March 4, 2015

Only a few days into Women’s History Month, Delta Xi Nu Multicultural Sorority kicked off March with the celebration of female empowerment through Respect HER.

An open forum organized by DXN debuted March 3 at Stotler Lounge in Memorial Union and was presented in conjunction with a dozen other organizations all devoted to social justice causes.

“Our first signature event is Respect HER.,” DXN member Shelby Randall said. “Respect HER. is an event that is part of our mission to always empower women and to respect women all around the world besides here in the community, and just kind of give that upper strength for women to have a voice in daily life.”

Sharing a message of empowerment, these thirteen organizations displayed several interactive booths and tables from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., showcasing different aspects of women’s empowerment, identity and leadership.

“Respect HER. is all about celebrating women,” DXN member Abigail Hollis said.

Randall described how DXN’s constant striving for inclusivity and acceptance made Respect HER. the perfect forum to host. The social sorority includes women from different backgrounds and with different ideas, but all passionate about having a voice and inspiring other women.

“Collectively we decided to get together and form this event and inspire other women and other women organizations here on campus to say, ‘you can do things and we can make greater things happen when we work together as a group of women,’” she said.

The origin and inspiration for Respect HER. came from the founders of Delta Xi Nu.

“For our sorority, our national philanthropy is awareness of domestic violence against women, so we kind of wanted to focus more on underrepresented women and having them be able to be shown more. To let people know that, hey, we’re out here, we’re doing big things too!” DXN Vice President Jacqueline Thai said.

Thai said the multicultural sorority reached out to a lot of different organizations for this year’s event.

“Basically we just picked every organization that we felt really resonated on our campus,” she said. “We kind of wanted to bring together the community.”

These organizations included True North, MU LGBTQ Resource Center, Feminist Student Union, Rainbow House, Mizzou Alphas, MU Women’s Center, Four Front Minority Student Leaders Council, Fluffy Girl, Target H.O.P.E., Women in Engineering, SPEAK Community Theater and MU Women’s Leadership Conference.

True North raised awareness of domestic violence and the safe space and free services they provide for those affected, in the hopes to remove society’s tendency to normalize violence against women.

Rainbow House reinforced the women leadership theme with mirrors encouraging passers-by to self-reflect and share the leadership qualities they possess. SPEAK Community Theater also had a message of self-love and self-care with its mission of social change through creative arts.

The Feminist Student Union presented an array of feminist female role models, and the men of Mizzou Alphas showed their support of Respect HER. with a booth showcasing women on campus in their desire to uplift women.

The MU Women’s Center tackled the topic of gender equality and gender roles with posters that adapted a poem by Nancy R. Smith entitled “For Every Woman”— “for every girl who is tired of acting weak when she is strong, there is a boy tired of appearing strong when he feels vulnerable.”

Four Front’s table focused on intersectional identities and bringing awareness to the issues that arise for cross-cultural minorities, and the LGBTQ Resource Center embraced all types of women: lesbian, queer, transgender and bisexual, in the same inclusive welcome shared by DXN.

Respect HER. allowed students to walk in freely at any time during the three-hour event and engage in discussion with the array of informative resources.

“We spent a lot of time on this event. We’ve been planning this since last year,” Thai said. “Within the last two months, everything’s been flowing really well.”

She said she was excited about the high turnout, and that it was worth the struggles and stress of preparation.

Respect HER. is an open space that encourages and promotes the idea of equality from very diverse perspectives.

“(It’s about) educating others that women would like to make a change and that they have made a significant change throughout the centuries and generations and that we wanna continue growing that,” Randall said.

Thai explained Respect HER’s goals: to remove the limitations and boundaries often placed on women, women who often feel less than because of their gender.

DXN’s main medium of celebrating Women’s History Month is through its Respect HER. event, although the group plans on holding fundraisers throughout the month and potentially will have more events in April or May.

“We do a lot of (events) on diversity too, we do a lot of beauty events,” Thai said. “We had a hair event last year and then we had a documentary on Southeastern Asian women.”

Thai said DXN is very involved in celebrating the beauty of multiculturalism and diversity.

“We’re all about feminism and celebrating women, so we definitely wanted an event that would both celebrate women and educate people at the same,” Hollis said. “So I think Respect HER is really the perfect thing for that. The idea behind it is really important to us.”

Thai, Hollis, and Randall all said they are optimistic that Respect HER can become an annual symposium.

“We’re hoping that we get more people to join and get a lot more recognition,” Randall said. “It would be nice to expand out to more and other organizations here on campus, to help kind of kick start in with some support and help get us to education more and more people on this campus.”

Although Respect HER is geared toward women, it hopes to appeal to the entire student body to education those unaware and support those in need, Thai said.

“And we also want women to get together and feel empowered,” she said. “That’s our main goal: empowerment. Embracing empowerment and equality in honor of Women’s History Month.​”

Comments

The Maneater has the right to remove comments that do not comply with policies surrounding hate speech.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Skip to content