Where are the Women Writers?

I never thought about the representation of women in English classes until I transferred to Cal Poly Pomona from Citrus Community College. My first semester here I had two professors that were quite vocal about representation. After that eye opening semester, I took note of the female to male ratio of writers being taught in my undergrad English classes. Anger and hopelessness overwhelmed me as a result. I saw barely any representation of women at all—I felt cheated out of the diverse voices my classes could have focused on. Now, I had the opportunity to voice my opinion through Harvest Int.; and like a dragon emerging from it’s dank cave to spew fire, I was poised and ready to destroy the enemy of underrepresentation. But when I presented my devious plan, I was reminded, like drinking a glass of cool water, that there are allies among us. I had forgotten, you see, letting my irritation fester like a rotting tree from the inside out yet rooted in a dense greening forest. And with this soothing reminder, I interviewed a few undergrad English professors to hear their take on inclusivity of women writers in their classes. My questions are designed to find out if representation truly is difficult to incorporate in English classes.

The first professor I interviewed was Dr. Ozment, CPP’s resident women writers expert. She was one of my first professors at CPP who opened my eyes to this discourse.

SW: Which undergrad literature classes do you teach that incorporate women writers?

Dr. Ozment: I teach women writers in all my courses, as a rule. I’d never teach a course with all male-identified authors. As to your question, here’s the list of where I’ve taught them at CPP:

ENG 2883 Women Writers

ENG 3000 Intro to Lit Studies

ENG 3010 Intro to Literary Theory

ENG 4502 British Renaissance

ENG 4510 British Enlightenment

ENG 4512 British Victorian Age

Next year, I will be teaching women writers in the following:

ENG 3012 Digital Research Methods

ENG 4501 Literature of the English Civil War

ENG 4881 Intersectionality and Literature

SW: Is it a special effort to include women in the syllabus of said classes or is it a natural incorporation of them? Why or why not?

Dr. Ozment: I truthfully don’t make an effort to do this. Including women writers is a natural choice for me because women writers absolutely existed, I know a lot about them, and my research focuses on them. This will be different for people who don’t specialize in the field the way that I do. The effort tends to be managing student expectations. I have mentally categorized women as normative, but socially we still see them as othered. I sometimes have a student respond that this is a “women’s lit” class and not a “literature” class when more women than men appear on the syllabus. I have never heard of the same complaints when syllabi only include men (except me; I made that critique as a student). I dislike putting women into their own “women writers” course box and only doing it there, so I don’t, but that class is an important one because it lets me make a whole argument about women’s literary history that I don’t in my other courses. Upper-level literature courses are usually organized by temporality and geography (time period and location), but a course like women’s lit or African-American lit lets you instead explore a group of people who have been marginalized and it lets their amazing work shine through. They’re special and important places, but only doing marginal writers there doesn’t help anyone.

However, assigning women writers, for me, isn’t just about the literature. It’s about scholarship and framing as well. I assign women scholars’ work and feminist work to ground a feminist discourse in the classroom. You can still teach women misogynistically, so incorporating explicitly feminist frameworks is my way of not just teaching women as subjects, but as active parts of the interpretive process.

The second professor I interviewed was Dr. DeRosa:

SW: Which undergrad lit. classes do you teach that incorporate women writers?

Dr. DeRosa: All my courses have parity in terms of gender identity. That includes my 20th C. American literature courses, the American Lit Survey II, African American Lit, and my various graduate courses I teach.

SW: Is it a special effort to include women in the syllabus of said classes or is it a natural incorporation of them? Why or why not?

Dr. Derosa: I’ve only found it difficult in my modernism/postmodernism class where white masculinity is a founding principle for the periods. There are certainly female writers that play crucial roles in both. Female voices often work as a correction or an extension of the period from its normativity. This means that to teach the period, you need to teach its normative component as well as the correction, and when you’re trying to do this for three different periods, it can’t all fit. So, as you’ll see, I construct the course with postmodernism and post-postmodernism as a corrective to modernism. It’s imperfect, but it does honor the content and the voices. That said, I’ve never taught the class without a female voice and never would. One day I’ll learn to teach Joan Didion well and this will all be much easier.

The final interview I conducted was with Dr. Prins. Dr. Prins responses are in regards to essayists and rhetors in English classes:

SW: Which undergrad English classes do you teach that incorporate women writers? 

Dr. Prins: The undergraduate classes I teach include ENG 2150: Multimodal Literacy, ENG 3110: Intro to Rhetorical Theory, ENG 3150: Advanced Expository Writing, and ENG 3152: Language, Literacy, & Cultural Practices.

Each course includes work by women. For example, 2150 uses Robin Williams’ Nondesigner’s Design Book and articles by women in the field of multimodal rhetoric. Rhetorical theory uses essays by women rhetoricians and rhetorical theorists. In Advanced Expository Writing, I’ve used essays by Kathleen Alcala, Maya Angelou, Gloria Anzaldua, Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Roxane Gay, Jamaica Kincaid, Anne Lamott, Ruth Padawer, Claudia Rankine, Kathryn Schulz, and Susan Sontag. Language, Literacy, and Cultural Practices uses essays by women in writing studies and literacy studies (such as in the Literacy Critical Sourcebook edited by Ellen Cushman et al. and Writing About Writing collection edited by Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle).

SW: Is it a special effort to include women in the syllabus of said classes or is it a natural incorporation of them? Why or why not?

Dr. Prins: It happens pretty organically, although I do always take a step back from my initial plans for a course to check whose perspectives on our course topic are being represented, and, as needed, I do make changes based on this.

After ingesting these insightful responses, I came to a much more complicated conclusion to the issue of representation in English classes. Professors are not trying to hold back diverse voices, at least, not on purpose. It is sometimes challenging to include diverse voices when at the time of these literary movements happening, those voices were smothered. How can smothered voices be heard after being silent for so long? Through effort. Each professor described their process, their effort to be inclusive despite the odds against them, and effort alone is heartening. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie said in a Ted Talk in 2009, there is danger in a single story. And we must fight against the single story in any way we can. So next time you feel angry at the lack of diversity and representation, look at the history of the movement you are studying and dig deep. You will find the voices that have been stifled and you can finally let them breathe. 

Related Links: https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story?language=en#t-449847