A Mystifying History...Tasker and Holt-Underwood's "Feminist Research Methodologies in Historic Rhetoric and Composition"

The first thing I learned in picking up this article was how much I have yet to learn. I felt buried in the terminology that was used to describe various research practices. Even now after looking up historiography I am not certain exactly how the text is meant to be understood in its use of the word. I fear that I am not well versed in research methodologies.

I will choose then one of the points that I am sure I understood from the text. I found the question of how best to anthologize female writers an interesting one, in part because I have taken issue with what seems a bizarre abberration within the American Literature textbook that I use here at Peyton High. In this textbook, one encounters women in nearly every chapter, beginning with Anne Bradstreet and continuing in various quantities and qualities throughout the text. However, in an otherwise historically organized text, the chapters covering 19th Century Literature are devoid of female writers so that all the writers considered by the editors to be major enough for inclusion in a highschool text can be gathered in a single half chapter that stretches from Dickinson through the turn of the century, with a single exception for Willa Cather's "A Wagner Matinee."

I really detest this arrangment in this particular text. It removes the women from their context, deprives them of their rightful place among their peers and movements, and makes it seem, that the only way they would be included is to have a special chapter for women. As if, without that "female chapter" they wouldn't make the cut. In an otherwise historically based text, and in a year long survey of American Literature, I feel the arrangement is inappropriate. I have, as I have the liberty to do, taken the option of reinserting the women into their contexts and places, emphasizing all they accomplished and discussing their ideas in concert with the male thinkers of the time as equals. Even if some of these women (Emily Dickinson) for example were removed from their time by various circumstances as later discoveries, they were writing at the time and bring a new and important perspective to American thought/literature in their various periods. In discussing American Romanticism for example it would be criminal to leave Emily Dickinson out or to treat her as a separate artifact.

I recognize the role of anthologies made up entirely of female writers for courses that focus on the female writer, or as one of several texts within a survey course to provide a balancing feminine perspective to the dominant male discourse. However, the segregation of women into a room of their own within a survey course of the type I teach reflects all the evils implied by my very conscious use of segregation. To separate women writers (or rhetors) into their own space within an otherwise historical course seems to me to marginalize their contribution to their specific time and context, and to inihibit a full understanding of their achievement.