Established under the leadership of Jeanne Dost in 1972, the Women's Studies program and Women's Studies Center met in a variety of buildings across campus before learning of the University's plans to demolish the former Paleontology, Chemistry, and Station building. Dost and a group of volunteers renovated the building themselves, and ultimately convinced University administration to turn the building over to the Women's Studies Center. It has officially served as the Women's Center since 1973.

By the early 1980s, the Center was referred to interchangeably as the Women's Studies Center or the Women's Center. In Summer 2018, it was announced that the Women's Studies Center would be renamed the Hattie Redmond Women and Gender Center to honor Redmond's work as leader in the women’s suffrage movement in Oregon in the early 20th century.

OSU Building Names Evaluation Process

In 2016, Oregon State University engaged in a campus and community-wide building names evaluation process to address concerns citing potential racist and exclusionary views held by the namesakes of four buildings on the OSU Corvallis campus – Arnold Dining Center, Avery Lodge, Benton Hall (and by extension, Benton Annex), and Gill Coliseum. Benton Annex was officially renamed in the summer of 2018. For more information about the evaluation process see the Building and Place Names website along with the article "When Building Namesakes Have Ties to White Supremacy: A Case Study of Oregon State University’s Building Names Evaluation Process"

SCARC: Additional collections documenting the history of the Hattie Redmond Women and Gender Center include the Women's Center Records, the President's Commission on the Status of Women Records, and the Oregon State University Memorabilia Collection.

Oregon Digital: Digitized materials documenting the history of the Center are available online in Oregon Digital.