To the Editor:
Meghan Clyne’s column “A Center for Some Women” (4/21) irresponsibly misrepresents the Yale Women’s Center.
Clyne criticizes the Center, for example, for promoting a lecture on “Post Feminism and Popular Culture” instead of giving thought to the balance between career and family. But the lecture she cites took place in October 2002, while two of the last three Women’s Center Announcement e-mails have publicized events focused on the career-family balance (including a “Balancing Career and Family” panel discussion scheduled for April 28).
This deliberate mischaracterization of Women’s Center events should call the validity and objectivity of Clyne’s critique into question. What Clyne’s column criticizes is not the Yale Women’s Center, but an inappropriate and irresponsible caricature of what Clyne knows the Center to be.
The Yale Women’s Center is an organization for students of all backgrounds who work to enhance women’s range of choices and support equality in accordance with the Center’s mission statement. Clyne’s examples reveal a misunderstanding of this aspect of the Center. If Clyne were to organize an informational event about the benefits of adoption, the Women’s Center would surely welcome that event as an additional source of information about women’s choices.
The distorted facts presented in Clyne’s column should alert students not to rely on her characterization of the Yale Women’s Center. Readers who are curious about the Center should discover the real Yale Women’s Center for themselves.
Sarah Sherblom ’04
April 21, 2003