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.