As she enters a second-floor Sever Hall classroom, Rosenfeld waves cheerily to students and stops to chat with some.

Climbing onto the platform, she starts class by having a student describe a rape that her friend recently told her about at Bates College in Maine. She then encourages the students to suggest changes Bates could institute to prevent further rapes.

Throughout the class, Rosenfeld does not confine herself to the podium. She paces back and forth, scribbling students’ ideas on the chalkboard.

Women are taught to ignore the warning signs of an abusive relationship, she tells the class, both by believing in fairy tales like “Beauty and the Beast” and by being taught that violence is part of eroticism.

“The danger to women is they learn that sex is violence and violence is sexy,” she says.

A large part of Rosenfeld’s lecture comes not from her words at all but from the comments of eager students in the audience. There are 34 women and five men present at Monday’s class.

As she talks, hands go up and students wait for her to turn their way.

By the end of class, Rosenfeld has covered the chalkboard with words and phrases such as men, power, girls (circled), passive and virginal, and phrases like “modify self” and “subject to authority.”

Rosenfeld works up to her main point—a new idea of hers called “Batterer Detention Facilities” to deal with perpetrators of domestic violence.

Right now, Rosenfeld says battered women have to navigate too difficult and dangerous a process to get a restraining order against their batterers.

One student suggests that, one day, she hopes to see the subject of Rosenfeld’s class a matter of history rather than current events.

“I’m always very happy to talk myself out of a job,” the teacher replies. “I could do something else. I could watercolor.”

—Staff writer Anne K. Kofol can be reached at kofol@fas.harvard.edu.