Feminist traces: Women and feminism in 'College Composition and Communication', 1963-1992

Professional journals reflect the values of a professional organization. College composition and rhetoric has long prided itself on the integral and equal value of women as practitioners and scholars. This dissertation contests that view and draws an alternative story from the representation of women and feminism in thirty years of the field's premier journal, College Composition and Communication (CCC). While it is true that women make up the majority of composition instructors, it is also true that they carry disproportionately the burden of part-time, nontenured, low-status work, and composition instruction itself is viewed as "nurturant" or "maternal." These factors have led to the characterization of composition as "feminized" and have contributed to its marginalization within English studies. Yet feminist theory has been surprisingly late to influence mainstream composition scholarship, only emerging in CCC in 1988. I trace evidence of women's presence and participation through the pages of CCC beginning in 1963, the year widely agreed to mark the origin of contemporary composition studies, and continuing through 1992, when CCC finally published a focus issue on Feminism and Composition. While feminist activism, particularly surrounding the status of women in the profession, is suggested in minutes and workshop reports of the annual Conference on College Composition and Communication in the early 1970's, its representation in the journal is minimal. Feminism inspired several articles concerning sex bias in language and textbooks during this era, but otherwise women's issues and feminism are muted. By the 1980's, feminist ideals had gained wider popular adherence, and women's representation became a selling point for textbook advertisers. In the late 1980's, with the ascendance of poststructuralism, feminism became one among several theories informing composition scholarship, but the move to theory may have served to silence more pragmatic feminisms. Feminism thus arrived in CCC almost by default, and rhetorical evidence suggests that, contrary to popular opinion, women and feminism were resisted. Since the early 1990's cultural or "essentialist feminism" has had a particular appeal and informed a large number of the articles that foreground feminism; but rhetorical virtuosity by women in composition studies has created a place for varieties of feminism to coexist. The dissertation also argues for and models the persuasive value of feminist personal scholarship, positing it as a form of academic literacy.