"The Feminization of Rhetoric and Composition Studies"

I would like to start this blog out with a quote from Lauers’, The Feminization of Rhetorical and Composition Studies, “In composition, the term feminization appears to mean the dominance or predominance of women” (pg.546). The feminization of teaching and the status of women are vital in understanding the role and perception of teaching in America. During the Colonial period, prior to women's entry into the teaching profession, the public began to view women's basic education as worthwhile, mostly so that they could pass religion and moral values on to their children. As a result, women's literacy rate increased. Though, in the 1800’s, an ultra-domestic feminine ideal reigned, known as domesticity and true womanhood. Women were supposed to be protectors of virtue and to build domestic, pure homes while isolating themselves from the world. Society recognized the values of female nurturance as well as discipline in education. Teaching was one way in which women could work outside their own households while still being examples of purity and nurturance. As seen in the third paragraph in Lauer’s, The Feminization of Rhetorical and Composition Studies, Robert Connors argues… “These women were excluded from taking oral rhetoric and assigned to a more “appropriate” course called composition. He goes on to illustrate that this course gradually introduced important changes: moving from challenging and judgemantal student-teacher relationships to those that were nurturing and personalized” (pg.543). None the less, women had broken the barriers and joined a male dominated work-force. Lauer writes in the fifth paragraph, “The smart tactic for breaking into publication was to ridicule or demolish the interpretations of others, a practice true also in linguistics, where the structuralists were in mortal combat with the transformationalists. This was the academic context in which Rhetoric and Composition began as a scholarly field,” (pg.543). Beth Flynn states that the field feminized due to the changed view of how writers write and how it should be taught. I found it interseting that most of the theoritical work which composition theory had been created was developed by men. Lauer goes on to explain traits that both women and men have that are characterized as feminine. For example, one is cooperative, relational, interdependent, collaborative, caring for another’s development, and suffused with desire and joy. Lauer also spoke, “of actions that bear three of Holbrook’s features of women’s work: service-oriented, less well paid than men’s work, and often devalued” (pg.546). It is my opinion, that when society needed more women to enter teaching, the aspects of teaching that seemed appropriate to women were emphasized: nurturance and morality. When teaching emphasized discipline and national duty, more men became teachers. The feminization of rhetorics and composition studies was, therefore, created by both men and women. “Some theoligians and feminists are offering a new understanding of spirit, not as transcendent, not as the binary opposite of body, but as an insistence upon bodily dimension of knowledge and the consequent “attainment of a new capacity for ethical action-whether this is described in terms of love, compassion, altruism or care” (pg.549).