Converging histories: writing instruction and women's education in the progressive era, 1890-1920

Abstract

As we continue to recover the experiences and texts that, pieced together, help to illustrate the evolution of writing instruction, we expose the limits of previously constructed histories of the discipline of composition studies. The major historical accounts of writing instruction in nineteenth-century America (e.g., Kitzhaber, Berlin, Johnson) examine primarily the theories, practices, and texts from the most influential universities of the period. Since most of these institutions were all male for the better part of the nineteenth century, however, these studies are limited by inherent boundaries. We have only recently (in the work of JoAnn Campbell and Karen Hollis, for example) begun to consider the writing curricula at women's colleges as we work toward a more inclusive account of our discipline's history. In this effort, however, we must resist perpetuating the bias that privileges Northern over Southern institutions. Not unlike the concentrated attention given to northern men's colleges in the established histories of writing instruction, the primary sites of research at women's colleges have also been Northern schools--e.g., Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Vassar. To begin the work of filling in this gap, my research at Hollins and Mary Baldwin Colleges traces the evolution of writing instruction at two private, Southern women's institutions during one of the most revolutionary periods in the history of women's education, the Progressive Era (1890-1920). In Chapter One, I discuss the present state of research into the history of the discipline and establish the need for more careful considerations of writing instruction at women's institutions and, more particularly, at Southern women's colleges. In Chapter Two, I trace the evolution of the institutional missions and curricula at both Hollins and Mary Baldwin. In Chapters Three and Four, my analyses of archival materials from both Hollins and Mary Baldwin, including course descriptions, textbooks, and original student essays, depict a generation of faculty grappling with the difficult decision to move from the tradition of belles lettres to the more "practical" modes of discourse. I conclude, in Chapter Five, with a discussion of the way that this struggle within the curricula corresponds to and reveals the larger institutional problems of redefining education for "the Progressive woman" amid the sweeping social reform of the Progressive Era.