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Anita Hill Speaks

Twenty-eight years ago, the FQT Center (originally named the Alice Paul Center) and GSWS Program hosted Anita Hill in her first public talk after the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. Professor Hill returned to Penn at yet another historic moment in the movement against sexual harassment and sexual assault: Christine Blasey Ford's courageous testimony at the confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. 

Together with Kimberlé Crenshaw, who was a member of Hill's legal team for the hearings, the discussion ranged from the historical roots of the sexual exploitation of black women, what has changed and what has remained the same since 1991, and sexual harasment in the academy. Sexual Harassment from Congressional Testimony to the #MeToo Movement was moderated by Penn's own Dorothy Roberts.

1992: first public talk after hearings

2018: A Conversation between Anita Hill and Kimberlé Crenshaw

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1973: The Sit-In

In 1973, students, faculty, and staff conducted a multi-day sit-in in College Hall to protest a campus culture of sexual violence and gender discrimination. Protesters’ demands for institutional spaces focused on gender were met with the formation of the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Program (originally named “Women’s Studies”), a new academic program offering gender and sexuality studies courses, majors, minors, and graduate certificates, and the Penn Women’s Center, a campus center dedicated to increasing safety and inclusion for women and sexual minorities. Ten years later, faculty and students demanded a campus research center devoted to scholarship on gender and sexuality studies, leading to the foundation of the Center for Research in Feminist, Queer, and Transgender Studies (formerly named the “Alice Paul Center”), dedicated to supporting research and scholarship.

• The History of GSWS & FQT
• Penn Women's Center
• Penn Violence Protection