ABSTRACT
I can think of no more fitting conclusion to a set of essays on the entrance of women into the educational landscape than the paper I wrote for a symposium that Maxine Greene, Nel Noddings, and I took part in at the 1991 meeting of the Philosophy of Education Society. Although I accepted the invitation to participate with alacrity, our assigned topic—“Women Doing Philosophy of Education”—and the fact that it was the Society’s fiftieth anniversary gave me pause. I was delighted that there were now enough women in the field to make the event possible yet deeply troubled that such a symposium was needed. “A Professorship and an Office of One’s Own,” the one unpublished paper included in this collection, represented my way of saying that the panel’s very existence signified our still anomalous status.
As a footnote to this essay, I would like to report that Lamont’s Market has since closed down. With the publication of Anne Olivier Bell’s abridged version of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, I have also learned that on March 8, 1941—that would be exactly fifty years before the Washington D.C. symposium and only a matter of weeks before her death—Woolf wrote, “Now to cook the haddock.”
