A Feminist Legacy: The Rhetoric and Pedagogy of Gertrude Buck

6. Socially Conscious Women Teaching Writing

}g™ 6 socially conscious women teaching writing By the way I didn’t tell you the subject did I [debate topic]. Resolved that the labor unions are justified in their demands for the closed shop. Isn’t that a splendid subject. I am getting so interested in things like that that I shouldn’t wonder if I should want to be doubling in Economics next. This argumentation has done wonders for me in that direction for the world around has become full of interest. I just delight in studying out labor problems. —Helen Drusilla Lockwood, letter to her family, 6 Feb. 1910 ertrude Buck’s work in argumentation and debate complicates claims that with the entrance of women into higher education, the teaching of rhetoric shifted from an oral, agonistic discipline to a “less contestive and more interiorized, even personalized” field (Connors, Composition-Rhetoric 66). This argument can also be made more complex by examining the efforts of Mary Yost (1881–1954) and Helen Drusilla Lockwood (1891–1971), two students of Buck and Wylie’s. Yost, like Buck, developed an ethical approach to argumentation that responded to the persuasive, agonistic tradition and the Progressive Era insistence on democratic forms of education . Likewise, Lockwood’s pedagogical approach stressed a social rather than an interiorized perspective. Buck, Wylie, and their students’ efforts also underscore the need to rethink conventional evaluative criteria for measuring influence. In traditional histories of rhetoric, scholars’ yardsticks often have measured success in terms of the number of times a text has been published and socially conscious women teaching writing }gk republished. These accounts typically do not consider the significant impact teachers can have on their students and how those individuals, in turn, may become influential teachers of the next generation. While texts that have been published and republished certainly merit investigation because of their often broad and continuous impact, it is important to consider other types of yardsticks based on more wide-ranging and inclusive criteria. Measuring Buck’s success primarily in terms of her textbook editions is too narrow; Buck’s clear influence on her students speaks more significantly. This chapter demonstrates that Buck’s writing and her work with Laura Johnson Wylie at Vassar had a much more profound impact by documenting the intellectual progress and careers of Yost and Lockwood. The impact of Buck and Wylie lived on in the lives and teachings of their students. Both Yost and Lockwood carried on and extended Buck and Wylie’s tradition of encouraging feminist teaching practices that fostered democratic communication, activism, and broader intellectual and social responsibility for women. A 1904 graduate of Vassar, Yost taught in the English Department from 1907 to 1921, with the exception of a few years during which she pursued graduate work at the University of Michigan. Like Buck, Yost developed a feminist theory of argument quite separate from the agonistic, patriarchal approach that Robert Connors argues was displaced after women entered higher education but also different from the “irenic rhetoric” that he claims took its place (Composition-Rhetoric 24). Yost’s theory challenged the traditional basis in logic and faculty psychology and instead stressed the social significance of argument in terms of communication and community building. Described as a “Vassar College legend,” Helen Lockwood received her bachelor’s from Vassar in 1912 and went on to teach in the English Department from 1927 to 1956 (Heller 163). Like Wylie, Lockwood taught at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, where she served as a composition instructor and specialist in public speaking. At Vassar, Lockwood developed several innovative courses that pushed her students to challenge their basic assumptions, avoid unsupported generalizations, and think for themselves. In significant ways, Lockwood’s courses were “transgressive,” as bell hooks defines the term, “a movement against and beyond boundaries” (12). socially conscious women teaching writing }gg Mary Yost With the exception of Herman Cohen, scholars have not considered Yost’s work in previous histories of the field.1 Building on Cohen’s work, I will focus on Yost’s teaching of argumentation and debate at Vassar College; her 1917 dissertation, “The Functional Aspect of Argument as Seen in a Collection of Business Letters”; and her 1917 article, “Argument from the Point-of-View of Sociology,” which draws on her dissertation research and was published in The Quarterly Journal of Public Speaking.2 I also...