liberation movement and often centered the experiences of cisgender, heterosexual, white women. By the 2010s and 2020s, feminist organizations increasingly confronted the need to address the intersections of gender with race, sexuality, gender identity, disability, and class. Penn itself now explicitly acknowledges that feminism has historically been “white and cis-centered” and describes its mission as including gender, sexual, and racial minorities.
Laud-Hammond’s vision for the Center reflected this expanded mission. Penn described her goal as positioning the PWC as a “celebratory and welcoming hub” dedicated to gender equity and inclusivity. Her leadership consequently represented more than demographic change. It suggested a reimagining of what a women’s center could be: not simply a place dedicated to women’s rights, but a broader community space addressing gender equity and the experiences of an increasingly diverse campus population.
The timing was particularly significant. Laud-Hammond assumed leadership in January 2019, but 2020 dramatically changed the environment in which the Center operated. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the physical Center closed and its programming moved online, including workshops addressing psychological, financial, and legal concerns. The PWC also became a space for community and connection during a period of widespread isolation.
The 6abc article therefore captures a symbolic milestone at a moment of substantial change. Laud-Hammond’s appointment represented both continuity and transformation: continuity with the generations of feminist activism that created the PWC, and transformation toward a broader understanding of who a women’s center should serve. Nearly fifty years after students demanded a space to address violence against women, the Center entered the 2020s with an increasingly expansive conception of gender equity – and with its first Black woman at the helm.
A 2020 Daily Pennsylvanian article reporting that Penn had added more than fifty lactation spaces over the previous decade offers a different window into the changing work of the Penn Women’s Center. The numbers themselves are striking: Penn had increased its lactation spaces from just four rooms in 2010 to approximately sixty rooms across thirty-five buildings in 2020. The University had made expanding lactation facilities an “official priority” in 2011.
The development reflects a broader transformation in how universities understood gender equity. Earlier feminist activism often focused on gaining access to educational and professional opportunities. By the 2010s, attention increasingly turned toward the institutional conditions that determined whether people could actually participate fully in university life. Lactation facilities are a particularly concrete example: providing a private place to pump breast milk addresses the practical conflict between caregiving and the demands of academic or professional work.
This shift was occurring nationally. The 2010s saw growing attention to the experiences of working parents, the costs of childcare, and the need for workplaces and educational institutions to accommodate pregnancy and caregiving. Federal protections also increasingly recognized breastfeeding as a workplace issue. At universities, these questions were particularly significant because faculty, staff, graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and students could all face different challenges balancing academic or professional responsibilities with parenthood.
Penn’s response extended beyond physical rooms. The PWC became an advocate for parents and worked with the Family Resource Center and Parents @ Penn to develop parenting resources. The University also established a Family Grant Program for PhD students with children in 2011, providing financial assistance for childcare and other expenses. These developments demonstrate that the PWC’s role had expanded well beyond its original focus on women’s rights and safety.
The lactation rooms are therefore important precisely because they may seem mundane. A room equipped with a breast pump, refrigerator, chair, and privacy represents an institutional decision about whose needs deserve to be accommodated within the physical environment of the university. The expansion from four rooms to approximately sixty transformed breastfeeding from something that individuals had to negotiate privately into a need that Penn formally recognized as part of campus infrastructure.
The story also illustrates an important evolution in feminist advocacy. Equality increasingly meant more than allowing women into institutions on the same terms as men; it meant questioning whether those institutions had been designed around assumptions that excluded people with caregiving responsibilities. By helping advocate for lactation spaces, parenting resources, and financial support, the PWC participated in a broader movement toward making universities more compatible with family life.
Seen alongside the PWC’s earlier history, the expansion is significant. The Center began by demanding that Penn recognize women’s safety as an institutional responsibility. By the 2010s, its work increasingly included women’s ability to remain, work, study, and build families within the university. The sixty lactation spaces documented in 2020 thus represent a quiet but consequential form of institutional change: feminism had moved from demanding access to asking what institutions needed to change to make that access sustainable.
In contrast to the long running production of the Vagina Monologues, Penn Monologues had become an established part of Penn’s feminist programming by the mid-2010s. The production originated in 2010, when students involved with The Vagina Monologues began experimenting with a different approach: rather than performing established monologues, Penn students would write and perform stories drawn from their own experiences. The first production featured fifteen original monologues, eleven performed by the students who wrote them.
The distinction between the two productions was significant. Where the Vagina Monologues connected Penn to an international feminist movement, the Penn Monologues made the Penn community itself the source of its stories. The two productions consequently coexisted for much of the decade. The Pennsylvania Gazette described Penn Monologues as Penn’s own Vagina Monologues-inspired production, presented alongside the established V-Day event.
The new production reflected broader changes in feminist activism during the 2000s and 2010s. Feminist movements increasingly emphasized intersectionality. Rather than assuming a universal “woman’s experience,” activists increasingly sought to make space for multiple voices.
Penn Monologues embodied this shift through its emphasis on personal testimony. Students embodied the roles of performers, producers, and authors in preparing for the annual show. The production could therefore respond directly to the experiences of the Penn community and to issues that mattered to students themselves.
From its earliest productions, the program also sought to broaden participation beyond the framework of The Vagina Monologues. The inaugural production included male performers, while its organizers sought to incorporate a wider range of racial and LGBTQ+ experiences. This reflected an expanding understanding of feminist programming as programming not only for women, but as a space to examine how gender shaped the experiences of the broader campus community.
The program’s relationship with the Penn Women’s Center was equally important. Penn Monologues became a student-led organization and a program of the Women’s Center, demonstrating how the Center’s mission had expanded by the 2010s.
The 2020 article therefore captures an important moment before the eventual transition away from The Vagina Monologues. The two productions offered different models of feminist storytelling: one drew on an established national movement, while the other emphasized local authorship and lived experience.
When Penn eventually moved away from The Vagina Monologues toward Penn Monologues in 2020, the change was not entirely new. Penn Monologues demonstrated that Penn students wanted to tell their own stories and broaden whose stories counted as part of the conversation.
