The CEA Forum - Summer/Fall 2007 - Mary Braddon\u2019s \"Good Lady Ducayne\" in Context(s) - Victorian Medicine, Literary Gothicism, and 21st Century Feminist Pedagogy - I. Reconsidering Feminist Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Oct 15, 2026

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Examines feminist pedagogy through a classroom episode where a male student asks whether the instructor is "teaching any men" after selecting nineteenth-century Victorian and Romantic texts. Positions the moment as urgent for academic feminism amid perceived lull and backlash, discussing mainstreaming versus conservatism and the implications for teaching and theory. Argues for normalizing women\u2019s writing after decades of recovery and scholarship, then returns to classroom goals and criteria for canon and text pairing.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages13

Reading Time33 min

AccessFree to download

I. Reconsidering Feminist Pedagogy in the 21st Century

Feminist pedagogy and the classroom conflict

Feminism\u2019s urgency and theoretical directions

Normalizing women\u2019s writing and classroom goals

The CEA Forum Summer/Fall 2007: 36.2 MARY BRADDON'S "GOOD LADY DUCAYNE" IN CONTEXT(S): VICTORIAN MEDICINE, LITERARY GOTHICISM, AND 21ST CENTURY FEMINIST PEDAGOGY Shannon R. Wooden I. Reconsidering Feminist Pedagogy in the 21st Century I was designing my first upper-level course on nineteenth-century literature in the weeks before the fourth semester of my first tenure-track job. I had been waiting my whole graduate career to get to teach this class. I had chosen my books and piled up my research, and I was happily anticipating the stimulating discussions my students and I were going to have about Victorian science, nationalism, race, gender, medicine, insanity, and detection. Then my phone rang. A senior colleague (male, which might be beside the point), was calling on behalf of an advisee (also male, again perhaps irrelevant), who was considering registering for my course; having gotten wind of some of my book selections, the student (and, I suspect, the colleague) wanted to know whether I was “teaching any men.” Surprised and immediately defensive, I tried to explain to my colleague that if one is teaching nineteenth-century prose fiction, one can hardly avoid women (writers or characters) without making a real effort to do so, and that my syllabus included many “great” Romantic and Victorian texts regardless of who wrote them. Bizarrely, I found myself defending the relative conservativeness of my book choices, almost assuming the “not-a-feminist-but” posture so many of my women students manifest: See? Look at all the “great” works on my syllabus! I wanted to argue that Frankenstein , Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights hardly count as “women's texts,” as if the phrase necessarily refers to non-canonical, “lesser” works newly recovered by the feminist-politicized canon-busting project of the last couple of decades. The opposite of a“woman's text” isn't a “man's text,” that is: the opposite of a “woman's text” is …what, a good text? A canonical text? A necessary text? Despite my defensive reaction, I did not (and do not) interpret my colleague's call as initiating the sort of open warfare in which feminist scholars before me had to engage. He certainly didn't think I should only be teaching Scott, Dickens, Trollope, and Thackeray. He wasn't asking me to make any changes to my booklist. But this minor conflict, and my reaction to it, suggests that the present moment is an interesting and surprisingly urgent one for academic feminism. Acknowledging a lull in feminist theory, perceived by practitioners and students alike, the October 2006 PMLA forum offered several reconsiderations of feminism, its evolution, its continued necessity in the academy and beyond, the various backlash(es) it has wrought, and the possible new directions it may take, both in theory and in practice. Though varied in their approaches, the articles in this forum articulate the very questions that I tackled in response to my colleague as I reflected on our exchange. Am I a “feminist”scholar and teacher? If I answer in the negative, is it because I have, as Susan Gubar identifies, so incorporated feminist arguments in my non-gendered work that feminism has ceased to be a separate venture (1712)? Is that posture liberating and progressive, or is it anti-affirmative-action, reactionary, and conservative; is it mainstreaming feminism, or destroying it? What are the theoretical and pedagogical implications, in either case? Can a non-feminist feminist have it both ways? My relative youth in the profession, as revealed in my opening tale, does more than suggest my inexperience with upper-level course design and dealing with students and colleagues on issues like this: it also indicates my entering the academy as a member of a unique generation of scholars. Though I don't consider myself a radical feminist scholar, I do believe in reading, studying, and sharing the work of women writers with students, but even as I write that sentence I realize that

FAQs

Why does the author discuss her course-planning experience at the start?

She uses an opening episode from designing a nineteenth-century literature course to illustrate a seemingly minor but meaningful conflict about gender representation and what counts as "feminist" teaching.

How does the author interpret the question about teaching men?

She treats it as initiating a reflection on academic feminism\u2019s present urgency, since it exposes assumptions about gender, canon, and pedagogy rather than demanding a direct change to the syllabus.

What does the author argue should be the next step for feminist scholarship in teaching?

She argues that after earlier recovery and theorizing of women writers, the necessary task is to normalize women\u2019s writing in academic thought so it is not easily forgotten.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by SANS