Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women's Writing, 1930-1990 (review)

Recently the academic world has taken to producing books about itself. A variety of critics have detailed the transformation of institutions of higher education by corporate culture and have tried to make us mindful of the enduring, often ambivalent, relationship that the academy has to the world outside it. Katherine Adams's new book, while not a critique of the current state of the academy, takes up the academy's relationship to the "outside" world. Like the recent crop of books about the university, A Group of Their Own looks at the transformations the university undergoes when confronted by new populations. In this mainly historical text, though, the story of the university's flexibility is fairly positive. Adams's work reminds us that while prey to various corporate blandishments, the university can be transformed by the very populations it has historically been slow to recognize or admit. Adams reminds readers, too, of the shining heaps of cultural capital and real money that the university has represented to the ambitious and excluded populations who have sought admission to it.

Also a concise study of writing groups, A Group of Their Own examines the development of university writing courses in the first half of the twentieth century, showing particularly how skill in professional writing was acquired and valued by women. The backdrop of Adams's inquiry is the social and demographic changes that led to more women entering college. Increased access to writing and English courses, Adams argues, led more and more women to claim the identity of writer in the professions of journalism, play writing, and novel and magazine writing. Her study will be of interest to those in the fields of education and writing studies, as well as to those working on twentieth-century women's writing.

A Group of Their Own is arranged chronologically, beginning with quick accounts of women's participation in professional writing fields from about 1840 to 1920. Adams describes the limitations confronting professional women writers during this time, focusing especially on the moralistic tactics they adopted while attempting to make a living in journalism with such newspaper staples as the advice column. Subsequent chapters describe the access of women to universities, their gradual admission to writing classes, their relationships to famed teachers, and their increasing presence in positions at newspapers and in federal works projects.

But the heart of Adams's study is the testimony of women who seized the opportunity to become educated; who took creative writing, literature, and journalism classes; who imagined themselves as scholars and writers; who mentored one another; and who kept journals and wrote letters testifying to their ambitions and anxieties about simply being at the university. In the process of looking at such testimonies, Adams recovers some little-known women novelists and playwrights of the first half of the twentieth century, suggesting that in the context of her study, their success must be measured by their ambition to write rather than by their reputations.

One of the book's most interesting points is that women's entrance into universities not only changed how English was taught to undergraduates but also how students regarded each other: many male students felt increased competition, while women approached one another as both colleagues and friends. This final point is perhaps the real innovation of Adams's study. Her view of women writers is deliberately devoid of any romanticism about what exactly writing is and does. She argues specifically against the model of the lonely individual writer, demonstrating that time and again women seized the opportunity to work with one another collaboratively, if sometimes unequally.

Although the book provides much fresh historical material, it has some minor flaws. For example, while Adams does provide readers with fascinating statistical information about the percentage of women in the population...