What Women's Literature?

Abstract

the school was four to one. Why don't you hire your thirty three best applicants, whoever they are? I used to harangue him, under mental shades of the heroine of My Sister Eileen proclaiming Get the marines out of Nicaragua! Why don't you hire thirty three women, or none at all, depending on the quality of your applicants? He used to look at me with kindly amusement, in the spirit of Dr. Johnson contemplating female preachers. This was many years ago. Since the excitement over women's lib in the sixties, I have wondered whether my professor ever remembers me. I spent two years on his staff, and have now spent twenty teaching elsewhere. I say all this by way of proving my credentials. I consider myself one of the relatively rare feminists of the fifties, still fighting. As such, I feel compelled to state that I find the present interest in 'women's literature' degrading, and the teaching of women's literature in English departments a subversion of women's liberation. The whole point of leaving the doll's house, I would have thought, was to become a person among people, to be what one wanted to be. If one chose to be an English teacher, it was because one had an interest in literature; one didn't have to astonish the professors, or to decorate a campus, or to confine oneself to books on childbirth. If one chose to write fiction, it was because one wanted readers to say What a fine novel, not Oh, a woman! Of course, in