Out of Place in Oxbridge

In Dublin, on the banks of the Liffey, I found a bookstore. I sat down by the window and picked up “A Room of One’s Own” by Virginia Woolf, parts of which I had read in high school but had since forgotten. When I first read the book, I was not yet acquainted with either Cambridge, England or its Massachusetts counterpart. This time around, Woolf’s description of “Oxbridge,” as she calls it (she never makes it clear whether she is referring to Oxford or Cambridge) hit close to home. In the opening, Woolf’s narrator considers what to say in a speech she is invited to give about “women and fiction.” Absorbed in her thoughts, she starts walking across a grass plot, but not for long:

Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at first understand that the gesticulation of a curious-looking object, in a cut-away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help; he was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me.

She is similarly turned away from the library (women need to be “accompanied by a Fellow of the College or furnished with a letter of introduction”), and finally ends up meeting a friend. Over an austere meal, they discuss the struggle to raise funds for a women’s college. The absolute best that the women were able to do, despite the bottomless endowments of other Oxbridge colleges, is to “raise bare walls out of bare earth.”

The point that “instinct rather than reason came to [the narrator’s] help” in the initial confrontation bears emphasizing. The man expressed “horror and indignation” not for any logically given reason, but because of a deeply held assumption that was not even recognized, let alone challenged, until he saw a woman on the grass. When we come to assume through our “faulty education,” in Woolf’s words, that some people do not belong in certain spaces, it becomes second nature for both the trespasser and the supposed gatekeeper to accept structures of exclusion (thus Woolf also pities “the patriarchs [and] the professors”).

In my first few years at Harvard, I became increasingly aware of the ease with which many male students would ask questions in class, while I often wrote down questions word for word and agonizingly chewed on them in my head before daring to speak. I noticed the assumed male pronouns people sometimes made about professors—“I’m taking a class with Professor So-and-so.” “Cool, what does he teach?” This wasn’t just something I observed, but a statistically valid phenomenon. An annual report noted the “progress” in faculty diversification at Harvard, as female tenure-track faculty hit a record high of 30 percent.

We must pay attention to the broader reasons why people make such assumptions: As Woolf writes, women have historically not had access to the resources necessary for their education, whether to attend existing institutions or to establish their own. When a lucky woman, or more broadly, a member of a racial minority or otherwise disadvantaged group, manages to gain entry into spaces of power, she faces resistance precisely because she is an exception. In the process of change, those moments of resistance can become frustrating, but they have the possibility of being informative: An assumption is often only brought to light when something challenges it. Even if the initial response to seeing a woman on the lawn, at the podium, or in a doctor’s coat is one of surprise, that moment leads us to face the assumptions we have. My hope is that further surprising encounters will challenge those assumptions. For the time being, I take solace in the subversive possibilities of occupying places that are not “for me.”