When Susan McGee Bailey ’63 graduated from Wellesley, she vowed never to set foot on campus again, because the College had no courses in women’s history.

Bailey, an ardent feminist, says that in the early ’60s, Wellesley “still very much had the idea that, ‘We’re an all-women’s institution. We don’t have to have anything specifically focused on women.’ That just seemed upside-down to me.”

After graduating with a degree in history, Bailey traveled the world, taught in Taiwan and the Caribbean, married, earned a Ph.D. in social science educational research at the University of Michigan, and did a postdoc in public health in Bogotá, Colombia. There, her daughter, Amy, was born prematurely with physical and developmental challenges. When Bailey returned to Boston to seek support for Amy at Boston Children’s Hospital, she heard that the College was starting a center for research on women. “I thought, that’s what Wellesley should have been doing all along,” she says.

For 50 years, researchers at what is now the Wellesley Centers for Women (WCW) have conducted groundbreaking interdisciplinary studies on social issues such as the effects of placing children in child care, gender equity in education, and the role of social media in adolescents’ lives. From the beginning, its mission has been to deploy rigorous academic research to address real-world problems.

“It all started in the 1970s, when Barbara Newell was president of the College,” says Layli Maparyan, Katherine Stone Kaufmann ’67 Executive Director of WCW and professor of Africana studies. Newell had come from the University of Wisconsin, which had launched an innovative, interdisciplinary center for research on poverty. “It was meant to be a social science research center with real-world policy impact. She came here to Wellesley as a women’s college and asked, ‘Why don’t we set up a center like that, [focusing] on the women’s movement?’” Maparyan says.

The Center for Research on Women (CRW) was founded in 1974, led by Carolyn Elliott ’59. The Wellesley Centers for Women was formally established in 1995 when the CRW joined forces with the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies—founded in 1981—retaining the plural on Centers.

“I always say, don’t take that ‘s’ off the Wellesley Centers for Women, because it encapsulates the history of two equally important women-oriented groups,” says Maparyan.

Bailey was hired as director of the CRW in 1985. “There was so much to do,” she says. “The issue of children and care for children and the conflicts confronting working parents weren’t the only issues, but they were key issues.”

The CRW’s School-Age Childcare Project, founded in 1978 with startup funding from the Ford Foundation, brought national attention to the importance of out-of-school-time programming as a strategy to help mothers enter and stay in the workforce. The project was later renamed the National Institute on Out-of-School Time (NIOST) and, since then, has continued to focus on how out-of-school programs can enhance the work of schools, especially in high-need communities, to improve children’s well-being, social and emotional learning, academic achievement, and life prospects.

Bailey spearheaded the groundbreaking report How Schools Shortchange Girls, funded by the American Association of University Women and published in 1992. It challenged the assumption that girls and boys are treated equally in U.S. public schools. The study found that teachers paid less attention to girls than boys in the classroom. It also found that sexual harassment of girls by boys in school settings was increasing. The report was distributed at the U.N. Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995, at which Hillary Rodham Clinton ’69 famously said, “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights.” The report influenced federal legislation on programs for girls in science and math, shaped public discourse on gender and education, and led to new community-based programs for girls across the country.

Photo by Joel Haskell

Answering an Essential Question

“One of the biggest questions of the feminist movement was, can women go to work? Can they leave the home and enter public life? Who’s taking care of the kids?” says Maparyan.

WCW has played—and continues to play—a role in answering that life-changing, society-altering question. Its researchers were deeply involved in the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development, a massive, national effort from 1991–2009. The goal of the study was to examine how differences in child care experiences relate to children’s social, emotional, intellectual, and language development, and to their physical growth and health.

“The whole question going in was, is it OK for women to send their kids to child care? Are the kids going to come out OK, or do women need to feel guilty for doing that?” Maparyan says. The study had a clear answer: “Yes, you can go to work. Yes, your kids will be fine. It’s great if the child care is high-quality. We do care about that. But, generally speaking, wipe the sweat from your brow, and go do your thing.”

The NICHD study decisively answered the question of whether child care harms children or not, and, by implication, whether mothers could participate in the workforce without guilt. Its impact on the lives of women at all levels of society, as well as parents of every gender, has been tremendous.

Normalizing parents’ use of child care marked a generational shift. “There are people who can remember before that study had its impact,” Maparyan says. “Young people today take it for granted that it’s always been OK to take your kids to daycare. But older people can remember when that was unthinkable. It just shows that in 50 years, a lot can change.”

Reframing the Conversation on Mental Health

Over the years, Maparyan says, “We’ve contributed measurably to gender equality and equity in the United States. We’ve also made important contributions to what we refer to broadly as human well-being, particularly through our mental health focus.”

Concerns about societal mental health prompted the establishment of the Stone Center for Developmental Services and Studies. Dedicated to the prevention of psychological problems, the enhancement of psychological well-being, and the search for a more comprehensive understanding of human development, it was launched with a generous grant from Grace W. and Robert S. Stone.

The Stones’ daughter Kathy Stone Kaufmann ’67, a retired psychotherapist who has served as a Wellesley trustee and on WCW’s advisory council, says, “The Stone Center had a vision for prevention and counseling, research and theory building, with Jean Baker Miller as the first director. Those were storied years, because she was such a national and international figure in terms of feminist psychology and relational theory. Her work turned around a basically male model to say that being healthy is being relational, is being caring, is being empathic, is being able to put yourself in someone else’s shoes,” says Kaufmann.

Relational-cultural theory (RCT) posits that healthy human development is based on growth through relationships, and that relationality itself is powerfully shaped by culture. This theory challenges the notion that the goal of human development is movement toward greater individualism and independence. The Jean Baker Miller Training Institute, a legacy program of WCW, has taught thousands of people to apply RCT in clinical settings, educational institutions, organizations, and businesses around the world.

Kaufmann recalls that when her parents gave their founding gift, they spoke about the idea of prevention in mental health. “That was not something in the lexicon—and it’s still not in the lexicon enough,” says Kaufmann, who worked for many years in community mental health and then in private practice. “The better way to do things is by trying to systemically prevent emotional problems. Open Circle offers social and emotional learning, which is really all about prevention.”

Founded in 1987, the Open Circle program provided evidence-based social and emotional learning curricula and professional development for elementary and middle schools. Originally called the Framingham Schools Project and, later, Reach Out to Schools, it was one of the first programs in the nation to define social emotional learning, launching an entire field and kickstarting a culture shift that transformed hundreds of schools across the United States into communities where students feel safe, cared for, and more engaged in learning. It also spurred U.S. schools to put more emphasis on the emotional well-being of the entire school community—teachers, administrators, staff, and students. (Open Circle operates separately from WCW now.)

A Model of Collaboration

WCW’s research model is built around collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and action. “We want that gold standard peer review so that we can say this is hardcore social science, not just our opinion—but then what we do with that has always been a big part of our secret sauce,” says Maparyan.

Linda Charmaraman, WCW senior research scientist and founder/director of the Youth, Media & Wellbeing Research Lab (YMW), says, “The mission of research is not being on a dusty shelf; it needs to be translated to practice and policy.”

Her early years at WCW focused on learning about all the different ways that research teams collaborate, says Charmaraman. “And then I was able to start on my own path of adolescent development and media use. I got this home-grown rearing of grant writing and how to understand what is timely for funders to put their investment into—that sometimes it’s a combination of what do you want and what does society need, what is society actually looking for?”

The YMW research-and-action lab, established by a National Institutes for Health grant, is a prime example of not leaving data to gather dust. Charmaraman studies the effects of digital media on the health and well-being of children and teens. She was invited to co-author the American Psychological Association’s 2023 health advisory on social media use in adolescence, and the U.S. Surgeon General referenced this APA advisory (as well as the lab’s chapter titled “Marginalized and Understudied Populations Using Digital Media”) in his 2023 advisory on protecting youth mental health. Amidst a crisis of depression and anxiety among young people, Charmaraman’s research provides hard data about the nuanced role social media and smartphones play in the lives of young people.

“I couldn’t have done the work without the help of Wellesley students, and I have such an interdisciplinary draw, too. I’ve worked with people from over 20 different departments,” says Charmaraman. “It feels like a liberal arts community within our lab.”

For Connie Gu ’24, who double majored in psychology and media arts and sciences, working as a research assistant with WCW played a critical role in her development as a scholar. She learned qualitative data analysis while working with Charmaraman and Catherine Grevet Delcourt ’09, assistant professor of computer science. Delcourt studies how people relate to each other through social technologies. Gu was a YMW workshop facilitator for three years. “[It] aligned with my research interest of creating technologies and opportunities that are collaborative, equitable, and empowering,” she says.

Gu also contributed to scholarly papers and was listed as an author on human-computer interaction (HCI) publications with her mentors. “Innovating Novel Online Social Spaces with Diverse Middle School Girls: Ideation and Collaboration in a Synchronous Virtual Design Workshop” was accepted for the prestigious Association for Computing Machinery’s Human Factors in Computing Systems conference.

“My mom Googled it, and she said, ‘Honey, that’s the biggest HCI conference in the world,’” Gu says, laughing.

Gu went on to do an in-person presentation at CHIWORK 2023 in Oldenburg, Germany, sharing her paper titled “Experiences of Novice Design Facilitators in a Remote Participatory Workshop.” And this fall, she embarked on a Ph.D. in information science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Global Perspective

In 2017, WCW expanded its reach into the world through two international conferences: the Gender, Social Justice, and Women’s Empowerment Conference in Cape Verde, and the Sex/Ed Conference in India.

In Cape Verde, WCW and the Centre for Research and Training in Gender and Family at the University of Cape Verde brought together academics, government officials, United Nations officers, and representatives of numerous nongovernmental and community-based organizations to discuss such topics as sexual- and gender-based violence, gender and health, rural vs. urban women, women’s access to nontraditional careers, womanism, and the relation between systems of care and social and economic empowerment. This conference provided an opportunity for diverse stakeholders and changemakers to share insights, discuss strategy, and form collaborations.

In India, WCW and the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexualities at Ashoka University in New Delhi co-hosted an international conference exploring the relationship between sex, sexuality, and education in the context of a rich international history of discourse and activism. Topics included sexual harassment in the classroom, LGBTQ+ education and K–12 students, reproductive justice and anti-racist approaches to sex education, and human rights perspectives on sex work. Contributions from art, music, drama, dance, and popular culture showcased the role of the humanities in this multidisciplinary conversation.

“We’ve always had a few international projects or people doing international work over the years,” says Maparyan, who is part of a team doing a USAID project in Liberia, West Africa. The large goal of that project is to create a workforce to help preserve the Upper Guinean rainforest on the African continent. “But that workforce—and this is where my part comes in—has to be accessible to women, youth, people with disabilities, and people from remote rural areas,” says Maparyan. “What can I bring in as a womanist and feminist scholar to make sure that those communities are included? It brings our expertise into an arena where it might not otherwise have shown up, which is environmental education and action for climate change.”

WCW will continue to play a role in the wider world as it heads into its next 50 years, leaving its longtime home in Cheever House for Simpson Cottage, an 1880 building on the east side of campus, and a new position under the umbrella of the Wagner Centers for Wellesley in the World. It joins the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute for Public Affairs and the Hillary Rodham Clinton Center for Citizenship, Leadership, and Democracy. With those colleagues, Maparyan anticipates finding new ways for WCW to make a global impact.

“We can really catalyze each other,” she says. And WCW’s mission will persist. “We are advancing gender equality, social justice, and human well-being through high-quality research, theory, and action. That’s not going to change. That’s what we do. That’s who we are.”