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The situation of women in the modern world is clearly a major concern of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (see Allen 160-78 and Whittier 12746). Less obvious is how the book might embody a feminist aesthetic, that is, how it might define, as a solution to the sociological and psychological problems of women, a language and an art competent to secure women, especially the female writer, against male domination. In her essay on “Women’s Literature,” Elizabeth Janeway suggests that to be distinct from men’s literature women’s literature must constitute “an equally significant report from another, equally significant, area of existence” (344-45). Hence, some of the major themes of women’s literature: madness, powerlessness, betrayal and victimization. Though not exclusively feminine, nonetheless these situations frequently arise from the situation of women as women (Janeway 346). Equally important to women’s literature, however, is a unique literary language and form. Marjorie Perloff’s “‘A Ritual for Being Born Twice,’” for example, focuses in Laingian terms on The Bell Jar’s “attempt to heal the fracture between inner self and false-self . . . so that a real and viable identity can come into existence” (102). It touches on many female issues. The title itself expresses a female motif. But it does not establish a specifically feminist context. As Erica Jong puts it, “the reason a woman has greater problems becoming an artist is because she has greater problems becoming a self” (qtd. in Reardon 136), which means not just integrating the masked self and the genuine self, but also, as Joan Reardon explains in her analysis of Jong, “in coming to terms with her own body,” expressing herself in her “own diction . . . images and symbols” (136). In her introduction to The New Feminist Criticism, and in her two contributions to the volume, Elaine Showalter describes how, in recent years, attention has shifted from the treatment of women in male fic-

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When I sat down to consider what I remember about the past of the National Council of Teachers of English, I came up with some admirable positions it advocated during the 1960s and 70s, and some admirable actions it took during that same period. I am, of course, using my own definition of admirable. Sometimes, it seemed to me, NCTE was influenced by and echoed the moods of the more general society, and sometimes it tried to influence those -noods. When newspapers, magazines, and television reported that literacy was at a low ebb, that the schools were doing a lousy job and something better be done about it quick, NCTE responded with resolutions opposing the worst of the so-called solutions and set up committees to demonstrate that the so-called crisis was greatly exaggerated. I remembered that NCTE has spoken out for the rights of racial minorities and made sure that they and their views were included in its own programs and committees. It has spoken out for the rights of women and-I can't say included them because we have always been a majority of NCTE's membership-but it has at least shown that it meant what it said by adopting a policy on sexism in language and by putting some muscle behind its support of ERA while that proposed amendment was still alive. It has spoken out for the rights of lesbians and gay men. It has spoken out against censoring books and against the abuses of testing. And I remembered that NCTE had acted admirably by forming three new sub-groups during those years. Through its related organization, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, NCTE formally recognized the importance of junior colleges in the educational system. Regional community college conferences were set up across the country and given financial assistance to help them along. As a result of that action large numbers of English teachers who had been existing in a kind of professional nobody's land became more professional. They met to talk about mutual problems, and more of them subscribed to and read professional journals. Eighteen years later two of those conferences are strong and vigorous, earning their own way. One, at least, is ailing and not

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IT HAD BEEN A TYPICAL FEMINIST CONFERENCE in early March 1979, in Buffalo, New York, a kind of high-voltage pressurized capsule in which we enacted what we wrote about and discussed what we enacted. Only in this safe place, on this common ground, could we feel free enough to dramatize disputes that would, in turn, energize further insights: unfortunately, nationally visible star, in this case Dorothy Dinnerstein, was effectively silenced by her so-called commentator; three forty-minute papers were given in a session scheduled to last an hour; third-world women, now termed of color, were ostentatiously absent, to guilty dismay of organizers; a female psychoanalyst announced to an astonished audience that clitoris, which she called the woodchip, produced an insufficient orgasm until it set fire to real explosion or big bang in vagina; first of two male speakers strutted his stuff in a combative performance in which he chastised women scholars for hiding behind skirts of sisterhood in an effort to evade genuine intellectual competition; at a Last Supper that night, over spicy fried chicken wings, a specialty in Buffalo, one of only two extant American feminist Lacanians-understandably exasperated with all these difficulties-reacted by hitting other one with a crumpled cigarette package and calling her a bitch. Set heat of this hectic activity against polar expiation of Buffalo in winter. We were all desperately afraid, or so we repeatedly exclaimed to each other, of being stranded in Buffalo. It was during a hot ride in an overcrowded car, through freezing night rains, that feminist critic Annette Kolodny asked about our teaching in Indiana Women's Prison: she was especially curious about inmates' attitude toward feminism. As we recalled atmosphere of prison nights and realized their similarity to dramatic enactments at conference, we knew that she had articulated crucial question we had faced when we team-taught in prison two years earlier. For prison (no less than conference) had been a

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The essays in Gender Studies explore relationships between gender and creativity, identity, and genre within the context of literary analysis. Some of the essays are psychoanalytic in approach in that they seek to discover the sexual dynamic/s involved in the creation of literature as an art form. Still others attempt to isolate and examine the sexual attitudes inherent in the works of particular authors or genres, or to determine how writers explore the sensibilities of each gender.

BECAUSE THE FRESHMAN COMPOSITION CLASS is usually the students' first introduction to college, what better place to challenge sexist reading, writing, and thinking? What better place to help students understand the relationship between language and thought? Instead of grammar-book rules that instruct students to avoid the masculine pronoun when gender is unclear, classroom activities can encourage students actively to explore their sexist values and draw their own conclusions. These activities should attack sexism at its roots by examining the cultural conditioning which both encourages faulty thinking and limits options for women and men. At the same time, through an examination of sexism, teachers can get at some of the students' persistent writing difficulties, such as generating essay topics, supporting topic sentences with sufficient proof, and selecting appropriate words and tone. Even though students have read and written for the better part of their lives, they seem unaware of the power of language to condition minds. They do not recognize that the assumption that males hold all prestigious positions lies behind the business correspondence salutation of Dear Sir. Nor can they identify the cultural bias toward single women reinforced by the titles Mr., Mrs., and Miss. If confronted directly with this sexism, many students acquiesce by using Ms. and by revising all he pronouns to read he/she. Nonetheless, they view such practices as arbitrary, senseless, and bothersome. A study of the causes and effects of sexist language can be integrated with and grow naturally from existing course structures and objectives. The three activities which follow are designed to explore the implications of sexism while building reading and writing skills. The first comprises word lists that develop awareness of sexist language used in literature and in students' own writings, while the second explores fairy tales that, like other literature, transmit sex role stereotypes and biases. The third considers research topics related to the two preceding activities. These three activities can be arranged in several sequences to develop writing objectives. For example, a teacher who views writing as a discovery process might use the following sequence: (1) students look at the data in the Hemingway passage from differing viewpoints, manipulate the data, and form tentative hypotheses; (2) students, in a

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IN THE SPRING SEMESTER OF 1978 I taught a seminar on contemporary women's fiction to twelve women graduate students. Taught is really the wrong word. Officially, I was responsible for the course, for grades, for leading discussion; actually it was that rare experience, a class that ran itself. This was partly because the students had designed the course-a course in which some of their own unpublished work would be discussed in the same way as already published fiction-and therefore felt responsible for it. But it was also because a real sense of community developed as our established critical methods failed us and we groped towards formulating new ones. The words with which one of the students, Marilyn Johnson, introduced her project for the course suggest the atmosphere that developed:

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THIS ESSAY IS A COURSE DESCRIPTION, but it is also an argument. I would like to use it to give an overview of a course that I have been teaching for three years now, and in the process, I would like to present some proposals about pedagogy in general, about teaching introductory literature courses, about women writers, and about the relationship between feminism and literary study. Some of what I have to say will be familiar, for, although my course is not, strictly speaking, a Women's Studies course, it is in large part a response to the kinds of issues which Women's Studies has been raising, and a great deal of the strength of the course derives directly from what I have learned from my contacts with academic feminism. The course could not have come into being without the work that has been done by feminists in over the past five or six years. My approach to feminist issues, however, is, I hope, fresh enough to justify my writing this piece, and the arguments I want to present are, I hope, sound and useful enough to be valuable to teachers who teach, think, and write about literature both within and outside the structure of a Women's Studies course or program. My course comes to rest right at the junction of several ways of thinking: it combines a shamelessly old-fashioned critical emphasis on theme and character with a new moral and political vision. The hybrid thus created has yielded gratifying results, and I want to recommend the informing ideas of the course to a wide variety of teachers of English. The approach I have developed works no miracles, but it does, I think, provide a coherent framework for exploring the pleasures and seriously confronting the questions that follow when one gives assent to the most basic feminist arguments. That approach, quite simply, is this: I teach a body of good literature, all written by women, and I teach it as specifically female writing; I encourage the students to read for ideas first; I do not ignore my own gender (about which more later); and I try to direct the students toward the kinds of moral and sexual-political insights that are to be found in women writers' vision of the world-especially their vision of the male half of it. English 160/Images of the Male in Women's Writing, was inspired by this passage in Virginia Woolfs A Room of One's Own (1929; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1957):

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TEACHING WOMEN'S POETRY IS, I think, nearly always a struggle: it is an effort to overcome most students' resistance to reading poetry at all, to encourage them to be open to the personal immediacy, the urgency, the language, and rhythm that characterizes so contemporary women's poetry. Teaching lesbian poetry is even more difficult: both teachers and students bring to it a multi-layered set of assumptions that must be dealt with before the poetry itself can be explored. An unknown to most teachers, lesbian poetry, like lesbianism, is understandably threatening. When we think about teaching lesbian poetry for the first time, uwhat most of us feel is scared. We hesitate to write about it in detail (if at all) for the same reasons that we hesitate to emphasize it-or even discuss it-in class and out: the fear of losing our job, of being denied tenure; the fear that, regardless of our sexual and affectional preference, we will be dismissed by our students as just a lesbian; the concern that students who feel hostile or skeptical, or even friendly toward feminism and the women's movement, will be irretrievably lost if too much attention were directed toward the issue of lesbianism; the doubts about our colleagues' reactions to what we teach and how we teach it; the threat that the validity of a hard-earned women's course, women's studies program, or women's center w ill be undercut, and funding jeopardized, if it becomes perceived as a dyke effort.1 Nothing can be said that w ill allay these fears, most especially for those of us uwho are lesbians. For those of us who want to remain in academia, the choices are painful. We can choose to be public about our lesbianism and run the attendant gamut of

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IN A FIELD AS NEW AS WOMEN'S STUDIES, to protest the traditional reading list or approach may seem premature. However, after several traumatic semesters one might argue convincingly for a reevaluation. Whereas generally the task of choosing texts for Women's Studies courses in literature is an exciting experience because of the anticipation of introducing students to many writers who are left out of their regular curricula, it also posits the difficulty of achieving a balanced representation of the various images of women. particular difficulty in point is finding sufficient representations for that section of the course that should be entitled The Liberated Woman or She Who Succeeds. In American Literature, the shortage is acute. Having made a study of the dearth of self-actualized, positive heroines in works by American Male Novelists for the Educational Resources Infor7nation Center, the problem was not unexpected. Nor has this deficiency gone without critical comment. Caroline Heilbrun discussed the implications of this problem in her article for Saturday Review, The Masculine Wilderness of the American Novel. Wendy Martin's conclusion in Seduced and Abandoned in the New World is that daughters of Eve, American heroines are destined to lives of dependency and servitude as well as to painful and sorrowful childbirth because, like their predecessor, they have dared to disregard authority or tradition in search of wisdom or happiness... . problem is not limited to fiction. Studies abound that lament the lack of positive female role models in everything from the Dick and Jane primary readers to high school history books. Adding women writers to the reading lists, whether they be writers newly discovered or resurrected by feminist criticism or already acclaimed writers, does little to alleviate the problem. resultant mood created by the reading material in Women's Studies courses in American Literature is rage or despair. This is true though there are several excellent short story and poetry anthologies that can be used in combination with any number of novels. same is true, though to a lesser extent, in a course that focuses on biography or autobiography. After going mad with Zelda, attempting suicide in Bell Jar, and agonizing through

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WOMEN'S STUDIES IS no longer a fad. It is a reality of the academic world affecting all schools, all curricula, all students. Those schools which have women's studies programs are asking, Where do we go from here? Those schools which have no programs or courses are asking, Why not? At some level, articulated or not, faculty, students, and administrators at every school are involved in a reevaluation of curriculum as it represents and affects all of them. With the publication of Female Studies I-VII (Know, Inc., Pittsburgh, PA and Feminist Press at Old Westbury, NY) we can trace the history and expansion of Women's Studies. We can see that, at more and more schools, the interest has steadily increased. At Tompkins Cortland Community College we have recognized and begun to act on the very vital role such programming can play in meeting the special needs of students at the community college. The community college student population is diverse. Some enter directly from high school, and some have been out of school for over twenty years. We have more and more students who are attending school parttime. Many have other obligations-jobs, families, community commitments. We have excellent students and students with serious remedial problems. And, of course, we have students who know exactly what they want to study as well as those who need much vocational and personal counseling. The community college, I believe, is one of the few institutions flexible enough to meet these varied needs. And women's programming is a significant aid to this flexibility and responsiveness to the needs of the community population. When I talk about Women's Studies courses, I mean courses which are primarily concerned with awakening students to the situation of women in society and which aim at stimulating reevaluation of traditional educational and social practices. Once students become aware of the secondary status of women, it is my hope that they are no longer content to accept it but get involved in attempts to initiate change. Basic to Women's Studies is a recognition that method is as important as content. This recognition implies changing the attitudes inherent in a hierarchical teacher/student relationship. It is important to encourage a collective searching for and sharing of information rather than vying for grades or personal ap-

in virtues of an avowed descriptive objectivity and traditional authority, dictionary is potentially one of most dangerous carriers of cultural bias and prejudice. In guise of linguistic objectivity, modern dictionary then appears neutral to editorial preference, poetry, and politics. For who would expect such scholarly virtues to promote cultural prejudice? Just because of its authoritative status and influence, dictionary should be one of primary targets of investigations in public doublespeak. With this concern in mind, I systematically investigated unabridged Random House Dictionary of English Language (1966) for its use of masculine and feminine nouns and pronouns in illustrative sentences. I wanted to see whether RHD perpetuated sex-role stereotypes in illustrating neutral entry words and whether one gender was given more representation than the other. I was impressed with how a seemingly objective and politically neutral medium could so easily reinforce sex-role stereotypes and sexism. The deeprooted cultural cliches about men and women are represented in following sentences illustrating usage of neutral and innocuous entry words. The entry word is italicized in each sentence:

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