For those of you who want to jump immediately into reading the dialogues, feel free. For readers who would like an introduction, of sorts, to the project, read the prologue first.
Laura Perry
Critical Feminist Studies
November 14th, 2008
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Isaiah
Berlin in his essay “The Sense of Reality” claims that novelists are
better able than scientists to delve beneath the surface of human
consciousness and private feelings. Because novelists seek
understanding rather than knowledge, they are able to deal with
particulars instead of searching for universals and larger systems. I
think Grobstein’s lecture walked this line carefully, between avoiding
generalizations and attempting to share facts with our class. Rather
than stating a definition of sex and gender (as many former professors
and high school teachers have done to us – “sex is the bits. Gender is
I am interested in the tension in
Woolf’s letters between positions of insider and outsider status in
society. On the one hand, Woolf points out that women (or, as she is
very explicit to specify: “daughters of educated men”) are less able to
create change because they do not hold the traditional positions of
power in society. She writes, “All the weapons with which an educated
man can enforce his opinion are either beyond our grasp or so nearly
beyond it that even if we used them we could scarcely inflict one
scratch” (18). Yet, on the other hand, Woolf also suggests that it is
this very outsider status that allows these women to effect more
meaningful change. “We believe that we can help you most effectively by
