By Camille Didelot
Students and staff filled the Women’s Resource Center in Marquette Hall last week to commemorate the center’s 40th anniversary at Loyola.
The Women’s Resource Center aims to provide Loyola women and men with a positive college experience and strives to create a supportive campus environment for students.
Kourtney Baker, who visits the center frequently, sees the WRC as one of the safest spaces on campus.
“The Women’s Resource Center means that there’s a safe space for not only women, but people of all genders to come together and celebrate unique identities,” Baker said.
Patricia Boyett, WRC director, said that the center celebrates the great diversity that Loyola has, as women represent every faith, race, ethnicity, culture, class, sexual orientation and political ideology.
“The Women’s Resource Center represents a vital component of Loyola’s social justice mission because it has sought to and continues to seek to empower one of the most oppressed groups in the history of the world,” Boyett said.
The WRC is striving to become more of a presence on campus with the help of students like Andie Slein, music business sophomore, who helped plan and organize the anniversary party.
“The fact that we’ve progressed so much with gender identities and women’s rights, we’re not only celebrating the center but we’re celebrating the progress,” Slein said.
The center is in the process of organizing different events such as the Feminist Forum and the Feminist Festival, which will explore and celebrate the many waves of feminism and tackle the struggles women face in contemporary times.
In addition to this, students and Boyett are planning on engaging in a research project to examine the work the WRC has accomplished since its founding, despite a brief closure in 1980.
“To unite women across the many socially constructed divides and to seek the support of all genders is a cause to celebrate, for through such a struggle, we pursue meaningful lives in the Loyola tradition of ‘living for and with others,’” Boyett said.