MARKETING AND TEACHING A WOMEN'S LITERATURE COURSE TO CULTURALLY CONSERVATIVE STUDENTS

by Karen Dodwell

When my department chair asked me to teach the Literature by Women course, I was pleased at the prospect; however, when I realized that the course did not always attract the required thirteen-student minimum enrollment, I was perplexed. In addition to designing a course that would appeal to cultnrally conservative students, I would also have to undertake a marketing campaign targeted at a student body thatseemed snspicions of feminism and wary of literature by women in an academic context The introduction to a recently published text, FeministPhilosophies, summarizes the attitude toward feminism I believed many students in my college held: "Feminism. For many women as well as men thisterm evokes an image of strident, unattractive women angrily demanding the abandonment of family, the desertion of husbands, the killing of fetuses, or perhaps jnst the burning of bras" (Kourany, Sterba, and Tong 1999, I). Many students would be cantions about enrolling in a literature by women course not ouly becanse ofits content but also, I believed, because of their assumption thatits teacher would most likely be a threatening feminist out to convertthem to a beliefsystem that clashed with their own cultural values.