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The Contribtuions of Maxine Hairston

during her three decades at the University of Texas at Austin. She wrote her first textbook, Contemporary Rhetoric, after teaching composition for five years as a graduate student and five years as a full-fledged faculty member at the University of Texas at Austin. In the preface to that book, Hairston describes one of her early stances on teaching freshman composition in the university: “The teacher who uses this text will notice that it focuses more on teaching students to write clearly, vigorously, and precisely than on teaching them to write complex, rich, and polished prose… Most of us do not have the time to train all of our students to be fine writers. We do, I think, have the time, ability, and responsibility to help them become lucid thinkers and competent writers.” Hairston went on to co-write several other important composition textbooks, including The Scott Foresman Handbook and The Riverside Reader. Hairston became an advocate for writing instructors throughout the nation when she first argued that composition instructors needed more respect from the English departments in which they worked in her 1985 CCCC address, “Breaking Our Bonds and Reaffirming Our Connections.” In this speech, which later became an article, Hairston compared the antagonistic relationship between literary studies experts and composition studies scholars in English departments to partners in an unhealthy, oppressive marriage. She argued that composition instructors had inherited and accepted the identity of a psychologically oppressed wife, battered by a partner (literary studies) who condescendingly belittles the value of her work. After all, many compositionists were women who were hired to take the teaching jobs that (generally male) literary scholars detested. Those battered instructors would be better off divorcing themselves from such unhealthy department politics and starting their own departments in Composition and Rhetoric in order to receive the respect they deserved as scholars in their own right. As a college student, Hairston had never even seen a female professor, and she had been warned that her gender was a count against her when she was allowed to work at the University of Texas upon receiving her Ph.D. Thus, she particularly nurtured the women who populated her field as students and colleagues. Two years before she retired, Hairston wrote another controversial article, “Ideology, Diversity, and the Teaching of Writing,” in which she argued for an ideology-free classroom. Rather than using classrooms as political platforms, Hairston believed that students and their critical thinking should be a teacher’s primary focus. Ultimately, Maxine Hairston was a passionate believer in a pragmatic approach to teaching writing. She was an outspoken proponent for the professional status of women in the field of composition and rhetoric, and her often controversial opinions about composition pedagogy resulted in fervent, yet productive, discussion and the improved professional positioning of composition studies within the academy.