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