How Chatham Undergrads Organized the Pittsburgh Feminist Student Summit
Students tabling at the 2025 Pittsburgh Feminist Student Summit speak to an attendee. (Lucas Barnes)
Register for the 2026 Pittsburgh Feminist Student Summit at events.chatham.edu
What started as an offhand idea in one of Professor of Gender Studies Jessie Ramey’s classrooms became an event that united Chatham’s feminist community with those of the greater Pittsburgh area.
In just five short months, an amalgamation of passionate Chatham students put together the first Pittsburgh Feminist Student Summit, hosted in Mellon Center during the spring ’25 term. It brought in students from all over the area, providing a safe and educational space for emerging Pittsburgh feminists to share ideas, experiences, and opinions.
Now, the Pittsburgh Feminist Student Summit is back for its second year on March 21, 2026.
The project was spearheaded last year by a group of students from Ramey’s course on gendered resistance, riots, and rebellions. The first summit was held in memoriam of the late Laura Lovett, who led the University of Pittsburgh’s gender, sexuality, and women’s studies program. She was joined Ramey’s class as a guest speaker on the day the idea was born.
“… her knowledge and connections, combined with Dr. Ramey’s, gave us a wide well of resources to plan this event with,” said Kiera Baker ’25, an organizer who graduated from Chatham with a degree in political science and women’s and gender studies.
“Without her, this would not have happened, and it is important to highlight that she was the catalyst for this event happening. It was great getting to see her students at the event, knowing they were there for her and how much she would have loved that.”
Baker, alongside a handful of other students—such as Mary Stanton ’27, Rachel Coleman ’26, and now-alumnae Sydney Altfather ’25, Arden Begley ’25, and Mackenzie Lewis ’25, to name a few—quickly got the ball rolling.
“The planning of the summit was a very collaborative process,” said Begley, the recent English alum, who dealt with many of the summit’s technology-related tasks, such as DJing.
Chatham students who organized the 2025 Pittsburgh Feminist Student Summit stand with Professor of Chemistry Joseph MacNeil (third from left) and Associate Professor of Gender Studies Jessie Ramey (right.) (Lucas Barnes)
Starting in November 2024, a group of officers from different Chatham femme- aligned organizations, Women’s Institute workers, and other Chatham students began to gather in the Women’s Institute every week to develop plans for the summit, Begley said. The small group of students quickly garnered support from various clubs and organizations, such as Chatham’s Feminist Coalition, the Triota Honors Society, Women’s Leadership & Femme Aligned LLC, Chatham Democrats, the Creative Writing Club, and Chatham’s Film Club.
Tiana Eicher ’26 majors in creative writing major and is a member of Chatham’s Planned Parenthood Generation Action chapter. “I remember Mary Stanton bringing up the idea of gathering all of the feminist organizations across Pittsburgh into one big event,” Eicher said. Then she, along with some other people in the class, decided to make the idea a reality.
In the coming months, a variety of students joined in on the planning process, working on things like social media promotions, T-shirt designing, communication, outreach, and playlist curation. “… the number of hands that had a major impact on this event cannot be understated,” Baker said. “We organized it in a way that anyone was able to join for whatever they could do.”
Before they knew it, it was time for the summit on March 29, 2025.
“From when I woke up that morning to when we finished our clean up, it felt almost electric,” Baker said. “We were all so passionate about this event and the topics we were covering that nothing could stop us. Seeing your friends light up when meeting new people at this event, especially in a time of loneliness and political burnout, was the most valuable part of the whole summit.”
“On the main floor in the JKM Library, various student organizations set up tables for student networking, complete with business cards prepared by the summit staff in advance, featuring attendees’ names and information,” Altfather described.
There was food, tabling, quiet areas to decompress—even student art exhibits, such as immersive media and interior architecture alum Abby Vendura ’25’s integrative capstone, “Homeland: Exploring Belonging Amidst Occupation.”
Attendees at the Pittsburgh Feminist Student Summit sit in Mellon Board Room in March 2025. (Lucas Barnes)
As students from surrounding colleges trickled into the Mellon Board Room, Painter and other impact hosts assisted guests with check in, creating name tags, and getting situated. Students from not just Chatham, but Pitt, Duquesne, Point Park, Carnegie Mellon, La Roche, and CCAC were in attendance.
As an impact host, Painter played the role of conversation facilitator. After listening to different pieces of feminist work, the attendees split off into discussion groups. “My job basically was to make sure the conversation stayed on topic and made sure that everybody was being respectful to all the parties involved,” Painter said. “I think everyone was doing a pretty good job anyways at being respectful during the conversations. I really loved it.”
Eicher oversaw set-up of the crafting room. “I was also in the crafting room for a bit that day which was super fun because it was just a place to relax and have fun, while still having feminist conversations,” Eicher said. This space ended up being the most popular, according to Baker.
“People were bonding in a new, fun way that was not such ‘serious networking’ as the title may have suggested,” Baker said.
“What I can take away from that experience was the pride I felt that we were about to accomplish a feminist student summit in a short amount of time,” Altfather said, “and that we were able to reach some many likeminded individuals within the Greater Pittsburgh Area.”
This story was originally published in the Chatham Recorder alumni magazine.
This story was written by Lyn Bigley ’26. She is currently pursuing her BFA in creative writing alongside a BA in psychology. She previously worked as a digital content creator for Chatham University and is a contributor to the Recorder magazine.