On Being Wrong

Abstract

It was early in the fall semester of 1985, and I was lying in bed reading the New Yorker. During most of the 1980s I ran the Women's Studies Program at Barnard College and taught there. But I also taught on occasion in the graduate school at Columbia, where I had studied French during the high theory days of the 1970s. I had been leafing through the magazine on a Friday night trying to relax, when my eye was caught by a story that began in the following way: "It was easy to find an apartment in New Haven, even though my classes in feminist criticism were starting in just a few days and most of the other grad students had arrived at Yale the week before" (Janowitz 30). Hey, I elbowed my husband, who was reading on the other side of the bed. A story in the New Yorker by a woman writer about feminist criticism. I sat bolt upright in amazement. Then feminist criticism disappeared for a while, until well into the third page of the story, when the narrator, a young woman named Cora, after sup plying some family background for the reader (a dead sister, a father living in New Zealand), mentions that she had been accepted into the Women's Studies Program at Yale. I was newly excited. But not, as it turned out, for long. "I was sitting in class, taking notes as usual," the narrator complains about her seminar in feminist criticism, "when it became apparent that not one word that was being said made the slightest bit of sense" (32). More than twenty years after the fact, it's hard for me to slow down my initial reaction enough to replicate it here. I confess that I had been