Food, music, feminist literature - the Penn Women's Center was the place to be on Friday during its annual open house.
Copies of the most recent edition of The F-word, the Women's Center-sponsored feminist magazine, were distributed, and Penn's all-female a capella group, the Quaker Notes, performed a spirited rendition of "Hotel Song" and "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy."
New director Michele Goldfarb welcomed the crowd, saying the Women's Center was there to "celebrate, educate, and agitate" this year.
The Women's Center was founded in 1973 as a safe haven for Penn's women, but some say it has been an underused resource in recent years.
"Everyone on campus walks by it every day, and no one comes in," Goldfarb said. "We'd like to change that."
Goldfarb expressed her hope that the Women's Center will become a more widely used resource for education, support and networking, as well a community where women who are interested in meeting one another can come and talk about what is on their minds.
The Women's Center also hopes to teach women valuable life and career skills from a gender perspective. Women can come to the center to learn how to negotiate salaries, navigate the professional world and manage interpersonal relationships in a male-dominated workplace.
In trying to learn what interests women at Penn, the Women's Center has for the first time formed a student advisory board whose members span across every year and every undergraduate school as well as several of graduate schools.
One of the board's goals is to turn the Women's Center into a community that will be "political, educational and fun," Goldfarb said.
Among the Women's Center's plans for the near future are broadcasting the Democratic presidential debate that will be held at Drexel this month, as well as starting a weekly class where women - and men - can come and bond while learning to stitch.
