Spring Break
Gender equity center opens
Eau Claire 10th UW System 4-year college to open women's center
Karline Koehler
Issue date: 9/22/05 Section: Campus News
In 1926, Virginia Woolf asserted that to be a successful writer, a woman needed a room of her own in which to work.
This fall, with the opening of the new Women's and Gender Equity Center in a former storage space in the Old Library, coordinators Traci Thomas-Card and Erin Polnaszek hope to offer a refuge and a resource center to fill the need for a safe and productive space. This room, however, is not only for women.
"It's not exactly 'a room of her own,'" Thomas-Card, a graduate student in English literature, said. "Men have a place at the women's and gender equity center too ... it doesn't work without men's support."
Eau Claire is the 10th of the UW System's 13 four-year colleges to open a women's center, according to the UW System's Women's Studies Consortium. Differential tuition and the office of Student Development and Diversity fund the center.
Last academic year, Student Development and Diversity hired Thomas-Card to research possibilities for a women's center at Eau Claire. She spoke with coordinators of women's centers at other universities, who recommended being inclusive and collaborating with other organizations, she said.
The WAGE Center is open to all women and men who want to hang out, study, meet, attend workshops or use the library of feminist and gender-related books. Thomas-Card said she hopes to add more resources, including magazines, movies, a coffeemaker and a writing tutor.
The WAGE Center's phone line is a cell phone staffed 24 hours a day by coordinators. The center is available as a "safe space" where people can go in a personal crisis situation.
"Anybody can call the number anytime they need help," Thomas-Card said.
The center's coordinators will not act as counselors, she said; they will keep the person safe and refer her or him to a professional.
The center's goals include raising awareness of students in majors not traditional for their gender, such as men in nursing and women in the physical sciences, and advocating easier access to emergency contraception, Polnaszek said.
The WAGE Center aims not to compete with other gender-concerned organizations on campus, Thomas-Card said, but to collaborate with them.
"There are already a lot of places on our campus that deal with women's issues," she said. "We want to bring them all together. ... (Our goal is) not to erase differences, but to celebrate and promote differences."
This fall, with the opening of the new Women's and Gender Equity Center in a former storage space in the Old Library, coordinators Traci Thomas-Card and Erin Polnaszek hope to offer a refuge and a resource center to fill the need for a safe and productive space. This room, however, is not only for women.
"It's not exactly 'a room of her own,'" Thomas-Card, a graduate student in English literature, said. "Men have a place at the women's and gender equity center too ... it doesn't work without men's support."
Eau Claire is the 10th of the UW System's 13 four-year colleges to open a women's center, according to the UW System's Women's Studies Consortium. Differential tuition and the office of Student Development and Diversity fund the center.
Last academic year, Student Development and Diversity hired Thomas-Card to research possibilities for a women's center at Eau Claire. She spoke with coordinators of women's centers at other universities, who recommended being inclusive and collaborating with other organizations, she said.
The WAGE Center is open to all women and men who want to hang out, study, meet, attend workshops or use the library of feminist and gender-related books. Thomas-Card said she hopes to add more resources, including magazines, movies, a coffeemaker and a writing tutor.
The WAGE Center's phone line is a cell phone staffed 24 hours a day by coordinators. The center is available as a "safe space" where people can go in a personal crisis situation.
"Anybody can call the number anytime they need help," Thomas-Card said.
The center's coordinators will not act as counselors, she said; they will keep the person safe and refer her or him to a professional.
The center's goals include raising awareness of students in majors not traditional for their gender, such as men in nursing and women in the physical sciences, and advocating easier access to emergency contraception, Polnaszek said.
The WAGE Center aims not to compete with other gender-concerned organizations on campus, Thomas-Card said, but to collaborate with them.
"There are already a lot of places on our campus that deal with women's issues," she said. "We want to bring them all together. ... (Our goal is) not to erase differences, but to celebrate and promote differences."