Women's Studies Department   

continued

...she is a woman, not a man. The campus is dangerous to women alone at night.

"I couldn't believe I had forgotten the time," she says. "Usually I am so careful." Fortunately, her roommate was home and came in a car to get her.

As Marguerite was waiting, she did a little survey. It turned out that men came and went alone, but no women did. She witnessed several women making calls at the public phone, for what was obviously routine "protection." My student has realized something about Woolf's text that, perhaps, no man could, and she is energized by this new understanding. It was reading Woolf that led to her survey and to her recognition that her experience was shared and was political.

She has also called because she wants to know whether it's all right if she refers to this evening's discovery in her paper. She has learned her lessons well and knows that you're not supposed to write about "real life" in English papers. Her expressions of relief and gratitude when I give her permission to feel what she is feeling and to articulate it as part of her analysis leave me wondering: How will all those other women in the lobby of the library understand their confinement? Which class in this vast university will ever address--or even acknowledge--the fundamental fact that a woman alone cannot go to the library here without risk after dark?

From National Women's Studies Association "A Report to the Profession: Liberal Learning and the Women's Studies Major."