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32 2 Linked Fortunes Kate Chopin, the Short Story (and Me) barbara c. ewell As for so many others, my first encounter with Kate Chopin was a tip from a colleague—“You gotta read this!” Or, more specifically, “Put this one in your syllabus!”It was the mid-seventies. I had just finished my PhD at a venerable midwestern Catholic institution, and tenure-track jobs were sparse. After a year in a part-time position at Loyola University New Orleans,I had been offered my first full-time job: teaching three composition courses as an instructor at Newcomb College of Tulane University, just across the fence from Loyola. When I was interviewed by the Newcomb department chair, he asked if I would be interested in teaching the Women in Literature course, created by the instructor whose departure for California was providing my employment. I was delighted to have a chance to teach a real literature course, but I must have voiced some of my uncertainty about the subject matter. I knew that there was nothing in my freshly typed résumé that indicated any such expertise. Renaissance poetry or Shakespeare I could do, but how could I teach a subject in which I had had no training? The graying chair, a kindly and otherwise enlightened sort of guy, leaned back from his cluttered desk, gave me an appraising glance, and said with a chortle,“You certainly look qualified!” The notion that simply being a woman qualified me to teach a whole literary field might seem a bit startling (it was to me), but in those days, it shouldn’t have been. For one thing, no one was “qualified” to teach wom­ en’s studies.The first women’s studies program had been established only in 1969 (at San Diego State, in California, the epitome of sixties radicalism ), and even Newcomb’s own women’s center (the oldest university- 33 Kate Chopin, the Short Story (and Me) based center in the Gulf South) did not yet exist; it was founded later that fall in 1975. Women’s studies was a brand-new discipline, with close links to the politically based women’s movement, which was largely focused on passing the ERA, having finally succeeded in securing legal abortion. Given such political and activist associations, “women’s lib” was seen by many academics as merely trendy, a bit of a joke, as the flippancy of the department chair indicated. But women-in-literature courses did attract students, and since the lone female tenured professor in the English Department could hardly be expected to teach such a lightweight course, my gender must have seemed like a bonus for the department’s bottom line. I set about preparing the syllabus with all the gusto of a brand new teacher. The departing instructor had helpfully left her syllabus, and I began making it my own, consulting friends and former colleagues for more ideas. I think it was Dawson Gaillard, the department chair who had hired me at Loyola,who recommended The Awakening; I know she told me about Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God—a dreadful title, I thought, as I located a little-used bound paperback copy in the vastTulane library. I hesitated with Hurston (though it later became another classroom staple), but The Awakening was a no-brainer. In fine New Critical fashion, I was intent that my course should not be too political or biased (“only the best literature”), so I included a few male writers, notably D. H. Lawrence, whom I had always thought of as a liberated sort, making my first course, in effect, an “images of women in literature.”But after only one semester of reading these often new (to me) writers, like Chopin and Hurston and Lessing and Plath, in that blindingly intense context of their own female spaces, I promptly stripped the men away. Lawrence’s pallid women and phallic figures wilted before the searing images of Adrienne Rich, Margaret Atwood, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf, Maya Angelou. At the same time, my stance toward the women’s movement completely changed.The timid objectivity, which I had thought appropriately professional and professorial , fell away like scales from my traditionally educated eyes: in one short semester, I had become a full-fledged, card-carrying feminist. With my Women in Literature course soon expanding to two sections every semester, I became increasingly involved in organized efforts to make women more visible—in the profession as...

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