On Wednesday, the Sarah Doyle Center for Women and Gender hosted a 50th anniversary celebration, bringing together the campus community to commemorate the center’s legacy.
Students and faculty in attendance enjoyed an open house featuring food, refreshments and an exhibit displaying snippets of the center’s archives.
The celebration “recognizes the decades of contributions that our center has made to the student experience at Brown,” wrote Felicia Salinas-Moniz MA’06 PhD’13, director of the Sarah Doyle Center, in an email to The Herald.
“We see this event as a way to bring our campus community together to share stories about the (center) and celebrate the year ahead,” Salinas-Moniz added.
The archival exhibit, titled “50 Years in the SDC Archive,” was curated by Maria Gomberg ’26, a feminist librarian at the center. The exhibit features documents from the center’s history, including advertisements for invited feminist speakers, cartoons of the center, posters for student activism events and reflections from former Sarah Doyle Center staffers.
“These archival materials offer a comforting sense of historical continuity,” Gomberg wrote in the exhibit’s description. “For the most part, day-to-day life in the Sarah Doyle seems to be remarkably similar.”
The Sarah Doyle Center officially opened its doors in 1975, a few years after Pembroke College merged with Brown University in 1971, Salinas-Moniz wrote. Women of Brown United, a University women’s liberation group, along with a working group on the Status of Women at Brown, advocated for the formation of the center, named after Sarah Elizabeth Doyle, the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Brown and a former girls’ principal at Providence High School.
Doyle was “instrumental to the founding of Pembroke College,” and the center’s name recognizes her efforts to support women’s education, Salinas-Moniz wrote.
Today, the center “serves as a welcoming space for examining issues around women and gender,” through hosting speaker programs, workshops and community gatherings, she added.
For its 50th year, the center is planning to feature “local community organizations who do work around women and gender” and connect with alums through establishing a continuous digital journal where they can reflect on their time as a student involved at the center, Salinas-Moniz said.
“It’s been so wonderful to see them reflect on how much the center positively shaped their time at Brown and contributed to their personal and professional growth,” she wrote.
For some student members, the center has served as a second home throughout their time at Brown.
“I am a really big advocate for third spaces, and Stonewall and the Sarah Doyle Center have been that place for me,” said Gender and Sexuality Peer Counselor Leslie Lima ’27. “It’s been a place where I can go and feel comfortable.”
Mia Gutierrez-Huang ’26, another peer counselor, said she discovered the center when she was a first-year living across the street in Keeney Quadrangle. “It always felt like an actual home versus a dorm,” she added.
“As a whole, the Sarah Doyle Center’s work is important because it helps to cultivate a sense of community and belonging for students across identities,” Salinas-Moniz wrote.
