Education, community, advocacy and change are some of the main priorities for the Ithaca College Young Feminists Collective, a new Ithaca College club. The up-and-coming organization wants to redefine the narrative on feminism and open up the conversation to all groups, regardless of race or gender.
The group is holding meetings at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays in Friends Hall room 208.
Junior Ruby Kiesewalter is the founder and president of the collective. She said she has learned about feminism over the years, but her interest in sharing feminist conversations with others sparked after Angela Davis spoke at IC in Spring 2025.
“I would talk to my [female] friends, and they would talk about experiences that they were going through, but they wouldn’t be able to put a name to what they were experiencing,” Kiesewalter said. “I think one of our main goals is education. Being able to provide not only young women, but young people, with the vocabulary and the knowledge to understand their experience in this world we live in.”
Junior Breanna Greenspun, the club’s vice president, said that there are many issues involving gender across the world. But she also said she noticed problems based on gender on the IC campus in her experience as a film major.
“There are a lot of issues with the way women are treated in the film program,” Greenspun said. “I’ve been leaning a lot more into photography lately because the photography department just has a lot of female professors … it just feels a lot more welcoming, inviting. I feel like a lot of male professors, specifically in film … don’t take women as seriously.”
One of the foundational elements for the club is intersectionality. Intersectionality is the acknowledgment that multiple identities can exist at the same time because everyone deals with their own forms of oppression and prejudice. Junior Bella Potakey, the treasurer of the collective, said they want to be inclusive to all groups of people with different experiences.
“I think at the core the things that we want to address are people issues,” Potakey said. “We have maybe different cultural identities or ethnic backgrounds or socioeconomic status[es]. But I think at the end of the day, we’re people, and we’re all dealing with different things that need support and need education on.”
Natasha Bharj, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, is the adviser of the club and said that in her classes, she covers topics involving intersectionality and inclusivity.
“I think it’s great any time students are getting together to create a space that other people could feel really empowered in,” Bharj said. “Making a space that could be really welcoming to other people, whether or not they have ever thought about gender before, or if they have been thinking about it their whole lives [is important].”
Junior Jessie Romero Silver is the club’s event coordinator and they said a goal of theirs for the collective is to open up the conversation through collaboration with other clubs.
“[We want] to have this be a space where it’s not just the e-board educating the members,” Romero Silver said. “It’s all of us educating each other because we all bring something different to the table.”
To put some of these goals into effect, the collective hopes to collaborate with many other IC clubs to talk about specific issues that marginalized groups struggle with. Kiesewalter said one of the collaborations she hopes to have is with IC Poder to discuss the hypersexualization of Latina women.
Junior Camilla Mischka, the secretary of the club, said she has been learning about the term “ecofeminism” and would like to learn more about it with club members.
“It basically kind of says how misogynistic values and the degradation of the environment come from the same patriarchal society that we’re living in,” Mischka said. “Sustainability in general is just really important. And I think there’s multiple ways to kind of tie it into feminism as a whole.”
The group highlights how feminism is shown in many different forms and is involved in reproductive health, public education, sustainability and more.
“Feminism isn’t just for women,” Romero Silver said. “We want our members to reflect that as well. Everyone benefits from feminism, and we’re here to support the Ithaca College students.”
Kiesewalter said that destigmatizing the word feminism is something the group wants to work toward achieving. She said that feminism can be an intimidating topic for people who do not identify as women, but they want to educate regardless of how they identify.
“Feminism doesn’t only benefit women [and] doesn’t only apply to women,” Kiesewalter said. “A lot of feminist ideologies can also apply to other marginalized groups. Something I really want to talk about is how the patriarchy is a double-edged sword. A double-edged sword also really affects men. So, yes, one of our first orders of business is destigmatizing the word feminism.”
Jessie Romero Silver was a Contributing Writer for The Ithacan in Spring ’25.
