Feminizing

The discussion thread on Laura's blog revolutionlullabye about women's status in academe is useful. Laurie posted a great comment about National Labor Bureau stats and about the AAUP Report on the Status of Women. Much of what is said in that report augments/affirms Sue Ellen Holbrook's insights about women's publication records in "Women's Work: The Feminizing of Composition." Holbrook offers this rather grim observation:

"Saturated by women practitioners, focused on pedagogy, allied with education departments and school teaching, conceived as having a 'service' and elementary place in the curriculum, and pervaded by paraprofessionalism, composition has become women's work. And so it will remain--disproportionately the work of women and work of lesser value--as long as these conditions remain" (Holbrook 211).

Holbrook is right that all of these factors have come into play to create a "feminized field," but there is the larger question of what this means. She goes on to remark:

"The transformation of composition from women's work to an esteemed profession can come only as part of the larger complex processes of raising the status of taching itself and the other service occupations in a capitalist society, breaking down the sexual division of labor, achieving social and economic equity between women and men, and revalorizing socially produced differences between the masculine and feminine genders" (211).

That statement gives us some hope, and she does point toward the presence of feminists in composition studies. Theresa Enos's book _Gender Roles in Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition (SIUP, 1996) and my book _Gypsy Academics and Mother-teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction_ (Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1998) strive to shed light on the situation in the late 90s for women faculty in composition studies. I argued in my book that faculty unionism was a way to combat the poor pay and working conditions of part-time and non-tenure-line faculty, in particular. However, there is also the question of how women in senior ranks in composition--and there are a number of us now--are making a difference in how composition as work gets valued. I think that an updated survey article needs to be written about women's presence/status in composition. There is a book underway on the topic. Diane Davis, Michelle Ballif, and Roxanne Mountford have been working on a book about Women's Ways of Making it in composition and have conducted interviews with successful, tenured women scholars. I'm not sure of their argument, overall, but I think the question of how women have made a difference in addressing workplace inequities and feminization might be on the table. There is also a CCCC Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, which takes up these issues.

Yet we should overlay some globalized concepts onto this issue/ essay since we're reading Holbrook now in 2006.

"Service" occupations are often devalued MORE in a globalized society. When there are unionized populations of "care workers" or those in the "helping professions," wages and benefits will be better. Collective bargaining can improve working conditions in significant ways for some groups of caring workers: teachers, nurses, contingent faculty in higher ed. , clerical workers (accounting for differences between groups). Social movement unionism present in groups like Jobs for Justice and United Students Against Sweatshops are indications of the kind of melding that can happen between social justice movements and labor organizations. But this is in the West, often in highly developed, capitalist countries. There is now the globalization-feminization of labor.

Care work (nannies and elder care work) and pink collar clerical work are new frontiers in globalization. Nannies and elder care workers are brought in and clerical work and factory work is outsourced to other parts of the globe where workers (mainly women) are not organized into unions. This work has gendered and racialized dimensions as many of these workers are people of color, women of color. There is even more opportunity for exploitation when there is a highly exploitable class of workers (usually young women from developing countries). So we are in an uneven space with improvements of the status and working conditions of those who perform caring work. The book _The Globalized Woman_ deals with many of these issues.


Also to get back to our immediate disciplinary context, there is also the question of instituionalized racism that Royster and Williams mention. Our field has, for many years, ignored the histories and literacy practices of African Americans, equating African American students with the position of basic writing students. This is also the case with other people of color, Latinos/as and Native American students who also have been grouped in the basic writing rubric. Asian American students have been typed as ESL students or as model minorities. So clearly there is work to be done to re-direct the gaze of the field and redress the gender inequities and instituionalized racism, which are intertwined and intersected in ways we haven't yet begun to discuss in the field.