Andrea Beaudin
Holbrook, Sue Ellen. “Women's work: The feminizing of composition.” Rhetoric Review 9.2 (1991): 201-229. Web.
"Composition, then, is being feminized, a process made possible by its low status and women's" (209).
Holbrook's article, quite influential when published (Google Scholar lists that it's been cited 44 times), looks to the gender, status, employment, and financial inequality in the teaching of composition in higher education. Holbrook offers overwhelming data (ranging from the gender distribution of part-time instructors to full professors to the rosters of and conference presentations for NCTE and CCCC) to support her hypothesis. She argues that "women's work has four related characteristics: it has a disproportionate number of women workers; it is service-oriented; it pays less than men's work; it is devalued" (202), supporting her claim with a gendered break-down of professions, how they are characterized, and pay scale. Holbrook then focuses on the Academy, demonstrating that women are disproportionately in lower-level, often contingent faculty positions, teaching introductory/ composition courses, generally at a much lower rate of pay.
Holbrook's findings are troubling, and one hopes that situations have dramatically changed in the past twenty years. As a snapshot in time, however, her work uses the lens of gender to again demonstrate the ways in which the teaching of writing (composition and, by extension, technical writing) has been undervalued. She often alludes to the historical events that Connors and Whitburn develop at length to theorize the basis for this bias. Her article challenges Connors's bright and rosy outlook for the 1980s, as her findings forecast that many of those (mostly women) who will earn their PhDs in fields like composition or technical writing will not earn the respect or the compensation they deserve.
Andrea,
ReplyDeleteI have a few somewhat random thoughts that stem from my reading of your annotation.
• This idea of "service" in the composition context is really beginning to strike a chord with me, especially as it relates to gender (as you've highlighted in Holbrook's article). I recently read an article for another class (research methods) in which the author argued for moving from composition as a "service" course to composition as a "franchise" within the university model. Interestingly enough, I feel as though even these words have some traditionally masculine connotations themselves; thus, even moving to that model still brings forth interesting questions regarding "women's work" in the composition field and how words shape our construction and definitions of the field.
• Since this article was written in 1991, I wonder if any follow-up studies have been conducted yet, as I feel that obvious pay gap between men and women is closing.
• I’d also be curious to see if there are any studies of this sort on the technical communicator end, specifically. Does Holbrook delve into the work of women technical writing teachers at all? It’d be interesting to study the salaries of women/men technical writing teachers vs. women/men technical communicators to see if there is a correlation there or not, sort of a practice vs. teaching study of professional “value” in the field.
I liked the way you unfolded the content of the article. I am thrilled to see how a recent field like Technical Communication is going hand in hand with the also fairly recent feminist take in literature. One can undertake research about how the feminist perspective is shaping up research especially that Tech Comm accounts for many issues considered taboo or else under-represented. I also noticed in my article the same intensive reference to Connors, which highlights his research in the field as so-called founding father.
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