Welcome to the Hattie Redmond Women & Gender Center
About
The Hattie Redmond Women & Gender Center (HRWGC) is one of seven Cultural Resource Centers on campus. We are a student-run space dedicated to fostering community. Located within our cozy blue house, we have several programs to engage with, ranging from one-time events during Women’s Herstory Month, to weekly programming through our initiatives: AYA and Masculinity Explorations. As an open community of leaders inspiring change, we provide advocacy, resources, and opportunities to transform ideas into positive action and reality. We invite students of all identities to partake in building our community together.
OUR MISSION
Informed by feminist theories and lessons, we are committed to creating spaces of community, supporting advocacy, and developing student leaders who actively contribute to building feminist futures.
HRWGC Values:
- Community & Belonging – Creating welcoming spaces and inviting programming.
- Advocacy – Supporting students, organizers, and activists.
- Growth – Fostering environments of learning and identity development.
HRWGC Guiding Frameworks:
- Women of Color Feminisms
- Trauma-Informed and Survivor-Centered
INITIATIVES
- AYA
- AYA, our Women of Color Initiative strives to facilitate long-lasting and dynamic support for Women of Color, including body, spirit, and identity in the past, present, future, and fluid. We aim to facilitate interconnectedness within OSU and Corvallis communities, welcoming all people into spaces that allow learning, growth, and healing.
- AYA offers programming including our bi-weekly discussion group, our weekly newsletter, our webcast Still We Persist, and other one-time events. We invite you to engage with us through our programming/events, social media, or by signing up for our newsletter and listserv below.
- Masculinity Explorations (ME)
- Masculinity Explorations is an initiative invested in the engagement in conversation surrounding masculinity. We strive to discover what forms of masculinity reflect our values, and ways we can nurture them. We work to challenge both our preconceptions of masculinity, and the hegemonic societal expectation of what masculinity should look like. In addition to other programming, ME hosts Masculinity Mondays, a biweekly discussion group open to all.
Our Herstory
The Hattie Redmond Women & Gender Center was established as the Women's Center in 1972 at the same time as the Women Studies Program (now current WGSS; Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) at Oregon State University in response to the deliberate discrimination of women on campus. This history informs the Center's strong connection with the WGSS program and influences its commitment to social justice activism using anti-racist feminist theory and practice as the foundation for training students to challenge systems of intersecting oppressions on campus and in society. We are housed in the second oldest building on campus.
Since the early 1970s, universities throughout the U.S. have opened Centers to respond to inequities experienced by women both in-and outside the classroom.
The OSU Women & Gender Center is one of the oldest university Women’s Centers in the U.S.
The Center Against Rape & Domestic Violence (CARDV) and the OSU Pride Center grew out of our space.
In the summer of 2018, the OSU Women’s Center, in a building officially named the Benton Annex, was renamed the Hattie Redmond Women & Gender Center. The name change was the result of student activism that called attention to buildings with namesakes that held racist or otherwise exclusionary views.
Hattie Redmond was a leader in the struggle for women’s suffrage in Oregon in the early 20th century. The right to vote was especially important to Hattie, who was a Black woman living in a state that had Black exclusion laws in its constitution.
Her work is credited with laying the groundwork for the civil rights movement in Oregon in the mid-twentieth century. Her contributions to our history in Oregon has long been untold, and still is missing from much mainstream educational curriculum. We strive to honor and center Hattie Redmond in all of our work, acknowledging the importance of the intersection of race and gender.
- To learn more about Hattie Redmond, visit:
Dear Survivors,
We love you. We support you. We are here to advocate with you.
We are writing to reaffirm, again and always, our commitment to believing and supporting survivors of sexual and interpersonal violence in our OSU community, across all identities and experiences. We recognize that the constant influx of media around campus sexual violence has a significant impact on our community; the recent news might be feeling inescapable, overwhelming, or triggering/activating. You may be holding feelings of anger, sadness, and betrayal. We want to remind you that it is normal to be experiencing any number of feelings surrounding this flood of distressing news about trauma and violence - those reactions are real and they deserve to be acknowledged and taken seriously. Your stories and experiences are valid, and we are here to support you and your healing, no matter how that looks.
HRWGC Staff
- Whitney Archer: Associate Director of DCE & Center Director of HRWGC
- Hazel - Leadership Liaison
- Jada - Leadership Liaison | Communications Representative
- Masha - Graphic Designer
- Julie - Community Relations Representative
- Kailey - Community Relations Representative
- Rain - Community Relations Representative
- Yajirrah - Community Relations Representative
- Alia - Community Relations Representative
- Samira - Community Relations Representative