About
The Women’s Resource Center (WRC) is an open and safe space that focuses on empowering women, ending gender violence, and establishing gender equity.
We use an intersectional lens to advocate for the education, empowerment and agency of women-identified students. Our vision is equality for all students.
History
Our Roots on Campus
The Women’s Resource Center became an official campus organization in 1993; before that, there was a lot of feminist work being done on campus. This work consisted of collaborations between radical student organizations and the Women’s Studies department. As recent as the 1990s, all the way back to the university’s founding, there was a much more palpable presence of such groups. The existence of those first feminist radical groups set a precedence for something like the Women’s Resource Center to follow.
The Role of the Women’s Studies Department
What is now called the Women & Gender Studies Department, started as “Women’s Studies”. First established in 1974, this department took on several different roles for the city of Milwaukee itself and the university’s community. With all the benefits of a department like this, it did not materialize without push back against this feminist work. Given the nature of persistent misogyny and conservatism, it was (and still is) considered controversial. Formation of the Women’s Studies department was the talk of the town because of its perceived “controversy”. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel even published articles about it as early as 1972, two years before the department was official and still in its early stages of development.
While the department was an educational one, it also served many other purposes. Before the founding of the WRC, this department provided the same support to the community that the WRC now continues through our mission of advocacy, education and empowerment. Women’s Studies was juggling much more than they were being compensated for, yet, with their dedication to feminist issues, they still managed to fulfill people’s needs. They would get calls on a daily basis from women with questions about what resources were available to them at the university and the Milwaukee area. The need for a Women’s Resource Center became apparent quickly after the department was launched. But until they were able to get the ball rolling on the WRC, the department’s office served as a safe space and the office distributed educational materials like a pamphlet of resources in the area. The local resource pamphlet became an essential service that the department provided. It was constituted of over 175 listings, kept updated over time, and some of the listings were even other UWM feminist organizations like the Feminist Center, Association of Women in Education, Women’s Focus Group, and the Single Parent Group. In addition to connecting folks to resources, the department sponsored free lectures, and sent students to feminist conventions and seminars across Wisconsin.
Women’s Resource Center (WRC)
The resource center was the first of its kind on campus, meaning that it was the first demographic targeted student resource center. Through campus advocacy by the Women’s Issues Committee, Women’s Faculty Caucus, among others, the WRC was able to come to fruition with their commitment. A figure at the university that was particularly devoted to formation of the WRC was Roxanne Patton. She was a driving force in the development of the WRC through her role on the Student Association as the “gender issues representative”.