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The Contributions of Flowerence HoweIn Florence Howe’s “Remembering Meridel,” an article memorializing the late author Meridel LeSeuer, Howe quotes
LeSeuer:Perhaps women like me of another generation are like a bridge. Pass over, use the energy of the root in our witness and our singing. So we will never be gone. You have more tools now. The fog is lifting over the illusions. You have begun to tell it. You will bear sharper witness. Be bold. Tell it all. Don’t spare the horses. The earth is waiting to hear you. All the children and the ancients are waiting. We shall come home together. (11)
If Howe has done anything, she has born sharper witness than even LeSeuer herself could possibly imagine. From her working-class beginnings in Brooklyn, she has risen to incredible heights in American academe as a patroness of feminism, still refusing to slow down in the fight against silence and oppression of all kinds. The point of this overview is, of course, to discuss the ways in which Howe has impacted the teaching of writing.
However, it is perhaps more interesting to note the ways in which the teaching of writing has impacted her, instead, which has in turn affected education as we know it today. The awakenings of Howe’s consciousness, as she relates in various articles (including the concise overview “From Race and Class to the Feminist Press”) began during the Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. At this point, she had already emerged from her working-class background, where she was “supposed to become an elementary school teacher, get married to a nice Jewish man, have babies, and live happily after” (“From Race”). Instead, she survived several failed marriages in her attempt to balance traditional expectations of women and her own desires and goals. After being the first woman in her family to even attend college, Howe attended graduate school and became an English professor, which led her to Mississippi at the age of thirty-five. It was in Mississippi where she experienced a new type of teaching as the Citizenship Curriculum required
teachers to sit in circles with students, not to “teach” but to “learn with” the students, and ask open questions to engage the students in dialogue to learn to question their oppressed status, as well as to articulate alternatives. She ironically did not question the oppression of women at this time, even though she was working to question the disparities between the treatment of different races. She even relates how, at this time, she did not even think to bring or teach books by women. When she returned to her regular position in Baltimore, she implemented some of the techniques which she learned in Mississippi in order to “discover what was in [her] students’ heads” (“From Race”). She recalls that she sought “the theme to unlock [her students’] abilities to write, as talking about being black in a white society had unlocked the freedom-longing voices of [her] black students. But what was that theme for white, middle-class females? In hindsight, it seems obvious [to Howe], but in 1964 and 1965, [she] was not a feminist” (“From Race”). It was not until a discussion about point-of-view in D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers did she find her theme. She suddenly thought to engage her students in the same types of dialogue which she had employed in Mississippi, concerning the students’ perceptions of equality, but in their families. By digging deeply into what constituted “equality” in her society, and that of her students, she realized that the system was skewed in a way that she had never before noticed. From this point, Howe began to fight. She began to implement women writers in her curricula, which
eventually led to her formation of The Feminist Press in 1970 (when she was forty-one years old) which worked to recover the texts of women writers who had been lost (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Meridel LeSeuer, Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, etc.). She called for the rallying of female academics, which helped advocate the women’s studies movement and led to the creation of the Commission on the Status and Education of Women in the MLA, among other nationwide efforts to question and overturn the oppression of women in universities. Her essay “Identity and Expression: A Writing Course for Women” details some of her classroom practices in the early years of her feminist consciousness. These practices include free-writing on the students’ assessments of themselves as writers; initiating discussion about why they feel this way; encouraging them that it is not too late to become a good writer; journaling in different ways (which they did not have to show to her); straying from strict rules concerning attendance, tardiness, etc.; incorporating women writers (a move which was actually met by much resistance by women in the beginning); using literature to which to react, and analyze those reactions in a reader-response fashion; and asking open vs. closed questions, among other methods. Despite her extensive bibliography, this article actually acts as a rare specific pedagogical tool for the implementation of feminist pedagogies in the classroom. However, Howe’s contributions to the field of teaching writing are innumerable enough because of her fight to change women’s experience in higher education altogether. Paradoxically, it was her experiences in teaching her writing course, which she remembers so vividly, which led to her own consciousness of her struggles in a patriarchal institution. This fight to be the voice for the voiceless has continued with her interests in promulgating works by minority, international, disabled, and other generally oppressed or silenced peoples. Specifically Cited: “From Race and Class to the Feminist Press.” Massachusetts Review 44.1–2 (2003): 117–135. “Identity and Expression: A Writing Course for Women.” College English32.8: (1971): 863–871. “Remembering Meridel.” The Women’s Review of Books 14.7 (1997): 10–11. |