In 1848, women’s rights activist Lucretia Mott, a Quaker, brought the issue of women’s rights to the public sphere at the Seneca Falls Convention in Seneca Falls, New York.
Now, 164 years later, one can find the convention’s namesake, Seneca International, reverberating the same message in a different venue — on Penn’s campus.
Seneca International — founded last spring by College junior Alice Xie and College senior Ashleigh Taylor — aims to fill a void left by women’s advocacy groups already established on campus.
“I saw development-oriented organizations, but none that uniquely helped woman in poor and impoverished areas,” Xie said. “It was surprisingly difficult to find organizations addressing these issues here and at other major universities, so I thought this would be a good space to fill.”
Members feel issues that women face globally are not given the same attention as the issues women face on campus, and they hope Seneca International can bridge the gap between domestic and global women’s issues.
“I looked at the opportunities [that] clubs on campus offered and realized that most of them dealt with issues that students at Penn might face directly, such as sexual harassment or date rape,” Xie said. “Of course all those are very serious issues, but I was more interested in international, slightly more severe, women’s rights violations.”
“For me, joining Seneca is really an opportunity to put women’s issues on a larger scale and to get people … thinking about these things that are convenient to ignore,” College senior and Seneca International member Alixandra Kriegsman said.
The issues that Seneca International plans to bring attention to will range from women’s health to sexual violence, but its ultimate goal is to make these distant issues mainstream and relatable to the student body.
“I think one of the greatest challenges that women’s rights faces is that people don’t often see women’s rights issues as human rights issues, such as health, education and economic opportunity,” said Seneca International Director of Programming and College senior Chloe Sharfin. “One of the things that Seneca is trying to do is emphasize that women’s rights issues are human rights issues and that everyone should be involved on a certain level.”
Seneca International has already branched out to two other college campuses — Yale and Stanford — and plans to expand to other schools in the near future. The organization has accumulated almost 90 members.
Establishing credibility as a new non-profit organization on campus was initially the biggest challenge for Seneca International.
“I think starting out was the hardest part because you have to get good people to sign-up and who believe that this is going to be a viable organization,” Xie said. “In terms of the technicalities, everything we knew about setting up a non-profit was a result of Googling. A lot of it is really more straightforward than what people might think.”
Members of the board hope to not only spread their message to students at Penn, Yale and Stanford but also to galvanize a movement as a whole.
“I think it’s exciting for each of us personally to really lay the foundation for this group,” Sharfin said. “I think that each of us has expressed that we want to build this into something bigger than Penn and bigger than ourselves.”
