Women’s Resource Center – Page 2 – Forty Years: The History of Women at Bowdoin

Rethinking Sex

Rethinking Sex: Anonymous accounts of and about sexual harassment at Bowdoin College, is a collection of student stories and opinions from 1987 (Document CS, 66). One imagines that women wrote the majority of the stories, as most describe heterosexual encounters between men and women, with men as the aggressors. Part of Rethinking Sex Week, the publication accompanied an open forum.

By 1987, women had been at Bowdoin for over fifteen years and the Women’s Resource Center had been open for seven years. However, this may have been one of the first times issues of sexual harassment were addressed so publically. The safe environment of the Women’s Resource Center provided community and may well have raised consciousness sufficiently that women found the courage to share their stories publically albeit anonymously. The variety of stories in Rethinking Sex shows the differing and contradictory perspectives on sex in the Bowdoin community in the 1980s.

The means of educating Bowdoin students on issues of sexual harassment or sexual assault through sharing of anonymous personal stories remains an important part of life at Bowdoin today. In the fall of 2009, a new performance became an annual part of first-year orientation. Speak about it originated from stories in Speak, a more modern version of Rethinking Sex. Rethinking Sex may have started a trend in educating the Bowdoin community around these issues. Speak and Speak about it are also important elements of the Women’s Resource Center’s role on campus today.

Women’s Resource Center Focus Group

This discussion brought together four Bowdoin women who all played important roles in establishing Bowdoin’s still vibrant and active Women’s Resource Center. Jan Brackett and Bridget Spaeth ’86 each served as directors for the WRC, and Linda Nelson ’83 and Laura Barnard ’83 were early members of the Women’s Resource Center Collective that founded the WRC in 1980. All four women share stories of triumph and love in the face of adversity and discrimination. Their discussion offers unique insight into what it was like to be a woman at Bowdoin in the late 70’s and early 80’s – the good, the bad, and the unexpected.

Audio: click title below to begin listening

Interview with Linda Nelson ’83, by Coral Sandler ’12

Claiming Space for Bowdoin Women: A Discussion with a founding member of the Women’s Resource Center, Linda Nelson ‘83

As one of the founding members of the Women’s Resource Center and the Gay Straight Alliance, Linda Nelson helped claim new spaces for Bowdoin women in the early 1980s. To hear about how she entered Bowdoin as an out lesbian, experienced active support and real harassment, and persistently worked for social change at Bowdoin (and in the world), listen to the audio.

Audio: click below to begin listening

Intriguing Pieces:

Time: 00:07:44
Quotation: “Somebody tried to burn it [the Women’s Resource Center] down at one point. Um, we did receive threatening phone calls kind of on a regular basis. Some of us were followed around campus.”

Time: 00:14:28
Quotation: “And I think what we realized was that especially with the fraternity structure in which you had this physical structure of houses, that women really needed a space here. So that’s where the idea for the Women’s Resource Center came from. Needed a space, needed a collection.”

Time: 00:24:53
Quotation: [Linda on the message of a lecture she attended by Audre Lord]“Stop feeling guilty about it [privilege]. You know, those of you who got a good education, who have the privilege of being white, who have the privilege of being educated get out there and do something and make a difference with that. And I firmly believe that and I think everybody that helped to found that Women’s Resource Center as a collective really, really believed that.”

Citation: I, Coral Sandler, interviewed Linda Nelson on Saturday, October 14, 2011, in the Nixon Lounge of Hawthorne Longfellow Library at Bowdoin College. We discussed Linda Nelson’s experience at Bowdoin as a student and founding members of the Women’s Resource Center.