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Flowerence Howe Annotated Bibliography Essays

Essays that have been reprinted:

Reprinted in:

Community and the Schools. Harvard Educational Review, reprint series, no. 3, 1969.

The College Reader. Edgar Friedenberg, Max Black, et al., eds. Harcourt, Brace & World,1971.

“The Education of Women,” Liberation (August/September 1969): 49–55.

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“A Report on Women and the Profession.” College English 32.8 (1971): 847–54.

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The New Schools Exchange Newsletter, No. 109, January 15, 1974, 3–6.

Changing Education, Winter/Spring 1974, 30–34.

“Varieties of Denial.” Colloquy, November 1973.

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Nonsexist Education for Survival. National Education Association, 1973.

In 1973, Howe published approximately forty percent of an interview she conducted with Doris Lessing in 1966. In the introduction to the interview, which she published in light of Lessing’s increasing popularity, she notes how “[i]n 1966, no one was interested in the interview. Doris Lessing’s following among the literary intelligentsia in the U.S. was minescule,” shocking words in 2007 when Lessing has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

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Howe’s provocative solution to the issue of the patriarchal institution of the university, in her title essay, is for women to gain power in the institution not by dispersing themselves across the curriculum in non-traditional “women’s fields” and becoming “tokens” in such departments. Instead, she argues that women will not be able to hold power and have “true participation” unless they first gather and grow in strength in the more traditional women’s fields, such as nursing, education, etc. (166). She justifies this argument by showing how minimally the percentage of women in non-traditional fields is expected to rise, writing, “Not only would there be no possibility for developing feminist leadership in those traditional male professions [if women simply remain with ‘token’ representation’]; there would be no base sizable enough from which to organize for change” (166). She sees the power in numbers, and concludes that the feminist movement should work to reclaim the power in fields which have been “demeaned” by the their labels of “traditional” and “female” (169).

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Journal of Education, Summer 1977, 11 24.

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“Breaking the Disciplines: In the Nineteenth Century and Today.” Proceedings of the Great Lakes Colleges Association Annual Meeting, 1979.

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Women’s Studies Quarterly 25.1 and 25.2 (1997): PAGES.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 164 (CLC164), December, 2002

Essays (that have not been reprinted so far):

“Doris Lessing’s Free Women.” The Nation, January 11, 1965, 34–7.

“Doris Lessing: Child of Violence.” The Nation, June 13, 1966, 716 18.

“Untaught Teachers and Improbable Poets.” Saturday Review, March 15, 1969, 60–82.

“Narrative, History, and Prophecy” (on Doris Lessing). The Nation, August 11, 1969, 116 18.

In 1970, as a part of the MLA’s Commission on the Status of Women, Howe teamed up with Laura Morlock and Richard Berk to comprehensively survey the position of women in English as well as other modern language departments nationwide. By examining several areas concerning women in the academic profession, Howe et al. came to some conclusions regarding the inequity of the field, showing that “at each stage up the professional ladder, from graduate student (or college senior planning graduate study) to full professor, fewer and fewer women appear” (467). The numbers decreased dramatically from women comprising 69% of all college seniors planning graduate study in foreign languages (65% planning graduate study in English) to 31% of all Ph.D.’s awarded in the last five years, and even to only 8% of faculty teaching only graduate students (467). These numbers are, however, possibly skewed to “understate a pattern of discrimination against women” by departments who might not have responded to the survey “because their statistics might be embarrassing” (459). They also reported similar inequities concerning tenure, salary, etc, but were encouraged to report positive trends of increasing women Ph.D.’s.

“Sexism, Racism, and the Education of Women.” Today’s Education 62.5 (1973): 47–8.

“No Ivory Towers Need Apply.” Ms., 46–7 (1973): 78 80.

“Eight New Feminist Books- an Essay.” The American Scholar (Fall 1974): 676 84.

“Women’s Studies Thrives.” The New York Times, April 25, 1976.

“A Feminist Perspective in the [Literature] Classroom.” English Record, Spring 1978, 2–4.

In 1981, Howe celebrated the end of the first decade of the MLA’s unofficial recognition of women’s studies by reassessing the status of the cause. She admits that vast strides had been taken, but calls for further action. She resists stagnancy by pointing out continuing statistics of inequity on the job front, and connects this to curricula which propagate the resistance to women in the profession by lacking women writers who write on anything but “sex, madness, and suicide” (13). She writes, “It is almost as if the ancient myth brought to new life in the middle-class nineteenth century—about the separate spheres appropriately inhabited by males and females, the public, work world of men, and the private, domestic, mainly sexual world of women—continues to haunt our male colleagues” (13). Her solution to this is the inclusion of works by women that focus occupation, such as by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Nella Larsten, etc., to show that work is not an “addition” to women’s lives, but is often central. In addition, she calls for the re-labeling of courses and academic sessions to indicate that they focus on “Male Writers” of whatever century, “The Male Self,” etc. She also calls for the creation of anthologies for women of different races, sexualities, etc. and for a new appreciation for different genres (folk, fragmentary, etc.) (16).

In this volume of College English, Howe joined Julia Penelope, Dale Guilford, and Lahna F. Diskin in providing individual one-page answers to a query concerning “What 1985 Classroom Teachers Should Know about Women’s Studies.” Howe’s answer to the inquiry begins with a warning that “those who know little or nothing about women’s studies will find themselves increasingly left behind” (22). Her solution to this comes in a few proactive packages: enroll in an introductory women’s studies course, organize a study group among friends, or do a self-study. She provides the names of several textbooks that might be helpful, and then iterates that it is harder to teach women’s studies “today” (in 1985, but it could easily be 2007) than in the 1970’s, because women are less aware of the issues. She writes, “Today, many students fail to realize how important gender is. They come to class [thinking that] everything has been solved; women can do anything. Or there isn’t a problem and there never was. This is the view held by people untouched in the ‘70’s” (22). She then charges teachers to arm themselves with four things: information; context; consciousness; and debate/discussion (22).

“Memories of Hunter.” The Hunter Magazine 7.2 (Summer 198): 2 8.

Howe provided this chapter on women’s studies and curricular change to Chamberlain’s comprehensive overview of women’s studies in American education.

Here, Howe offers a look into the history of publishing which she has experienced with The Feminist Press. She describes how she was led to the ideas which began The Feminist Press as a result of the questions which her students were asking in her classroom: “How did women look in the eighteenth century? […] What did they think about their lives?” (15). These types of questions led Howe to search for biographies of women, which eventually led to the publishing of writers such as their first three “recovered” authors: Rebecca Harding Davis, Agnes Smedley, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman (15). Howe assesses the position of feminist publishing, and reveals her vision for seeking out further diversity and publishing of autobiography (which would of course blossom through the almost twenty years since this article was published).

“The Poetry of Life: Essay on Muriel Rukeyser.” Women’s Review of Books, November 1994.

“Remembering Meridel.” The Women’s Review of Books 14.7 (1997): 10–11.

Howe wrote this article in honor of the writer Meridel LeSueur whose work the Feminist Press helped to recover by first re-publishing her work in 1982 (Ripening). In describing her experiences with LeSueur, however, she reveals the grassroots effort which the Feminist Press put forth to rediscover and reprint women writers who would have otherwise been forgotten. She describes “stop[ping] [in 1977] in front of a large house on a residential street in St. Paul, Minnesota, armed only with note-pads and a worried sense that Meridel might not like us. We had come to pursue the possibility of reprinting her previously published writing, perhaps with her unpublished journals” (10). She then describes how LeSueur welcomed them into her home, feeding them, housing them overnight, and allowing them to go through her trunks of writing and journals, beginning a relationship that led to publications and the revival of interest in a writer who had been a literary icon until she was “red-baited out of existence” as a member of the Communist Party in the 1930’s and 40’s (10). Although the article serves as an emotional memoriam to an important woman writer, it also serves as a lesson in the appreciation of the work Howe and others like herself have done in the feminist literary movement. She records how LeSueur “had dreamed […] about her work being in the hands of women” (10) and ends the piece by quoting LeSueur:

Perhaps women like me of another generation are like a bridge. Pass over, use the energy of the root in our witness and our singing. So we will never be gone. You have more tools now. The fog is lifting over the illusions. You have begun to tell it. You will bear sharper witness. Be bold. Tell it all. Don’t spare the horses. The earth is waiting to hear you. All the children and the ancients are waiting. We shall come home together. (11)

In this, and the ways that LeSueur thanked Howe the Feminist Press for “the loving birth of [her] book,” (10) the article serves as much to memorialize Meridel LeSueur as it enlightens modern readers of the struggles of those who worked to revive work that might be taken for granted.

“Eating Bitterness: Essay on Robin Morgan’s poetry,” Women’s Review of Books, July, 2000.

To represent 1973, they chose to reproduce a sample of a piece by Florence Howe discussing the state of English departments, where highly-qualified job-seekers were being denied tenure-track or tenured positions as humanities courses (especially literature) were being cut and adjuncts were the only professors being hired on per-course bases.

“From Race and Class to the Feminist Press,” Massachusetts Review, Summer 2003.

Like in her article “Remembering Meridel,” here Howe provides a look into the process of running The Feminist Press and what that means to women today. While choosing to publish many stories about females in their growing stages (which she says was to counter college curricula filled with male bildungsroman), she reveals the choices that she made to address the process of aging, and what that actually means to several of her authors who are/were still fighting the fight for feminism. She ends with the point that, “Though many of us are now ‘old ladies,’ the women’s movement itself is still young. The Feminist Press, responsible for the earliest reprints of ‘lost’ American women writers, many of whom are now part of the standard college curriculum, is itself only in its youthful 33rd year” (16)..

“Tribute to Nellie McKay—from her Publisher.” African American Review, 2006.