A woman essayist would be out of her mind not to relish literary references being enacted on her behalf by reality itself. After the fateful day in 1929 when Virginia Woolf was prevented from walking across the lawn at Cambridge, any instance of an inquisitive woman being stopped by a beadle anywhere and under any circumstances is a reference to Woolf.

I step out onto the sunny sidewalk and into a purple cloud of young women in polyester gowns billowing out around their bodies in the wind. Their hair, which has been meticulously straightened for the occasion, flies wildly and they clap their hands over mortarboards. It is graduation day. This explains why the teashop was so crowded. Did Woolf not also, I think, come upon a group of Cambridge Dons arrayed in the ludicrous costume of officially sanctioned learning not long after the scene with the beadle? I will have to reread it, I think.

If I hadn’t already been thinking of Woolf, it is doubtful that the scene at Cambridge would have come to mind. The image before me on the Manhattan sidewalk is one more familiar from college brochures, credit card advertisements, greeting cards, and movie montages. It is the quintessential image of victory in a society based upon a corporate/bureaucratic hierarchy. It is mobilized like, and intended to have the same type of emotive power as, the image of the knight slaying a dragon or the crucifixion.

In 1959, when women were first admitted to the University Heights College, which later became NYU’s College of Arts and Science, the student newspaper quoted Lord Chesterfield on sex: “the position undignified, the pleasure momentary, and the consequences damnable.” 

Looking at them, in their graduation costumes, primed to enter the upper echelons of science, finance, the professions, I think of what Woolf wrote in Three Guineas about the insoluble predicament confronting the daughters of educated men. They were, she wrote,