One of the first clubs I joined at Harvard was the Women’s Initiative in Leadership (WIL), a weekly speaker series offered by the Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics. I’ve been a feminist since I was a preteen, though the way I defined that word then differs from how I would define it now. In high school, I railed against sexual objectification in competitive speaking events, led a teen council at my local women’s shelter, and won thousands of dollars for short stories that grappled with the weight of womanhood. My work was by no means radical activism, but I considered it central to my identity.
In the conservative suburb where I grew up, “feminist” was something of a dirty word. When I got into Harvard, I was certain that things would be different. I’d researched the history of feminism on campus—from the women’s liberation movement at Radcliffe in the 1970s to the debates over the status of final clubs in the 2010s—and I was excited to become a part of that legacy. Naively, I’d also assumed that the institution’s perceived political leanings aligned with its social culture. Harvard was widely considered a left-of-center university in a progressive East Coast city: surely, I thought, its campus culture would reflect that.
The first woman to speak at WIL that semester was a partner at a major consulting firm. Before transitioning to the private sector, she had worked alongside several Republican politicians in the federal government. She was an eloquent speaker, but the longer I sat in that Kennedy School seminar room, the less sure I was that the group I was in had anything to do with feminism. Once a week on Fridays, an accomplished woman would advise us—a group of 30 or so ambitious undergraduate women—on how to succeed in the professional world. Was that feminist enough on its own? Did it matter what, exactly, these speakers had accomplished? The one in front of me had directly advised anti-abortion members of Congress; Roe had been overturned that summer and abortion was now banned in my home state. But WIL, at least then, was more concerned with the success of the women in that seminar room than the welfare of women as a whole: I quit at the end of the semester.
Feminism is difficult to define. The movement has always been characterized by internal debate—this, I think, is because it tries to represent the interests of half of humanity. I’ve heard it discussed as a personal identity or critical framework; I am inclined to think of it as a political ideology. Even its most basic goals depend on whom you ask. When I was a teenager, I thought of feminism as advocating for equality between men and women. Now, I think it works for a world where sexual difference carries no social significance: “men” and “women” would be meaningless categories. I’m sure my personal definition will continue to evolve as I spend more time in the world as an adult woman.
Even so, during my first year at Harvard, I didn’t find a thriving feminist presence in any sense of the word. The closest alternative was an ecosystem of pre-professional women’s groups like WIL, designed to help women succeed in a range of corporate contexts. Why does Harvard lack an expansive space for feminist organizing, especially given its historical tradition of women’s resistance? What role do pre-professional groups play in bringing women together and helping them succeed in male-dominated spaces? And in what ways do pre-professional organizations fill in the gaps created by the absence of explicitly feminist groups?
In reporting for this column, I asked leaders of three prominent women’s pre-professional groups—Harvard Undergraduate Women in Business (WiB), Harvard Undergraduate Women in Computer Science (WiCS), and WIL—how they envision their clubs in relation to feminism. While all hesitated to describe their groups as feminist, many opted to use the term “empowerment.”
“Feminism, to me, focuses solely on women, whereas empowerment is more collaborative,” WiB copresident Ellie Gao ’25 told me. Morgan Byers ’26, the current WIL chair, also describes her group as a “women’s empowerment” space, though for her, the term is analogous with feminism. At the same time, she believes that “feminism has this connotation with ‘female,’” and says she tries to stay away from gendered language in order to remain inclusive (though she can’t quite explain why “women’s empowerment” feels less gendered than “feminist”).
Empowerment is more a nebulous feeling than a measurable outcome. It’s also a word I’ve only ever heard women use. Brittney Cooper, a cultural critic and Rutgers professor of women, gender, and sexuality studies, warns against conflating empowerment with power. Power is conferred by social systems, she argues, while empowerment is something that people cultivate when they lack real power to begin with: imagine, for a moment, members of the Porcellian proclaiming that their centuries-old club, which includes former presidents, senators, and Supreme Court justices on its roster of alumni, empowers them. There’s nothing wrong with empowerment, Cooper adds—but we need to stop settling for empowerment when what we really need is power.
When Rachael Dziaba ’26 started college, she hoped to join a feminist advocacy group. She went to the annual Student Activities Fair, but the closest club she could find was Our Harvard Can Do Better, a group advocating against rape culture on campus. Dziaba joined the group and spent her freshman year involved in advocacy focused on Title IX and campus sexual violence. The summer before her sophomore year, she and a few other organizers with Our Harvard Can Do Better elected to rename the group the Harvard Feminist Coalition.
“We wanted to make it clear that the organizing space was for all feminist issues,” she says. The coalition still organizes around campus sexual violence, but now members also advocate for broader feminist and intersectional causes, such as reproductive justice and Palestinian liberation. Their activism has led to visible change on campus: last spring, their lobbying efforts led to a recall vote on campus that removed one of the Harvard Undergraduate Association copresidents over allegations of misconduct.
This isn’t to say that pre-professionalism and feminism are mutually exclusive. Although Amulya Garimella ’25, copresident of WiCS, wouldn’t exactly describe her group as feminist, she does believe that its work counters the pervasive culture of misogyny in the tech world by building community among women. In the face of nationwide efforts to force women back into the private sphere—from the overturning of Roe to the romanticization of the tradwife—pre-professional groups cultivate women’s aspirations outside the home. Although the success of an individual woman isn’t the end goal of feminism, the belief that women should have power in the public sphere is often considered one of its bedrock principles.
Even so, pre-professional groups on campus vastly outnumber the single feminist one. Though this troubles me, I no longer find it surprising. Harvard attracts overachievers. Many of us—myself included—are here because we learned to game the system of college admissions, turning high school into an extended audition for the Ivy League. As undergraduates, we continue to value prestige and individual accomplishments: this is one reason why more than half of graduating seniors entering the workforce take jobs in finance, tech, or consulting. It makes sense that this fixation on traditional markers of success seeps into Harvard’s sexual politics. Harvard women realize that the patriarchy won’t be abolished anytime soon; in the meantime, many choose to maximize their power within a sexist system. To those women, feminist organizing can feel like a threat because it seeks to abolish the very system under which they have accrued social capital, however compromised that capital may be. Sometimes, it is easier to satiate oneself with empowerment than it is to undertake the exhausting, stigmatized, and painful fight for real power.
As crucial as feminism is to my life, I’m not immune to the urge to distance myself from the messy work of organizing. One of the many extracurriculars I tried out freshman year was Fifteen Minutes, the weekly magazine of The Harvard Crimson. While I’ve since drifted away from those other clubs, I’ve stayed in the Crimson, where I’ve spent the past two-and-a-half years writing about gender and sexuality on campus. Although I’m proud of the work I’ve done, the Crimson’s conflict-of-interest policies mean that writing about these topics precludes me from organizing around them. As much as I’d like to think of this as an unfortunate, inevitable circumstance, it is in fact a choice I make every day. Several peers have left the Crimson because of their commitment to activist causes—primarily, campus organizing for Palestine. When faced with the same choice in relation to feminism, I stayed: writing, editing, and climbing my way onto the masthead. I chose journalism and all its consequences: its distance, its objectivity, its apoliticism.
I believe in the power of writing: I’m trying to stake a career on it. Journalism and literature both can alter the public consciousness, laying the foundation for political change. At the same time, I worry that writing is not the most effective way for me to improve the material conditions of another woman’s life. It is direct action, not intellectual discourse, that leads to swifter and more lasting change.
Even though my preference for journalism has limited my activism, I still try to imagine what robust feminist organizing could do for women at Harvard. Ultimately, pre-professional groups serve to support success for the individual woman. While this isn’t inherently a bad thing, something I have long admired about traditional activist groups is their attention to the collective. In a feminist context, collective action could help Harvard women think about what it is they owe other women, especially as they go on to accrue corporate and political power, as Harvard alumnae so often do. The women I’ve met here stun me with their drive and brilliance. I know each one will accomplish amazing things on her own: I am curious to know what we could accomplish working together.
