All Center, No Women: The Breakdown of the Yale Women’s Center

With recent media outcries over their now canceled Spring conference “Pinkwashing and Feminism in Palestine,” the Yale Women’s Center is garnering concern from students and the Yale community who are expressing doubts about whether their mission as a self-proclaimed “women’s center” means anything to the Center at all.

The Center, which is housed on Yale’s Old Campus and funded by Yale’s Office of Gender and Campus Culture, has become increasingly hard to find on campus, despite its central location.

The Center’s website, which has expired, is only listed in one place: Yale’s Undergraduate Admissions Page. They recently removed their listing under Yale’s Office of LGBTQ Resources, which was the only place that contained their website, address, and contact information. They briefly had a website up for their pinkwashing conference but switched it to private after canceling the event. 

The website removal comes in the wake of the controversy and ultimate cancellation of their Spring conference, “Pinkwashing and Feminism in Palestine,” which would have brought in several openly antisemitic speakers in support of Palestine, queer liberation, and, hopefully, women. The removal of their websites and contact information comes at a particularly inopportune time as some people probably want to contact the Center now more than ever. 

Yale Friends of Israel is one such group that has been trying to reach the Center.

Sophie Schonberger, ‘26,  who spoke on behalf of YFI and supplied information about the difficulty they’ve had getting in touch with the Women’s Center, noted her concern that the Women’s Center was partnering on such a conference with a group (Yalies4Palestine) that has openly celebrated as resistance the Hamas attack on October 7th where Israeli women were raped and killed. She was very clear that drawing attention to and supporting women everywhere is important and a wonderful job for the Women’s Center, but she believes “there’s a line crossed when there’s a glorification of certain things” like terrorism that affects women on both sides.

The event sparked concern over whether the Center has a clearly partisan bent, inviting openly antisemitic speakers and including anti-Israeli lectures like the one by Isis Nusair on “gendered, racialized, and sexualized torture by the Israeli military in Gaza,” yet being highly unreachable to an Israel-aligned group, as Kira Berman would find out. 

Berman, ‘25, who is President of YFI, commented on the Center’s Instagram post advertising the pinkwashing conference noting her frustration at being unable to get in contact with anyone at the Center about the event. 

She had reached out to the Center by email two weeks prior on February 21 looking to establish a relationship and hoping to partner with them on an event supporting Jewish women and bringing awareness to the sexual violence towards women by Hamas. The Center did not respond for two weeks.

She also directly messaged the Center through their Instagram account, which appears to be their only active social media account (the last post on their Facebook account is from April 27, 2022 as of this writing), to which message she received no response. On March 7th, Jewish Insider reported on the backlash to the pinkwashing event, noting how Berman had tried multiple times to get in contact with the Center. That very evening, she received a response to her email. 

In all, it took over two weeks for the Yale Women’s Center to respond to a woman on campus looking to sponsor an event for women on campus. And their response appears to have been motivated by media coverage. 

Notably, the Center has no accessible mission statement or declaration of purpose to explain their reasons for seemingly politicizing their assistance to women and they did not comment on the situation regarding their website and lack of accessibility.  

The Center, additionally, was closed for the entire Fall semester. They went on hiatus at the beginning of the semester for no apparent reason until they announced on November 9th through their Instagram account, “Next semester, we will be reopening with a revamped space and a restructured team to enhance our support for the community. Stay tuned for updates about our new space in the spring!”

It’s unclear why the Center waited until November to acknowledge its closure and offer an explanation. They were still active on Instagram during that time, advertising various other events in line with their mission, events such as “March for Tenant Power” and their own “teach-in and orientation about fossil fuels at Yale.” What do these have to do with the support of women? The Center doesn’t explain. 

Claire Barragan-Bates, a junior at Yale and former Board Coordinator of the Yale Women’s Center (the primary position on the board), expressed concern that the Center had placed its focus more on political activism than women. “It’s a center for women. It’s not that deep.” 

She noted that the Center needed to “decouple from unrelated political ideology and stop prioritizing Marxism over women.” 

She described how, during her time on the board, she had pushed the Center to partner with some of the larger women’s organizations on campus such as the Women’s Leadership Initiative, believing that to do the most good, they needed to become more known on campus. “They outvoted me every time and said they weren’t comfortable partnering with organizations that furthered capitalistic ideals.” 

Between events that seem unrelated to the support of women such as a “teach-in and orientation about fossil fuels” and openly partisan, ostensibly female-aligned events such as “Pinkwashing and Feminism in Palestine,” the Yale Women’s Center seems to be expressing a particular agenda and they are making themselves particularly difficult to get in touch with to discuss why this may be. 

That’s not to say that the Center isn’t addressing important issues, simply that it isn’t necessarily addressing women.

From the Center’s political leanings and poor contactability, a question arises: can a university-funded group under the non-partisan moniker of “women’s center” politicize their aid and make themselves as highly unreachable as the Yale Women’s Center and still say they are living up to their mission? 

The Women’s Center refused to comment for this piece.

Editor’s Note: Since writing, Yalies4Palestine has announced that the pinkwashing conference will proceed without the support of the Women’s Center, which is now being investigated by the Yale Office of Student Affairs.