Winter 2000
Women-Writing-Teaching,
edited by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt
Reviewed by Marilyn Shapiro
In keeping with the autobiographical mode of this collection of essays, Women/Writing/Teaching, edited by Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, I begin this review with my own reactions and experiences.
I must admit that I approached this book with antipathy and to the question posed by the editor and compiler, Jan Zlotnik Schmidt, in her query about her own writing: "Is it too self-indulgent to write about my life. . . as if I have mattered?" I would usually have answered, "Yes." Since women's emergence as academicians, we have been inundated with glimpses of each other's lives and experiences. Schmidt cites a familiar list of women writers and cultural critics in her introduction who, she says, have "urged the intertwining of the private and the public; the autobiographical and the theoretical . . . ." Readers of cultural criticism during the last twenty years know this advice has been adopted. I am one, however, who has not been universally sympathetic to the mode. Yet, since I knew a few of the essayists personally and knew the reputations of many others, I read through the volume.
I first highlighted the experiences that most corresponded with my own, such as Lynn Z. Bloom's confession: "In hopes of ingratiating myself with one or another of the local universities, I taught part-time at three . . . " and her complaint that when she collaborated on an essay collection with a distinguished scholar, her own English department invited him to lecture on campus, but "did not invite [her] to either the lecture or the dinner for him." I incur similar slights every time a new male faculty member is brought to campus and wined and dined by the old-boy network, omitting relevant female faculty. However much I, too, like to complain, I do not think such whining has advanced the cause of knowledge and may even have been the cause of bell hooks' complaints that "Nowadays, most women's studies professors are not as committed to exploring new pedagogical strategies."
Mary Gordon brags, "At Barnard I get to teach what I want to people who are eager to learn" but admits that when she began teaching at a "community college [she] had to teach what [she] didn't want to teach to people who didn't want to learn. . . . " Much innovative teaching, in fact, was initiated by women who, unhappy they could not obtain coveted positions at major universities, applied their efforts to go above and beyond established methods and teach the "unteachable," with varying degrees of success. Even bell hooks, who praises Paulo Freire's mentoring and his "insistence that education could be the practice of freedom," confesses that her "students abused that freedom in the classroom by only wanting to dwell on personal experience."
I'm sorry to say I think many of us have abused that same freedom in our personal academic essays, and yet let me say that reading these essays, whining and all, has been invigorating. Some essays begin with personal memoirs but expand to encompass the intellectual climate as well. Lillian Bridwell-Bowles, for example, writes a thoughtful essay delineating "Varieties of Academic Discourse" that describes the complication of differing agendas in a way that is not dismissive of points of view not her own. On the other hand, Hephzibah Roskelly invokes Alice Walker's critique of those who deal with nineteenth-century British literature and not with "race and class." Yet the novels Jane Eyre and Middlemarch, which Roskelly notes are the subjects of these courses, do certainly deal with class. Why not study what others have written to se what is alike about us all? Why not introduce similarities in female experience via class consciousness if that is the common denominator. We cannot all be black or white, but we can be poor and unloved.
Ann Victoria Dean complains that when she wrote an autobiographical doctoral thesis, her "editor-advisor . . . continued to chop and rearrange." But his position as doctoral advisor is to "chop and rearrange," no matter what mode of thesis he encounters. If she were writing her autobiography for commercial publication, her work would be "chopped and rearranged" by an editor to an perceived audience reaction and readership. Actually, the perceived audience and readership might be the impetus behind her doctoral advisor's chopping as well. One can certainly write one's autobiography in one's own way, but doing so will neither guarantee its publication in the marketplace nor its acceptance as a text that significantly advances knowledge.
What I did find positive and exemplary in these memoirs was, on the whole, a true love and excitement about the teaching of writing. Mary Gordon admits, "I never want to go back to teaching after time off," and describes the "tinge of resentment" she feels after a Christmas break having to turn her attention to "the needs of others." Yet she chronicles her time teaching the elderly, a position she chose reluctantly to satisfy a grant requiring "community," as ultimately "something entirely hopeful . . . a spot of light."
"A spot of light" is what all these women writing/teaching uncover and that is illuminating and uplifting for us all to read. It proved so for me. As one who usually shuns writing courses for the privileged refuge of literature, I came away questioning my avoidance. I even felt myself itching to teach writing classes again or incorporating a different kind of writing in my literature courses. Therefore, I must conclude that the personal stories selected by this anthologist serve a pedagogical purpose after all. As educators, particularly jaded educators, we need to read what will invigorate our sense of purpose and rekindle an enthusiasm that lack of innovation may have worn away. New women teaching/writing probably need to read the horror stories their elders have encountered to recognize that they have survived, prevailed, and find that "spots of light" make this rocky profession a worthy one.
P.S. I need to end this review with a personal coda. My sister-in-law saw this book on my desk waiting to be reviewed and informed me that the editor is her cousin. I do, in fact, remember meeting Prof. Schmidt's parents on visits to my sister-in-law's now-deceased parents and recall their speaking proudly of their daughter's profession. My sister-in-law read her cousin's memoir with a personal sense of nostalgia, a remembrance of peoples and places with which she was familiar. She and I marveled at the serendipity of this new connection between us. We all experience a similar connectedness reading the essays in this anthology as if we, too, are family.
Back to contents page for Winter 2000 Forum