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Chapter 5. Thinking About Women in Place
- University of Nevada Press
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c h a p t e r 5 Thinking About Women in Place c h e r y l l g l o t f e l t y Creating healthy communities requires the kind of work that was once labeled women’s work, work that kept women in their proper “place.” Baking casseroles for potlucks—checking on a sick neighbor—soothing hurt feelings—caring for children—planting flowers—volunteering— cleaning up. This essay describes a course titled “Women and Literature” that I use to raise feminist issues related to place and community. While women’s liberation can require cutting ties and casting off obligations in the name of self-determination, wholesome communities require commitment and even self-sacrifice. This literature course studies a diverse array of American women writers whose work negotiates the tensions among individual freedom, community membership, and commitment to place. At the University of Nevada, Reno, where I teach, “Women and Literature” is offered at the senior level, cross-listed in English and women’s studies and open to all majors. It fulfills the university’s capstone and diversity course requirements. Because the course kills two requirements with one blow, it enrolls heavily, drawing students from 6 8 m a k i n g c o n n e c t i o n s across campus, some of whom have little interest in the subject, some of whom feel threatened by feminism. In the past I’ve taught the course as an anthology-based history of women in literature. While that version raises students’ gender consciousness and exposes them to important works in the literary tradition, it feels a bit canned and canonical, the chronological approach tending to render the topic academic. Moreover, as my students have pointed out, the course is depressing because the literary works that are collected in anthologies of women’s literature frequently end in suicide or madness, giving more time to victimization than to empowerment. When the editors of the present volume invited me to submit a proposal for “teaching about place,” it occurred to me that a place-based theme for a women and literature course might engage students at a personal level. It also struck me that women’s studies courses usually focus on identity and politics at the expense of place and, conversely, that most place-based courses employ a critical approach that is gender blind. Introducing the theme of place into a women’s literature course expands the purview of both feminism and place studies, offers male students a point of connection, and encourages students to examine their own relationship to place. One student’s anonymous review suggests that the aspect of place did breathe new life into this standard course: “I came into this class apprehensively expecting a commonplace survey of women’s role in the history of literature. Therefore, I was greatly surprised (and greatly happy) to see a variation on the course: Women in literature in relation to place. This topic—two seemingly separate ideas—provided a frame for strong, intellectual thinking, which I enjoyed.” In the first week of class, I explain key concepts from feminism and [54.172.169.199] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 12:55 GMT) c h e r y l l g l o t f e l t y 6 9 bioregionalism, providing a theoretical lens through which we read the creative works. We compare conceptions of home in an excerpt from Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Gary Snyder’s essay “The Place, the Region, and the Commons.” For Friedan, home means house, implying housework and housewife. In a few strokes, Friedan paints a picture of the round of chores that consumes a typical day in the life of middle-class suburban mothers of the 1950s. Isn’t there something more? Is this all there is? they ask in quiet desperation that Friedan labels “the problem that has no name.” While Friedan considers the experience of the homemaker, Snyder is interested in human maturation and sense of belonging. For him, home is symbolized by the hearth, where families come together, break bread, and share stories that anchor them in the world. From this foundational sense of place, children gradually identify with an expanding circle—family, community, bioregion. For Snyder, the ideal is to embrace one’s bioregion as home, a circle of kinship that encompasses flora and fauna as well as aunts and uncles. For Friedan, then, self-in-place translates to woman-in...