Women's Centers
Giavanna Munafo, Dartmouth College

Women's Centers -- whether campus- or community-based -- provide support, resources and information. Some centers explicitly identify *women* as the constituency they serve, while others serve women and men. Either way, the work of a women's center usually involves education and outreach around issues of particular significane to women and/or issues having to do with gender. The Dartmouth College Women's Resource Center, for example, includes "celebrating women's achievements, exploring the role of gender in everyone's life, and supporting individual struggles for justice" in its mission statement.

Women's centers offer such a variety of programs that it is difficult to describe them in a representative way. From women's health seminars, career counseling and free legal clinics, to feminist film festivals, support groups and self defense courses, women's centers strive to answer needs demonstrated by the members of the communities they serve. Women's centers typically provide opportunities for reflection, engagement and personal growth. Increasingly, women's centers stress the understanding that exploratoins of gender must take place in tandem with explorations of race, economic status, sexual orientation, religious or spiritual affiliation and other significant aspects of individual and cultural identity.

Some centers focus on crisis intervention and management and provide counseling and direct service to individuals who experience sexual abuse, domestic violence, sexual harassment and other illegal or unwanted contact or behavior. On the other hand, some women's centers provide referrals to such services and do not provide them directly. In many cases, a women's center will house, oversee or work closely with an office or program devoted to sexual abuse education and/or advocacy.

Importantly, many women's centers strive to create a community and space wherein people committed to gender equity (whether self-identified as "feminists" or not) can meet one another, socialize, strategize and organize around a whole array of issues and experiences related to that shared commitment. As a result, women's centers that are blessed with adequate space to do so often become important meeting places for various groups (ad hoc or established) whose alliances with one another may wax and wane over time. Thus, many women's centers truly are at the center of what might best be described as a constellation of people and issues.

Note: There is a national email discussion list devoted to women's centers -- it's called WRAC-L, which stands for "women's resource and action centers list". You can subscribe by sending a message that reads [subscribe wrac-l (your name)] to listserv@dartmouth.edu .

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Copyright December 5, 1996, Giavanna Munafo, Dartmouth College
Questions? Contact me, Giavanna.Munafo@Dartmouth.EDU.