Dialogue, Selection, Subversion: Three Approaches to Teaching Women Writers

This essay began its life as an Aphra Behn showcase panel, chaired by Michael Rex of Cumberland University, at the combined CSECS/ABS/NEASECS conference at McMaster University in October, 2011. The three writers describe very different courses, taught at different institutions, as the following demographics and curricular descriptions indicate. Karen B. Gevirtz teaches at Seton Hall University, a diocesan Roman Catholic university with a seminary. The Archbishop of Newark chairs the Board of Regents and presides over the Board of Trustees, which together oversee the university’s academic, Catholic, and corporate identities. Seton Hall was founded in the mid-nineteenth century in New Jersey to serve the immigrant Irish community in Newark and still attracts a large Catholic and immigrant population. This course was a graduate seminar in the MA program, which attracts a mix of younger students continuing directly from receiving their BA at Seton Hall and older students, most of whom teach secondary school. This course had eleven women and one man, but normally Gevirtz’s graduate seminars are evenly split between the genders. The description for this section indicates a graduate-level survey of eighteenth-century literature; it is, in Gevirtz’s words, “a literature course in which gender plays a role,” as opposed to a “dedicated gender studies” class. The problem she addresses is students’ perception that a reading list in which half or more of the writers are women is either dominated by or exclusively about women and the anxiety that perception causes. Her response is to insert units into the course in which she demonstrates men and women writers in dialogue about issues that are not gender related. Martha F. Bowden teaches at Kennesaw State University, a comprehensive university of 25,000 students in the Georgia State University system. Although predominantly populated by students from the local community, the university has a diverse blend of nationalities and ethnicities, and its student body includes many older learners. The political allegiances of the students are as varied as their backgrounds; so is their level of preparation. The context of the course is an undergraduate Gender Studies class that, while part of the English major, attracts students from other disciplines, some of whom are doing the minor in Gender and Women’s Studies. While the English majors may have a head start in the disciplinary conventions of writing in an English class, they are no more likely to have any knowledge of eighteenth-century British literature than other students. The concern in constructing this syllabus is that women writers are too often represented solely or primarily by novels, thereby erasing the wide range of genres in which they actually wrote. Jonathan Sadow teaches at the State University of New York at Oneonta, one of thirteen Master’s universities in the SUNY system. It has recently risen in the rankings, in part because it offers a small-campus experience for a much smaller cost than private institutions. However, it is still a regional institution; most students come from either suburban Long Island or upstate New York. Education is one of its largest programs and a majority of English students are dual Adolescent Education Majors or Elementary Education students with an English concentration. There is a small Women’s and Gender Studies program, but most of these students are not English or Education majors. Although there have been growing discussions around diversity issues, it is a rural campus and the majority of the students are socially tolerant but apolitical. This undergraduate course has been taught twice at the 200 level. Although the overwhelming majority of the students are female—there has been one male student—most are also there to fulfill a period requirement …