NYMA:
Mother Always Said
In Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun (1998) quoted Jean Paul Sarte, saying “genius, he sets out to prove, is ‘not a gift, but rather the way one invents in desperate situations,’ and in considering it we must ‘retrace in detail the history of a liberation’” (p. 44).
As a WPA, I have recently been thinking about how often WPAs have to reinvent the wheel (or the program, as the case may be). These programs—often guided by untenured women—frequently serve as a space of potential genius as we each individually struggle to create our programs; yet much of this work, this genius, goes unrecorded in the scholarship because it is too service-oriented, and it is difficult to turn a show-and-tell narrative into an argument. Yet it is other people’s, other WPAs’, stories that we so desperately need as models in order to be able to keep from recreating problematic programs and to be able to feel less isolated in the work that we do.
Have we as a field outgrown our need for profession-based storytelling? We always hear that a proposed article or presentation is not scholarly enough. What do we really mean by that? Why isn’t that kind of narrative as valuable even when it does some of the most important work: consolidating and verifying what we know about the teaching of writing in the form of functional, successful writing programs?
“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” (Janice M. Lauer, 1995, p. 280)
Monday, February 22, 2010
Hallmarks of women’s work
