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
