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Оглавление1 Composition’s Origin Stories Through a Feminist Lens
We use stories to define ourselves, to create traditions, and to establish our heritage. Because Composition Studies is a relatively new discipline in the university, it has been important for its scholars to record its story, to show how it emerged and evolved and why its presence matters. As with any story, there is not just one version—and which plotlines, characters, and tensions most vividly occupy the narrative landscape depends on the lens of the storyteller. This book introduces you to stories of Composition’s history, struggles, and accomplishments through the lens of feminism.
Composition Studies and feminism hold much in common. As Susan Jarratt writes:
Both [. . .] seek to transform styles of thinking, teaching, and learning rather than to reproduce stultifying traditions. They share a suspicion of authoritarian pedagogy, emphasizing instead collaborative or interactive learning and teaching. They resist purity of approach and the reduction of their scope by moving in and around many contemporary critical theories and disciplines. (2–3)
Within both Composition and feminist scholarship, then, you are likely to find projects that value revision of classrooms, institutional politics, and knowledge practices. These projects may well be collaborative, whether involving scholars who work together to discover new knowledge or fusing knowledge from different disciplines. You are also likely to hear voices not always valued in intellectual traditions—students, community members, teachers—as well as discourse that might “sound” different from other academic writing, drawing from narrative and experience as a resource for knowledge. In fact, much of what makes Composition Studies a unique field can be traced to the infusion of feminist thought into its conversations.
By focusing a feminist lens on Composition Studies, then, this book aims to spotlight how feminist contributions have made Composition Studies a more inclusive, innovative, and exciting field. Whether illuminating difference within our classrooms and institutions or recovering and “gathering” women’s voices in the rhetorical tradition, feminist contributions have created space for subjectivities previously unheard or marginalized. Feminists have introduced new methods of making arguments and engaging in research, prompting us to reevaluate what “counts” as both legitimate knowledge and legitimate subject matter for our writing. Feminist perspectives have also played a key role in broadening the field’s notions of academic discourse, pointing out that restricting ourselves to traditional, Western notions of logical, linear, and objective writing consequently limits possibilities for intellectual and creative work. Finally, feminist scholars have altered our view of classrooms, underscoring the ways gender and power dynamics shape our interactions with students and offering new visions and practices for the teaching of writing.
As is probably clear by now, both feminism and Composition Studies work from values that challenge academic business as usual; consequently, both have also struggled to claim legitimacy. While the large part of this book focuses on the contributions of feminist thought to Composition Studies, this chapter examines the field’s beginnings—the different ways compositionists claim the origins of the field—which illuminate ongoing tensions between maintaining countercultural values and achieving disciplinary credibility.
Now, let’s return to the beginning(s).
The Origin Stories of Composition Studies Through a Feminist Lens
When you think about Composition Studies, what comes to mind? The first English course you took at college? Practices like peer response and revision? Learning new rules and expectations for college-level writing? Or maybe, like so many English majors, you know it as the class you passed out of with an AP exam.
Although Composition Studies is now well established as a discipline with its own conferences, journals, and graduate programs, it is still most often conflated with the course from where it began: freshman writing. In fact, some scholars argue that the exact origins of the field lie in the Harvard exam of 1873, a test designed to sort out those students who needed additional training in grammar and spelling before moving on to their real coursework. Many of us who work in the field today still confront the prevailing expectation that composition teachers will—for once and for all—prepare students as writers before they enter their biology, political science, or literature classrooms. In the eyes of many, composition remains a service provider to the university. Or, looking at the field through a feminist lens, the field can be characterized as feminized.
I use the term feminized here to suggest that the work of composition, like housework or mothering, is often positioned as service work. Donna Haraway offers further explanation: to be feminized is to be “exploited as a reserve labor force” or “seen less as workers than servers” (86). This status has to do both with the work of composition teaching, which tends to be associated more with lower-status teaching than with higher-status research, as well as with the fact that teaching composition is literally women’s work, since women constitute the majority of its instructors. Composition programs also tend to be staffed predominantly with part-time instructors or teaching assistants (TAs), who are commonly underpaid and overworked.
The reason this “service” status rubs many compositionists the wrong way, however, is not only because of the low standing that accompanies it but also because it conceals the different set of values that Composition Studies brings to the university, values that might be deemed as countercultural or, as I will argue, feminist. Sharon Crowley describes these values nicely:
Academics who profess composition studies go about their professional work somewhat differently than do their colleagues in literary studies. Their interest in pedagogy inverts the traditional academic privileging of theory over practice and research over teaching. Composition scholarship typically focuses on the processes of learning rather than on the acquisition of knowledge, and composition pedagogy focuses on change and development in students rather than on transmission of a heritage. [. . .] Composition studies also acknowledged women’s contributions to teaching and scholarship long before other disciplines began to do so. (3)
As you can begin to see, then, there is a tension between composition as a feminized field—one that tends to be defined and sometimes controlled by others—and as a feminist field—one that values teaching and learning, difference, collaboration, and process.
In order to give you a clearer view of this tension, I’ll now describe three of the field’s origin stories. I have chosen origin stories because, as with families or even individuals, narratives of how we came to be play an important role in self-definition and identity; this is certainly the case with the field of Composition Studies. These stories will serve as narrative touchstones to which I will return as I show, throughout the book, how feminists have challenged and revised them. I’ll begin with the story of the previously mentioned Harvard exam, which left a legacy the field would perpetually try to undo by telling new stories about itself. The problem, as you’ll see, is that sometimes the way these stories are constructed—so as to lend the field more credibility—tends to discredit the field’s feminist contributions and/or values. So in this chapter I’ll also point to some of the ways feminist scholars have responded to these origin stories, inserting or reclaiming alternative values, often by drawing from feminist ideas across disciplines or even outside the academy.
The Harvard Story: The Birth of Composition Studies from a Test and a Course
As you likely know from experience, tests are designed not only to measure learning but also to track and separate students into categories, to reward prior learning and backgrounds, and sometimes to determine how well teachers are instructing students. In the case of the 1873 Harvard exam, the test aimed to accomplish all of these functions. The need for the exam in the first place came about when Harvard president Charles William Eliot opened admission to “students in all conditions of life,” that is, to high school graduates educated in free (public) high schools, as opposed to only those graduates of elite preparatory schools (qtd. in Douglas 128). At the same time he wanted to welcome a wider range of students, Eliot also sought to ensure that those students who received a Harvard education were of “promising ability and best character” (128).
Since social class was tied to character, the written entrance exam served to sort the refined—the traditional Harvard applicant—from the unrefined—the new (lower class) demographic seeking college education. A student’s grammatical usage, then, became indicative of his social identity. Those students whose usage departed from valued standards were considered dirty, unrefined, and unmannered—and sent to freshman composition, which functioned as an inoculation of correct grammar and spelling (Miller 52). Within these courses, students no longer wrote argument or exposition, but instead composed pieces considered less abstract and complex that could, as Robert J. Connors puts it, “be quickly scanned for obvious flaws” (Composition-Rhetoric 141). Teachers marked these papers using symbols that corresponded to a “correction card,” a reference students used to remedy each grammatical offense (144). Ultimately, the point of the required course was not, Crowley contends, “to acquire some level of skill or knowledge” to be measured upon exit, but it was instead “to subject students to discipline, to force them to recognize the power of the institution and to insist on conformity with its standards” (74).
What Eliot and his colleagues didn’t expect was that over half of the Harvard students (including many of those from elite preparatory schools) would fail the exam. Not only did this heighten the need for a first-year composition class, it also placed heavy pressure on the high school teachers to improve their students’ performance (or, we might say, improve the students, themselves). The situation escalated to a full-blown literacy crisis when Harvard published the condemning results of its exam in The Dial, a popular national journal. The eventual result was an 1894 National Conference on Uniform Entrance Requirements, which established a list of texts for use in college English entrance exams that effectively determined the secondary school curriculum—and therefore, the teachers’ work (Graff 99).
While it was male university administrators feminizing (at that time largely male) instructors of college composition, those who ultimately bore the brunt of the “literacy crisis” were the mostly female secondary school teachers, who were blamed for failing to adequately prepare students for college. That is, the literal feminization of American schooling—women constituted sixty-three percent of America’s teachers by 1888, and ninety percent in cities (Grumet 34)—coincided with a presumed literacy crisis at the university level, and ultimately with the feminization of composition. As early as 1929, in fact, a survey of teaching conditions in freshman English indicates that women conducted thirty-eight percent of composition instruction nationwide, constituting the highest percentage of female instruction in any college discipline, with the exception of home economics (Connors, “Overwork” 121).
The Harvard origin story—with students deemed unable to meet (often unnamed) requirements and teachers bearing the blame—echoes throughout composition’s history. The implications are many. Just as the late nineteenth-century college administrators told high school English teachers what to teach, first-year composition and high school teachers alike often lack control over their own curricula. Further, because US educational history is laden with perceived “literacy crises”—the ongoing notion that “these students can’t write”—first-year writing has been, and continues to be, in high demand. To meet this demand, universities typically staff first-year writing courses with TAs and adjunct instructors (the greatest percentage of whom are women), who are underpaid and overworked.
To make visible and respond to these issues, feminists in Composition Studies have conducted studies and launched important arguments about the literal feminization of composition, raising awareness about labor and work conditions for part-time instructors (Enos; Holbrook; Miller; Schell). In so doing, they call attention to institutional dynamics that position the (especially part-time) composition teacher as the “proverbial housewife who contributes greatly to the running of the household (or the university) but gets no actual recognition for it (e.g. tenure, salary increases, office space, resources)” (Schell 554–55). Feminists in composition have also sought to challenge the metaphorical feminization of teaching in the university, arguing that teaching is intellectual work deserving of status equal to research.
Because of its historical connection to first-year writing, composition—to this day—is often associated first and foremost with the feminized work of teaching. As you’ll see in the stories that follow, the field has sought to claim alternative origins that establish its identity within the more masculine terms of the research university.
For Writing and Discussion
1.Have you ever taken a high-stakes writing test (say, determining entrance into a program or course or determining your placement in a curriculum)? What knowledge or skills did it ask you to demonstrate? Based on this, what assumptions can you make about the nature of the knowledge or practices the test valued? What can and cannot be measured by such an exam? Which test takers might be most advantaged or disadvantaged by these tests?
2.First-year writing is a course about which many groups feel compelled to voice their opinion. Do a media search for news about student writing or a “literacy crisis.” What do you find? How are problems with student writing framed? What does this framing tell you about what is most valued when it comes to writing? How might these values be read as gendered?
3.Take a look at several first-year writing program websites around the country. Look at who teaches the courses and how they are categorized (faculty, instructors, TAs). What can you tell about the labor conditions at work? Who does most of the teaching? What is the gender division among teachers or between tenure track and part-time instructors?
Classical Rhetoric as Composition’s Proper Ancestor
During the mid twentieth century, the organization of US universities assumed a formation we’re familiar with today—one divided by disciplines and within those disciplines, sorted by professors’ specialties. With professors occupied by their own research, the bulk of first-year composition teaching fell to TAs and part-time instructors; or, as Richard M. Weaver described the situation in 1963, composition courses were staffed by “just about anyone” who would teach it, including “beginners, part-time teachers, graduate students, faculty wives, and various fringe people” (qtd. in Crowley 119).
With the business of teaching assigned to women and associated with caretaking and drudgery, those interested in professionalizing the field needed to legitimize it by locating something other than teaching at its center. One strategy was to tell a new story about the field’s origins, replacing composition’s ancestry as a fix-it shop for poor student writing with the noble paternal lineage of classical rhetoric. From this thinking emerged what James Berlin dubs “The Renaissance of Rhetoric” or what Susan Miller, through a more critical lens, calls composition’s “neoclassical account” of its history. According to this story, then, the origins of composition exist not in the feminized act of teaching a service course, but in venerated figures like Plato and Aristotle and canonical works of classical rhetoric.
Restoring rhetoric to university education would not only give composition a legitimate history, subject matter, and research area but some scholars believed it would also help revise the focus and purpose of composition instruction, altering the curricular focus from correctness to Aristotelian argument. This movement marks a moment when scholars like Albert R. Kitzhaber, Wayne C. Booth, and Ken Macrorie, from within the field itself, aimed to define the field’s pedagogical and scholarly contours. It connected the teaching of composition to a rich, established tradition that involved careful study and deployment of rhetorical concepts: ethos, logos, audience, purpose, style. Edward P. J. Corbett’s Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student is the best known of this scholarship. Here Corbett sought to reclaim the fifth-century approaches for the contemporary classroom. This system “taught the student how to find something to say, how to select and organize his material, and how to phrase it in the best possible way” (vii). Indeed, this process may resonate with some writing pedagogies you’ve experienced, where you locate a topic, gather research, create an outline to arrange it, and then write the paper.
In Corbett’s textbook, students first focus on “Discovery of Arguments” by practicing thesis formation and ways to “appeal to reason.” They also learn that sometimes it is necessary to appeal to emotion, since Corbett acknowledges that while “rationality is man’s essential characteristic,” man is also moved by “irrational motives” (39). Once students have determined what they want to say, they are led through the process of arrangement: introduction, statement of fact, confirmation, and conclusion. Finally, Corbett addresses issues of style, which range from “grammatical competence,” to “choice of diction,” to sentence structure and word order. At the root of this approach is the belief that rhetoric should occupy the center of composition classrooms because of its omnipresence in our society; students must make and respond to arguments in their daily lives. Corbett also suggests that a rhetorical approach highlights persuasive devices that “come naturally, instinctively to human beings” (30), which could be honed by opportunities to study and practice this activity.
Others, though, highlighted limitations to this tactic. As Miller, as well as C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon, points out, many of these efforts to establish classical rhetoric as a predecessor to modern composition failed to complicate the seemingly generic or universal “rational” subject at its center, who was, in fact, a male subject from the ruling elite. Women in ancient Greece were denied education, literacy, and citizenship, and in fact, weren’t even allowed into the public sphere, let alone to make public arguments. Likewise, this discourse presents “rationalism,” which is foundational to effective persuasion, as a natural human attribute. For instance, in Corbett’s words, “Rationality is man’s essential characteristic” (39). Consequently, alternative ways of knowing or being in the world are easily deemed irrational, alien, or illegitimate.
Feminist scholars have also challenged the idea that practices of classical oratory can simply transfer across centuries, geography, and populations. We see this assumption in Corbett’s treatment of a scene from The Iliad in his textbook. From this text, he argues, the “modern student” learns that “despite the hundreds of years that separate his society from Homer’s, men acted and responded then in much the same way that they do today” (19). Even as the “dominant ideas of society change,” Corbett argues that “the basic human passions and motivations are the same today as they were in Homer’s day” (19). As you’ll see in the chapters ahead, feminist scholars place great emphasis—whether recovering ancient rhetorical texts or addressing contemporary classrooms—on the importance of local contexts and attention to differences within them, thereby disrupting the idea of universal rhetorical strategies or human characteristics.
While ancient rhetorical practices were never widely adopted in the composition classroom, the study of rhetoric would continue to be a vital line of inquiry in the field—one that has often been privileged above composition as a “practical,” feminine classroom subject. For instance, in a survey Theresa Enos conducted in the 1980s on gender and publishing in Composition and Rhetoric, she found a split within “rhetoric” and “composition,” such that scholarship in rhetoric was associated with knowledge production (i.e., the territory of men), while scholarship in composition connoted a focus on pedagogy, and was therefore more open to women.
Beginning in the 1990s, however, feminist scholars began to challenge the notion of a “unified” rhetoric attributed solely to classical male figures and designated as the scholarly territory of male scholars. Feminist conceptions of rhetoric, or “rhetorica,” as Andrea A. Lunsford has dubbed this work, interrupt the “seamless narratives” of the rhetorical tradition, refusing to valorize “one, traditional, competitive, agonistic, and linear mode of rhetorical discourse” (6). Instead, Lunsford writes, feminist rhetoric makes room for multiplicity—for rhetorics—and for “dangerous moves” (often equated with the feminine) such as “breaking the silence, naming in personal terms, employing dialogics, recognizing and using the power of conversation, moving centripetally toward connections and valuing—indeed insisting upon—collaboration” (6). In this way, then, feminist rhetorics extended the texts that comprised (and were taught as) the “rhetorical tradition,” altered accepted rhetorical strategies, and expanded possibilities for writing instruction and practice.
For Writing and Discussion
1.Has education in rhetoric been part of your own learning experience? If so, how would you describe the way rhetoric was represented?
2.Doing a search on the Internet, take a look at several composition programs that espouse a rhetorical focus for their curriculum. In what ways does the program reclaim classical rhetoric? In what ways does it disrupt it or move beyond it?
The Process Paradigm: Composition as a Science
Because the humanities are often deemed “soft” (or feminine) in relation to the “hard” sciences, one way English studies has sought to legitimize itself as a discipline is to claim connections to science. Within literary studies, we can see an example of this during the 1940s and 1950s when New Criticism flourished. New Criticism involved examining the text as an isolated artifact—rather than connecting it to the author’s biography or historical moment, as was the established practice at the time—and then analyzing it using a technical, field-specific vocabulary.
In order to rewrite its central identity as a discipline, and not merely a service course, composition scholars also sought scientific affiliation by locating a subject that could be scientifically studied: the writing process. For some narrators of composition’s history, then, the field’s origins as a discipline began with its research focus.
One example of composition’s efforts to achieve scientific status came in 1961 when NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English) created an ad hoc committee to prepare a “scientifically based report” on the status of knowledge in the teaching and learning of composition. In so doing, the committee developed criteria for what counted as research that made “genuine contributions to knowledge”: research that studied the process of written instruction using scientific methods with the goal of improving composition teaching (North, “Death” 198). The resulting document, Research in Written Composition, by Richard Braddock, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer, served as what Stephen M. North calls the “charter of modern Composition” (Making 17). The book insists that teaching-based inquiry needs to be replaced with scientific methodology. As the text states:
the field as a whole is laced with dreams, prejudices and makeshift operations. Not enough investigators are really informing themselves about the process and results of previous research before embarking on their own. Too few of them conduct pilot experiments and validate their measuring instruments before undertaking an investigation. [. . .] And far too few of those who have conducted an initial piece of research follow it with further exploration or replicate the investigations of others. (5)
Teachers, then, were replaced by “investigators” as the central agents of the field. Knowledge derived from classroom experience was replaced with the stuff of science—pilot experiments, measuring instruments, and replicated studies.
While this emphasis on scientific approaches did allow Composition Studies to advance its status as a discipline and gain legitimacy in and outside of English studies, it also deepened the fracture between largely male researchers who studied composition and female teachers who practiced it in the classroom with students. Consequently, a top-down dynamic was created where male researchers produced scholarship that directed female teachers about how best to teach. In the decades that followed, the number of women hired in tenure-track (research) positions in composition would continue to grow, but a divide remains between those who teach the bulk of composition courses and those who conduct research—a split that feminist scholars, among others, continue to critique and challenge.
Finally, the emphasis on science limited the definition of what counts as legitimate “knowledge,” a question that is central to the feminist project. While composition scholarship certainly diversified over time in both its subjects of study—moving far beyond how to teach first-year composition—and in the form its research assumes, the privileging of seemingly “objective” and quantitative research in the university looms large, even today. One such consequence of this hierarchy is that scholarship focused on teaching is often deemed “soft” or less rigorous than other forms of research. For this reason, it remains an ongoing part of the feminist project to challenge what kind of and whose knowledge we privilege in order to make room for new voices, perspectives, and subjects.
For Writing and Discussion
1.What evidence do you see in the academy that demonstrates the privileging of scientific knowledge? What evidence do you see where other forms of knowledge have successfully challenged the limitations of science?
2.In what ways might scientific approaches to work in fields like English studies serve us? In what ways does it limit us?
Looking Ahead
As this glimpse into the competing origin stories of Composition Studies shows, the field has long sought to revise the status that links it to remediation and feminization. In establishing disciplinary and pedagogical agency, however, the field has sometimes claimed origins that exclude or marginalize feminist knowledges. For this reason, feminist teachers and scholars have had to regularly disrupt, challenge, and offer alternatives to the field’s efforts to establish disciplinarity. In the chapters ahead, I provide an overview of feminist contributions to Composition and Rhetoric, which both revise these origin stories and offer a more expansive and inclusive view of how we understand writers and rhetors, writing and rhetoric, and teaching and learning in the field.
In the first section of the book, Chapters 2 and 3, I highlight feminist scholars’ efforts to alter the rhetorical tradition, described in the second origin story above. While feminist revisions of the rhetorical tradition emerged later, chronologically, than feminist contributions to the composition classroom, I begin with a look at “rhetorica” because, as you’ll see, the recovered rhetorics of women from across centuries show approaches, knowledges, and values upon which feminists in Rhetoric and Composition would continue to build—implicitly and explicitly—in both their writing and in their classrooms.
Chapters 2 and 3 show how feminists have called attention to the masculinist, class-stratified cultures in which ancient rhetorics emerged, which helps us approach these texts with greater awareness of whom, and what, they exclude. Feminists have also argued that rhetoric need not be limited to these classical, canonized texts. Instead, they have reclaimed and rewritten the tradition by recovering women’s voices that have been previously overlooked or forgotten. They invite us to ask, what does it mean to locate our origins within the context of a more inclusive, diversified, feminist rhetoric? Chapter 2 features a range of voices feminists have recovered, which changes the sound, purpose, and tradition of rhetoric. Chapter 3 focuses on more contemporary feminist rhetorical projects that move away from a focus on individual voices to celebrate and investigate common themes and tropes across women’s rhetorics, including attention to human diversity, multiplicity of forms, and new rhetorical topoi, or the topics and places from which arguments can be made. Together, these feminist rhetorical contributions open new possibilities for how we teach, learn, and participate in the rhetorical tradition.
In Part 2 of the book, I focus on how feminist compositionists have expanded traditional notions of teacher and student roles, the practices and persona of the researcher, and approaches to academic argument. In each case, feminist compositionists emphasize the importance of how social location and subjectivity—how subjects are situated according to gender, power, race, embodiment, etc.—shape how we know, teach, learn, and write. That is, just as feminist rhetors challenge the idea of universal rhetorical practices or effects, feminist compositionists emphasize that how we experience our world, our communities, our classrooms, depends on our particular location within it; and that location is necessarily shaped by gender, which is always enmeshed with other social categories.
In Chapter 4 I illustrate how feminists in composition have influenced the field’s perception of the teacher and the student. In this chapter, I trace key metaphors for the composition teacher, and subsequent roles for students, which emerge from several pedagogical movements. I then highlight how feminist scholars have complicated these identities, illuminating the gendered assumptions that shape them and making room for more inclusive, expansive notions of teacher and student identities. In so doing, feminists in composition revise the role of service-provider or disciplinarian established in the first origin story.
Chapter 5 depicts a feminist response to the third origin story, which aimed to legitimize the field by associating it with objective, scientific knowledge. Here I trace feminist efforts to challenge the idealized persona in academic writing and settings, which is built upon a scientific model of the objective, logical, rational—that is, masculine—knower. Alternatively, feminist scholars have sought to claim the subjectivity of the writer and researcher, arguing for experience as a vital form of knowledge.
Chapter 6 highlights how feminists in composition have revised conventional expectations about what constitutes academic writing. Even as Composition Studies grew as a field and gained more agency in defining its courses and curriculum, an ongoing pressure remains to prepare students for all of their other courses. In this chapter, I’ll explore how feminists have challenged notions of argument and the unified, monologic voice it privileges, instead advocating for collaboration, inquiry, and for the importance of listening as much as persuading.
While feminist scholarship in Composition and Rhetoric has tended to move in two parallel, though sometimes intersecting, directions—one with a focus on feminist rhetorical texts and practices and one with a focus on writing, pedagogy, and curricula within universities—I highlight throughout the chapters ahead how the two function reciprocally to enhance research, teaching, and writing in Composition and Rhetoric. Indeed, through these contributions, rhetorical and pedagogical, feminists in the field have rewritten the story of composition.
Works Cited
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.
Braddock, Richard, Richard Lloyd-Jones, and Lowell Schoer. Research in Written Composition. Champaign, IL: NCTE, 1963. Print.
Connors, Robert J. Composition-Rhetoric: Backgrounds, Theory, and Pedagogy. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1997. Print.
—. “Overwork/Underpay: Labor and Status of Composition Teachers
Since 1880.” Rhetoric Review 9.1 (1990): 108–26. Print.
Corbett, Edward P. J. Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student. New York: Oxford UP, 1971. Print.
Crowley, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.
Douglas, Wallace. “Rhetoric for the Meritocracy.” English in America. Ed. Richard Ohmann. New York: Oxford UP, 1976. 97–132. Print.
Enos, Theresa. “Gender and Publishing Scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition.” Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 558–72. Print.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P, 1987. Print.
Grumet, Madeleine R. Bitter Milk: Women and Teaching. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1988. Print.
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 1980s.” Socialist Review 14.2 (1985): 65–107. Print.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminization of Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201–29. Print.
Jarratt, Susan C. “Introduction.” Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words. Ed. Susan C. Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA, 1998. 1–18. Print.
Knoblauch, C.H., and Lil Brannon. Rhetorical Traditions and the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1984. Print.
Lunsford, Andrea A. Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1995. Print.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991. Print.
North, Stephen M. “The Death of Paradigm Hope, the End of Paradigm Guilt, and the Future of (Research in) Composition.” Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change. Ed. Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward White. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 194–207. Print.
—. The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1987. Print.
Schell, Eileen. Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. Print.
For Further Reading
Berlin, James. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Print.
Crowely, Sharon. Composition in the University: Historical and Polemical Essays. Pittsburgh, PA: U of Pittsburgh P, 1998. Print.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women’s Work: The Feminization of Composition Studies.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 201–29. Print.
Miller, Susan. “The Feminization of Composition.” Feminism and Composition: A Critical Sourcebook. Ed. Gesa Kirsch et al. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003. 520–33. Print.
