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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

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(1994). Constructing a doctoral program in rhetoric and composition. Rhetoric Review: Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 392-397.

Intended for writing instructors at all levels who lack the training to deal effectively with the increasingly important role played by empirical research in their field, Composition Research explains ten of the most common empirical designs used in the social sciences. These include: case study, ethnography, sampling/survey, quantitative descriptive research, prediction and classification studies, true and quasi-experiments, meta-analysis, and program evaluation. Each design is explained with reference to at least two specific composition studies, and includes a separate bibliography that identifies further writing studies that use it. The book also features a chapter on measurement, an appendix on statistical analyses, a glossary of technical terms and symbols, and guidelines for research on human subjects.

Over the last two decades, the development of graduate programs in composition has provoked a number of questions: Is this study a genuine discipline? What are its origins, its domain of investigation, its modes of inquiry and methods of evaluation? To some it seems a newcomer to academia even though part of its work reinstates and reorients the written branch of rhetoric, one of the most ancient disciplines of higher education. To others its character is puzzling because its scholarship has a highly multidisciplinary cast. These attitudes manifest themselves in many circumstances. A panel at the last meeting of the Modern Language Association raised questions about criteria for assessing composition research. A recent article in College English by Scott and Castner implied this puzzlement by offering some bibliographic starting places for those wishing to enter the field.' Such questions are normal and appropriate for a developing field, which must define itself. This essay does not attempt to offer definitive answers to these questions but rather some preliminary reflections on the nature of composition studies as a discipline, first delineating some of its distinctive features and then discussing advantages and dangers associated with these features.

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(1980). Doctoral programs in rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 10, No. 4, pp. 190-194.

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