In Class and on Film, Fighting for Women

At the end of a corridor in the stacks of Langdell Library, a pink note card dangles from a bookshelf.

The card marks the way to the office of Diane L. Rosenfeld, which is marked only by a non-descript door at the end of an aisle of international law books.

From this out-of-the-way corner of Harvard Law School (HLS), Rosenfeld speaks out to the Harvard campus as an advocate for women’s rights—especially for their right to fight sexual violence.

As a fellow who came to HLS two years ago from the U.S. Justice Department’s Violence Against Women Office, Rosenfeld brought her enthusiasm to stop sexual violence against women to Women’s Studies 131, “Women, Violence and the Law.”

This past Monday afternoon, Rosenfeld sits at her desk tearing off pieces of a portobello mushroom, grilled onion and swiss cheese sandwich as she prepares for class. On the wall hangs a watercolor she painted herself.

Rosenfeld says she views education as her best hope to inspire other women to take a stand against sexual violence.

“It’s really important to teach people not to be passive participants in their lives and in their cultures,” she says. “They have the power to change things they see are harmful.”

Rosenfeld spent the night before trying to teach these lessons at a panel discussion as part of Take Back the Night’s week-long campaign to raise awareness of sexual violence.

The panelists spoke after a showing of Rape Is..., a short documentary about dealing with sexual assault. Between victims’ harrowing stories, Rosenfeld offered her own insistent voice.

“We have the right to say no,” she said in the documentary. “We have the right to exist in full citizenship without the threat of sexual violence hanging over us.”

In the panel discussion, Rosenfeld assumes the voice of an academic, citing statistics and insisting that women stand up for rights that are due them.

She says she finds her own rights infringed on too often. As the discussion gets underway, Rosenfeld recounts how she and the other female panelists went to use the women’s bathroom and it was locked—while the men’s bathroom was not—an indication, she says, of bothersome safety concerns.

“Women are not really free citizens with the same rights as men,” Rosenfeld says.

But Rosenfeld has been wading through the intricacies of women’s rights and violence against women too long to be surprised by the horrific stories of rape in the documentary or the locked bathroom door.

All of the energy and time she puts into thinking about sexual violence against women comes out in the “Women, Violence and the Law” class she teaches twice a week.

Sitting in her office on Monday, Rosenfeld talks with the class’ head teaching fellow, Claire P. Prestel. They’re surrounded with mementoes and symbols of the women’s advocacy movement.

Bumper stickers, cards and slogans decorate all corners of her office with expressions of empowerment for women. A sticker hanging from one of her shelves says, “Equal Protection, My Ass.”

On her standard gray metal file cabinet a card is taped up. A girl with frizzy hair and a pink bow sits in front of a dessert bowl with a wide grin on her face. The caption reads, “Women have finally realized there is only one source of true happiness: chocolate mousse.”

An Abercrombie and Fitch ad from a back-to-school catalogue also adorns the cabinet. It shows a picture of a dowdy woman with messy hair and carries a supposed warning to parents that this is the sort of women’s studies professor their children might meet in college.

To Rosenfeld, the ad “is a way of perpetuating the image that feminists are ugly women that don’t shave their armpits.”

“If you ask people substantively if women are entitled to equal rights, people will say yes,” Rosenfeld says. “If you use the f-word, young women especially feel it’s associated with being anti-male and that’s the hardest thing to overcome.”

Eating lunch, Rosenfeld shuttles between her desk and her computer—which rests on a separate, higher table in the corner because she likes to stand while she writes.

Alternately staring pensively out her big picture window and bursting into fits of giggles, Rosenfeld throws out possible topics for future women’s studies papers.

Students could write to Elle magazine about the problem of prostitution, she says. Or they could write a paper responding to one woman’s statement that “gaining weight and taking my head out of the toilet was the most feminist thing I ever did.”

Rosenfeld is pressed for time this afternoon—“I have four hours of work to do before class and one hour in which to do it,” she says—and she dashes between her desk and her computer.

“I think better when I’m standing,” she says matter-of-factly.

This afternoon, Rosenfeld will be lecturing her class. She leaves her office and walks through the maze of beanbags that fills the hallway connecting the stacks to the main floors of Langdell.

On the way, Prestel offers Rosenfeld a German chocolate, but before accepting, the professor inquires after the fat content.

Each chocolate contains 170 calories, the teaching fellow tells her.

Rosenfeld takes a chocolate—“in case of emergency,” she says.

As she enters a second-floor Sever Hall classroom, Rosenfeld waves cheerily to students and stops to chat with some.

Climbing onto the platform, she starts class by having a student describe a rape that her friend recently told her about at Bates College in Maine. She then encourages the students to suggest changes Bates could institute to prevent further rapes.

Throughout the class, Rosenfeld does not confine herself to the podium. She paces back and forth, scribbling students’ ideas on the chalkboard.

Women are taught to ignore the warning signs of an abusive relationship, she tells the class, both by believing in fairy tales like “Beauty and the Beast” and by being taught that violence is part of eroticism.

“The danger to women is they learn that sex is violence and violence is sexy,” she says.

A large part of Rosenfeld’s lecture comes not from her words at all but from the comments of eager students in the audience. There are 34 women and five men present at Monday’s class.

As she talks, hands go up and students wait for her to turn their way.

By the end of class, Rosenfeld has covered the chalkboard with words and phrases such as men, power, girls (circled), passive and virginal, and phrases like “modify self” and “subject to authority.”

Rosenfeld works up to her main point—a new idea of hers called “Batterer Detention Facilities” to deal with perpetrators of domestic violence.

Right now, Rosenfeld says battered women have to navigate too difficult and dangerous a process to get a restraining order against their batterers.

One student suggests that, one day, she hopes to see the subject of Rosenfeld’s class a matter of history rather than current events.

“I’m always very happy to talk myself out of a job,” the teacher replies. “I could do something else. I could watercolor.”

—Staff writer Anne K. Kofol can be reached at kofol@fas.harvard.edu.