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
