The Feminization of Rhetoric and Composition Studies?

STOR ®
Janice M. Lauer

Rhetoric Review, Vol. 13, No.2. (Spring, 1995), pp. 276-286.

Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0735-0198%28199521 %2913%3A2%3C276%3ATFORAC%3E2.0.C0%3B2-5

Rhetoric Review is currently published by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc ..

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR' s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you
have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and
you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www .j stor .org/joumals/leb.html.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or
printed page of such transmission.

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of
scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

http://www .j stor.org/
Mon Sep 18 23:54:53 2006
JANICE M. LAUER
Purdue University

The Feminization of Rhetoric and

Composition Studies?t

Last year, I was invited to speak at a conference whose theme was the
feminization of composition. 2 This topic coincided with another discussion I
had been following in our journals: the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition
as a scholarly field. In preparing my talk, I began to raise several questions
like: What is meant by feminization in these discussions? Can we assume that
composition is feminized? Are the discourses on disciplinary formation and on
feminization already woven together? If not, should they be? This essay
explores these questions, making distinctions and telling stories that offer an
alternative perspective.
Let me begin with the feminization of composition. My rereading of many
of these discussions3 leads me to conclude that their statements about
feminization apply largely to composition instruction, not to Rhetoric and
Composition as a scholarly field. 4 The two reasons generally advanced are the
numerical predominance of women and the nature of composition pedagogy.
Accounts agree that women do most of the teaching of writing from the
university level to elementary school as either full- or part-time instructors.
Many descriptions of recent pedagogies maintain that instructional practices,
particularly of expressive and critical pedagogies, are marks of feminization
because they are collaborative, student centered, and nurturing. A few,
however, dissent. Susan Jarratt and Evelyn Ashton-Jones, for example,
problematize collaboration as a desirable feminine pedagogy. Lil Brannon
contends that the expressivists and people like Giroux, Shor, Freire, and Rose
are reinscribing patriarchy by invoking masculine heroic narratives of conquest
as traditional male Romantic heroes who, like the rugged individual in the
Dead Poet's Society, work against all odds to make a difference.
Some historical accounts of nineteenth-century composition position it as
feminized in contrast to rhetorical instruction and the emerging
professionalization of English Studies. Robert Connors argues that the demise
of agonistic rhetorical instruction in persuasive public discourse, which he
contends had largely characterized male education up through 1850, was
related to the entrance of significant numbers of women into higher education
in the nineteenth century. These women were excluded from taking oral
rhetoric and assigned to a more "appropriate" course called composition. He

276 Rhetoric Review, Vol. 13, No.2, Spring 1995

The Feminization of Rhetoric 277

goes on to illustrate that this course gradually introduced important changes:

moving from challenging and judgmental student-teacher relationships to those
that were nurturing and personalized, from oral rhetoric to writing, from
argument to a multimodal focus that privileged explanation, and from abstract,
distanced subjects to more personal assignments (6).
But this early feminization of composition instruction was not
characteristic of the disciplinary formation of English Studies, which was
occurring during this same period. As Holbrook has explained, English Studies
became professionalized through a process of dissociating from feminine
culture by making itself a body of scientific knowledge constructed by
specialists, distancing itself from feminized composition instruction and the
preponderance of women teaching at the secondary and elementary levels. She
reports that starting in the 1880s through the next 80 years, English Studies
emphasized the ascending power of the PhD and the primacy of scholar-
training over teacher-training in English graduate programs. Men were
recruited to college teaching, and efforts were made to change the image of
English professors away from that of "unproductive" or unnatural men. During
this period women experienced difficulty in finding places within the
crystalizing English Studies. Holbrook documents that men receiving PhDs in
English jumped from 68 in 1930 to a high of 1,476 in 1941 whereas the
number of women rose from 28 in 1930 to only 44 in 1941 as English Studies
strove to make itself a science ("Manful Enterprise" 26).
This masculine ethos of English Studies was matched by its graduate
pedagogy. Don Stewart depicts George Kittridge, the Harvard English
Department's emperor, as arrogant and bullying, with a pedagogy described
later by Francis Child as "turning doctoral dissertations into a device for killing
the last spark of sensibility in the future teacher of literature and for sending
out clones to dominate English departments across the country" (64). Although
Stewart points to exceptions like Fred Newton Scott, he doesn't refute the
dominance of the Kittridge pedagogy. In my graduate literatme courses in the
sixties at the University of Michigan, the feminine wasn't palpable either. 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 to form as a
scholarly field. Did it resist this ethos?
To address this question, I will consider several accounts of our
disciplinary formation, asking whether these narratives of our development
have been tales of feminization. The first is North's important account, which
describes early research in Rhetoric and Composition as a methodological land-
rush, in which group after group of investigators "scrambled to make their
claim to a portion of what they have perceived to be essentially virgin territory"
278 Rhetoric Review

(23). Far from feminization, these metaphors reek of competition, territoriality,

border disputes, and conquest. A second version of the field's origins can be
found in citation histories. An example is a recent CCC essay titled "College
Composition and Communication: Chronicling a Discipline's Genesis" by
Phillips, Greenberg, and Gibson, that while offering a valuable construction of
the field's intertextuality, nevertheless is limited to textual evidence, and hence
does not support feminization, as I will explain below. A third narrative, told
by Nystrand, Greene, and Wiemelt, in "Where Did Composition Studies Come
From?: An Intellectual History," contends that a true academic community
emerged only when empirical research on the composing process, especially by
Flower and Hayes, married (their metaphor) theoretical conceptions. The
authors present important insights into the relationship between the emerging
Composition Studies and larger epistemological changes in criticism and
linguistics, as these fields moved from formalism through the structuralist lens
of social-construction to dialogism. But their interpretation of the field's
beginning relies only on a study of texts, ignores gender, and even occasionally
misrepresents some developments. For example, the authors state that Corbett's
book, Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, published in 1965,
"motivated a number of writing teachers to reassess the value of teaching
rhetorical invention as a means of guiding students' thinking" (278). This
imaginative reconstruction of the field's early research on invention makes a
subtle move, characterizing interest in rhetorical invention as pedagogical and
sweeping inventional theorists (including a few women) into an anonymous
group of "writing teachers." My own experience differs. When I began my
dissertation on invention in contemporary rhetoric at the University of
Michigan in 1964, I was not motivated to do so by Corbett's book but rather by
an intellectual curiosity about the state of rhetorical invention in composition
and an interest in new studies of heuristics. Further, I was not part of a group of
nameless writing instructors doing so.
In a fourth version of the field's development, Textual Carnivals, Susan
Miller, when speaking of composition studies, interprets the field's choice of
the phrase process paradigm to a sense of blurred identity instead of to an
androgyny that would have given equal privilege to the two terms. As the field
formed, she maintains, it used the term paradigm to associate itself with the
scientific, the "harder disciplines," distancing the field from soft, unorganized
theories of composition and thereby producing a new grotesque (140-41). In
"The Feminization of Composition," Miller urges a cautious critique of efforts
to define the field as an academically equal partner in English departments.
She warns of tacit cooperation with hegemonic superstructural values that she
believes lurk in efforts to maintain an intellectual continuity with ancient
rhetoric.
The Feminization of Rhetoric 279

The last representation of the field's development that I will mention here
is Beth Flynn's two articles on "Composing as a Woman." In her first essay,
Flynn starts by calling the field feminized because it "changed the conception
of how writers write and how writing should be taught," a conception she
attributes to both women and men (423). But she concludes: "For the most part,
the fields of feminist study and composition studies have not engaged each
other in serious ways" (425). In the second essay two years later, she contends
that "much of the theoretical work upon which composition theory has been
built was done by men ... and too often that work has been appropriated by
women composition specialists without a critique of its androcentrism" (88).
While both essays argue for introducing feminist inquiry in all its rich
complexity into composition research in the future, they also thereby express
misgivings about the feminization of Composition Studies in the past and
present.
Because all these versions of the development of the field of Rhetoric and
Composition are based on considerations of the field's scholarship, they imply
that at some mysterious moment a critical mass of publications rose up like
talking heads and magically transformed into a scholarly field an enterprise
that was viewed at the time as a service of dubious intellectual value. This focus
only on publications makes the claim for feminization problematic because
women haven't dominated publishing in composition. Theresa Enos's article,
"Gender and Journals, Conservers or Innovators," surveys twelve of our
journals, showing that men outnumber women as authors of articles except in
two journals, Basic Writing and The Writing Instructor. Sue Ellen Holbrook, in
"Women's Work: The Feminizing of Composition," reports that her 1986
analysis of Larson's bibliography showed that 66% of the authors were men and
44% were women, that in one year of College English, 65% of articles selected
were by men while 33% were by women, and that in Weaver's WPA
bibliography, 85% of the professional books were by men and 15% by women.
She interprets these counts to mean that men have been the preeminent makers
of knowledge in composition ("Women's Work" 210-11).
A counterargument might advance that even though men numerically
dominate publishing, certain women's scholarship has been more theoretically
fecund than that of men. But pursuing this line of reasoning risks promoting a
kind of female tokenism or affirmative action which, as Barbara Bieseker notes,
underhandedly affirms a cultural supremacy for a few women but devalues
collective rhetorical practices (156-57). Another countertactic might be to
demonstrate that doctoral programs in Rhetoric and Composition have enrolled
more women than men. But we don't have that information. Neither the 1986
MLA report, Chapman and Tate's survey, nor the Rhetoric Review's recent
overview of doctoral programs considers gender.
280 Rhetoric Review

So instead of turning to fecund influence or the number of doctoral

students, I will offer here a supplement to the above accounts of the field's
development by telling stories of my own experience with that formation. My
stories will speak about the field's body-concrete events, individual efforts,
and social interactions-that helped the field's professionalization. Like the
body, these efforts have been taken for granted, unvoiced in our disciplinary
accounts. As a genre, my stories might be dignified as synchronic history,
which ethnographic historians argue can heighten awareness of informal or
small-scale interactions that express important linkages and conclusions (Ervin
87), but because of space constraints, I can't provide the thick description that
more rigorous ethnography requires. My anecdotes might also be called a kind
of oral history that tells of activities largely occluded in the discursive histories
of our field. Or one might end up calling these narrative renderings
"unreconstructed essentialism," naive accounts, uncritically theorized and
relying on personal authority. I'll let the reader position them.
Because in composition, the term feminization appears to mean the
dominance or predominance of women, I will forego this term and, at the risk
of essentialism, 5 will foreground some "feminine" traits, that have been
"deliberately chosen and enacted critically by women and men, not
essentialized features derived from marginalization or oppression " (Phelps 2).
These traits have often been named as feminine:

-cooperative, relational, interdependent and collaborative

-releasing in others their unexplored resources and transformative power-
viewing development as a web
-caring for another's development
-suffused with desire and joy.

I will also speak 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 ("Women's Work" 202).
My first story revisions the emergence of the field as an act of conquering
territory for ownership, replacing it with the metaphor of working together to
clear space for sharing. The sense of an emerging field began for me as a
growing social network, a web of friendship. In 1968 at the CCCC in
Minneapolis, I attended an organizational meeting of the Rhetoric Society of
America. At this meeting people from speech communication, philosophy, and
English convened to form a society that would foster a resurgence of interest in
rhetoric. At subsequent CCCC meetings, a few Rhetoric Society members met
informally as a small special-interest group. One year in the early seventies (the
date escapes me), a subgroup of us went out to dinner after our informal RSA
meeting and continued to do so for several years. The regular members of this
The Feminization of Rhetoric 281

dinner group were Ed Corbett, Ross and Norma Winterowd, George and Mary
Yoos, Richard Young, and me. While I don't remember our specific
conversations over wine and salmon, I do recall that we discussed and dreamed
about a serious field devoted to the study of written discourse. And we had fun;
we became friends. I returned home each year with a sense of connection, a
feeling of shared dedication to studying writing and to connecting rhetoric to
composition. This group became a sustaining force, isolated as most of us were
in English departments uninterested in rhetoric and disdainful of composition.
Although the term discourse community would come much later, as I look
back, one was forming. Was this a gendered experience? Of the Rhetoric
Society members at these dinners, I was the only woman, but I felt no barriers. 6
I don't recall pieces of virgin land being auctioned or claims being staked. Nor
were our conversations exercises in one-upmanship. Instead we traded stories
about our adventures as local pariahs, and we shared ideas about writing.
And back at home in our institutions, we started to formalize the study of
rhetoric and composition theory. Ed Corbett i.ntroduced rhetoric courses at Ohio
State and directed a few composition dissertations (e.g., Andrea Lunsford's),
while Richard Young began teaching courses in composition theory at the
University of Michigan and directed some dissertations (e.g., Lee Odell's). Ross
Winterowd started courses in rhetoric and literacy at the University of Southern
California, while I developed courses in composition theory at Marygrove
college and the University of Detroit and directed a rhetoric dissertation (James
Porter's). From my perspective now, these predisciplinary acts seem pretty
gutsy because they boldly positioned composition theory as appropriate subject
matter for graduate study and, more importantly, they began to enlarge the web,
introducing others into a community that was in its earliest phase of
disciplinary formation.
Subsequently, some of that dinner group went on to construct doctoral
programs: Ross Winterowd in 1975 at the University of Southern California,
Richard Young in 1980 at Carnegie Mellon, and I in 1980 at Purdue. 7
Although the existence of these programs is now often taken for granted, I
would argue that their formation helped construct Rhetoric and Composition as
a scholarly field. And far from being acts of professional aggrandizement, the
founding of these programs was fraught with political risks and challenges for
the developers.
Other episodes in the formation of Rhetoric and Composition as a field
were the summer and year-long NEH seminars such as the one offered in 1978
by Richard Young, which introduced to Rhetoric and Composition a number of
future theorists like James Berlin and Victor Vitanza. And in 1976 I started a
summer two-week rhetoric seminar that was repeated for 13 years, first at the
University of Detroit and then at Purdue. This educational context helped
satisfy a growing desire and need for rhetoric and composition theory in the
282 Rhetoric Review

profession, drawing together some of the leading composition theorists and fifty
to sixty interested English instructors each summer. 8 The experience of many
of the participants who sought an understanding of this new field is voiced by
one participant's evaluation of the seminar: "I came to see that rhetoric is a
rich, varied, philosophical field that interests me as theory and as the basis for
teaching composition. I never before was aware of its dimensions, its political,
social, and cultural implications; nor its history."
The work of conducting these summer Rhetoric Seminars, the NEH
seminars, and the doctoral programs strikes me as "feminine," helping to
release in others unexplored resources and transformative power. And like
casting stones into ponds, the initial efforts of these developers only multiplied
into further responsibilities for them like directing large numbers of
dissertations, writing numerous letters of recommendation, and reviewing
scores of people for promotion and tenure. Ed Corbett confided to me one time
that he had written over 300 letters of recommendation that semester. Like
women's work, these acts of program development, dissertation direction, and
letters of recommendation are seldom highly rewarded by salary increases or
lightened faculty loads. In my department, for example, no release time has
been given for graduate program direction or for dissertation guidance, which
on average entails our working with 35 dissertations in a given semester, a
number several times higher than in literary studies.
Beyond these stories of program and seminar development, there are other
disciplinary acts that continue the tale of the feminine. The first is
bibliographic. While literary studies relies on the PMLA annual bibliography,
in our field someone had to undertake that service. Women stepped forth to do
it: in 1980 Win Homer published Historical Rhetoric: An Annotated
Bibliography of Selected Sources in English and its two subsequent updating
volumes, The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary
Rhetoric. In 1987 Erika Lindemann fought for the publication of the Longman
Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric and labored through five subsequent
volumes as it changed to the CCCC Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric.
Now this important work is being done by two other women, Gail Hawisher
and Cindy Selfe. Further, these bibliographic efforts have been collaborative,
products of the whole field. Not to be ignored are the bibliographies in the CCC
and RTE, done by Richard Larson over the years, and those in the Rhetoric
Society Quarterly provided by George Yoos for over 20 years. These acts of
service are crucial to disciplinary formation but engender little enthusiasm in
departmental promotion and tenure committees.
In this same supportive category is journal and encyclopedia editing.
Strong example~ include Theresa Enos's founding of Rhetoric Review, George
Yoos' long editorship of Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Victor Vitanza's efforts
with PRE/TEXT, and Stephen Witte and John Daly's initiation of Written
The Feminization of Rhetoric 283

Communication. The two encyclopedias-the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric,

initiated and edited by Theresa Enos, and the Composition/Rhetoric portion of
the Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts, coordinated by
me-provide outsiders and members of our field with collaboratively
constructed accounts of the complex dimensions of teaching and studying
rhetoric and composition. Yet such editorial work is rarely positioned high on
the merit totem pole of the university.
All of these stories make a case, I would submit, that "feminine" acts by
women and men have played a significant role in shaping the field, particularly
from the sixties to the mideighties. But what about today? Has the field has
changed? In a earlier essay of mine, "Composition Studies: Dappled
Discipline," I described the field as "permeated with a sense of community in
which new work attempted to build on previous studies rather than to ridicule
or demolish them" (27). I contended that "unlike the slaughter in some fields in
which proponents of one persuasion struggled in mortal combat with those of
another and unlike more covert warfare in which newcomers carved out niches
for themselves by enlarging loopholes in previous work, composition scholars
huddled together in the face of tidal waves of problems whose solutions
demanded collaboration" (27-28). I called this a comedic tone in Lynch's terms,
a "descent into the actual contours, the interstices, the smells of the beastie
[wo]man" (28), into the dappledness of classrooms, literacy sites, workplaces,
political forums. Today I might call this the world of the body, desire, pleasure,
self-mockery, and care. Do these terms represent the tone today? Would I now
speak of feminine traits? Not as readily.
There's a good bit of agon, ridicule, and displacement that bloodies our
discourse. But the need for huddling together in the face of tidal waves of
problems has not disappeared. While we throw more and more sand at each
other, literacy research and composition instruction are in danger of drowning.
Just two examples. 9 A few years ago, Phyllis Franklin told me that she had
spent quite a bit of time interesting the Ford Foundation in tunding literacy
research. But when she drew some Ford representatives to a meeting with
composition theorists and researchers, the composition people started bickering
among themselves and the Ford group withdrew. More recently, Richard
Larson's reports of the state of composition programs in the US paint a bleak
picture in spite of decades of theory and research. Could it be that these
programs stick to their safe current-traditional teaching in the face of baffling
or off-putting conflicts?
Yet even as our internal quarrels escalate, through this agonistic fog, I
glimpse some theorists, researchers, and editors still building networks and
bridges instead of ideological fortresses. I see people continuing to construct
educational contexts to empower others. These feminine traces strike me as
converging into one of the new directions of postmodemism. Berry and
284 Rhetoric Review

Wernick note that some theologians and feminists like lrigaray are offering a
new understanding of spirit, not as transcendent, not as the binary opposite of
body, but as an insistence upon the 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" (4-5). Wyschograd
calls this new mode of existence "a postmodem expression of excessive desire,
a desire on behalf of the Other" (5). Will this mode of existence prevail in
Rhetoric and Composition Studies? I hope so.

Notes
1 For helpful responses to this essay, I wish to thank Janet Atwill and my two RR reviewers,
Sharon Crowley and Lynn Bloom.
2 The annual conference sponsored by the University of Southern California's doctoral program in
Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literacy.
3 See, for example, Bauer; Flynn; Holbrook; Eichhorn et al.; Ervin; Hollis; Hunter; Miller;
Osborn.
4 The distinction I make here in no way implies a hierarchical binary between composition as
instruction and as scholarship. Nor do I think that these two senses of composition are unrelated: I have
written elsewhere about the strong relationship between Composition Studies and writing instruction.
But I do maintain that the two are not synonymous. Composition instruction had gone on for centuries
before Rhetoric and Composition found an academic position as a scholarly discipline.
5 In her examination of the problem of essentialism, Diana Fuss keynotes her book with the
following statement: "In and of itself essentialism is neither good nor bad, progressive nor reactionary,
beneficial or dangerous. The question we should be asking is not 'is this text essentialist (and therefore
"bad")?' but rather, 'if this text is essentialist, what motivates its deployment?"' (xi). She ends the book,
saying that "'Essentially speaking,' we need both to theorize essentialist spaces from which to speak and,
simultaneously to deconstruct these spaces to keep them from solidifying. Such a double gesture
involves once again the responsibility to historicize, to examine each deployment of essence, each appeal
to experience, each claim to identity in the complicated contextual frame in which it is made" (118).
6 Within the Rhetoric Society as a whole, however, women were a distinct minority. At the
organizational meeting, I recall being the only woman. The first Board of Directors in 1968 had 17 men
including Wayne Booth, William Irmscher, Henry Johnstone, Richard Larson, Ross Winterowd, Ed
Corbett, and Donald Bryant (Rhetoric Society Newsletter I}. Only later did women take leadership
roles, not from the ranks of speech communication or philosophy, but from the composition contingent
of the RSA. In 1975 Dorothy Guinn, then a doctoral student in Rhetoric, Linguistics, and Literacy at the
University of Southern California, was elected as a student member to the Board of Directors, and in
1976 I was elected. Dorothy and I continued on the Board as the only women until 1981, when I was
reelected and joined by Win Homer and Honora Rocker from Carnegie Mellon; then in 1982 Lynn
Worsham, a student member from the University of Texas at Arlington, was elected, followed in 1986
by Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede.
7 In telling this local story, I don't mean to imply that these were the only people developing
doctoral programs or offering courses and seminars at this time. Certainly there were others like Joseph
Comprone, Janet Emig, and James Kinneavy.
8 The faculty of the seminar were eight composition theorists each summer, including over the
years Jim Berlin, Edward Corbett, Janet Emig, Linda Flower, James Kinneavy, Andrea Lunsford, Louis
Milic, James Moffett, Gene Montague, Frank O'Hare, Walter Ong, Louise Phelps, Gordon Rohman,
Ross Winterowd (who codirected the first seminar with me), and Richard Young. The participants were
men and women from every state in the US and from Canada, with teaching experience ranging from
thirty years to none: instructors, departmental chairs, deans, a vice-president; literary scholars, linguists,
psychologists, and philosophers. They worked in large universities, regional colleges, community
colleges, high schools, and elementary schools; in urban and rural schools, and on a reservation.
The Feminization of Rhetoric 285

9 I am not hoping here for a mode of existence without any conflict, argument, or ideological
differences-all are marks of a dynamic and growing field. I am talking about a tone of respect, a
tolerant mode of professional interaction that does not demonize the "other."

Works Cited
Ashton-Jones, Evelyn. "Collaboration, Conversation, and the Politics of Gender." Feminist Principles
and Women's Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Ed. Janet Emig and Louise
Phelps. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, forthcoming.
Bauer, Dale. "The Other 'F Word: The Feminist in the Classroom. College English 52 ( 1990): 385-86.
Berry, Phillipa, and Andrew Wernick, eds. Shadow of Spirit: Postmodernism and Religion. London:
Routledge, 1992.
Bieseker, Barbara. "Coming to Terms with Recent Attempts to Write Women in the History of
Rhetoric." Rethinking the History of Rhetoric. Ed. Takis Poulakos. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993.
153-72.
Brannon, Lil. "M[Other]: Lives On the Outside." Written Communication 10 (1993): 457-65.
Chapman, David, and Gary Tate. "A Survey of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition."
Rhetoric Review 5 (1987): 1-3.
Connors, Robert. "Women's Reclamation of Rhetoric in the Nineteenth Century." Feminist Principles
and Women's Experience American Composition and Rhetoric. Ed. Janet Emig and Louise
Phelps. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, forthcoming.
"Doctoral Programs in English." Rhetoric Review Special"Issue 12 (1994).
Eichorn, Jill, Sara Farris, Karen Hayes, Adriana Hernandez, Susan Jarratt, Karen Power-Stubbs, and
Marian M. Sciachitano. "A Symposium on Feminist Experiences in the Classroom." College
Composition and Communication 43 (1992): 297-322.
Emig, Janet, and Louise Phelps, eds. Feminist Principles and Women's Experience in American
Composition and Rhetoric. U of Pittsburgh P, forthcoming.
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. Ed. Theresa Enos. Garland, forthcoming, 1995.
Encyclopedia of English Studies and Lnnguage .Arts. General Ed. Alan Purves. Scholastic, 1994.
Enos, Theresa. "Gender and Journals, Conservers or Innovators." PRE/TEXT 9 (1990): 209-14.
Ervin, Elizabeth. "Interdisciplinarity or 'An Elaborate Edifice Built on Sand'?: Rethinking Rhetoric's
Place." Rhetoric Review 12 (1993): 84-107.
Flynn, Elizabeth. "Composing as a Woman." College Composition and Communication 39 (1988):
423-35.
- - . "Composing 'Composing as a Woman"': A Perspective on Research." College Composition and
Communication 41 (1990): 83-89.
Fuss, Diana. Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Hawisher, Gail, and Cindy Selfe, eds. CCCC Bibliography on Composition and Rhetoric. 1991; 1992.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1993-1994.
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. "Women's Work: The Feminizing of Composition." Rhetoric Review 9 (1991):
201-29.
- - . "Manful Enterprise, Feminine Subject: Expressions of Gender in the History of Composition
1880-1950." Unpublished manuscript, 1990.
Hollis, Karyn. "Feminism in Writing Workshops: A New Pedagogy." College Composition and
Communication 43 (1992): 340-48.
Homer, Winifred, ed. Historical Rhetoric: An Annotated Bibliography of Selected Sources in
English. Boston: Hall, 1980.
- - . The Present State of Scholarship in Historical and Contemporary Rhetoric. Columbia: U of
Missouri P, 1983 and 1991.
Huber, Bettina. "Appendix: A Report on the 1986 Survey of English Doctoral Programs in Writing and
Literature." The Future of Doctoral Studies in English. Ed. Andrea Lunsford, Helene Moglin, and
James Slevin. New York: MLA, 1989. 121-75.
Hunter, Susan. "A Woman's Place 1s in the Classroom." Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 230-45.
Jarratt, Susan. "Feminism and Composition: The Case for Conflict." Contending with Words. Ed.
Patricia Harkin and John Schilb. New York: MLA, 1991. 105-23.
286 Rhetoric Review

Larson, Richard. "Classes of Discourse, Acts of Discourse, Writers and Readers." English Journal 81
(1992): 32-36.
Lindemann, Erika, ed. Longman Bibliography of Composition and Rhetoric. 1984-85; 1986. New
York: Longman, 1987-88.
- - . CCCC Bibliography on Composition and Rhetoric. 1987; 1988; 1989; 1990. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1990-1992.
Miller, Susan. Textual Carnivals. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1991.
- - . "The Feminization of Composition." The Politics of Writing Instruction: Postsecondary. Ed.
Richard Bullock and John Trimbur. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1991. 39-53.
North, Stephen. "Composition Becomes Composition." The Making of Knowledge in Composition:
Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1987. 9-17.
Nystrand, Martin, Stuart Greene, and Jeffrey Wiemelt. "Where Did Composition Studies Come From?"
Written Communication 10 (1993): 267-333.
Osborn, Susan. "Revision/Re-Vision." Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 258-73.
Phelps, Louise."Vision and Interpretation." Feminist Principles and Women's Experience in American
Composition and Rhetoric. Ed. Janet Emig and Louise Phelps. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P,
forthcoming.
Phillips, Donna, Ruth Greenberg, and Sharon Gibson. "Chronicling a Discipline's Genesis." College
Composition and Communication 44 (1993): 443-65.
Stewart, Donald. "Collaborative Learning and Composition: Boon or Bane?'' Rhetoric Review 7
(1988): 58-88.
The Rhetoric Society of America Newsletter I (December 1968): I.
Wyschogrod, Edith. Saints and Postmodernism: Revisioning Moral Philosophy. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1990.

Janice M. Lauer is Professor of English and Director of the Graduate Program in Rhetoric and
Composition at Purdue University. She has coauthored Four Worlds of Writing (with Gene Montague,
Andrea Lunsford, and Janet Emig) and Composition Research: Empirical Designs (with William
Asher), and has published articles on invention, composition as a multimodal discipline, and rhetorical
history.