PLENARY REMARKS

I'm honored to be a participant in the plenary session of this pathbreaking conference. And I'm delighted to be sharing that platform with three women whose work has been important to me, whom I greatly admire, and with whom I've been traveling along life's course for many years. It's exciting, too, to see so many well-known names in the conference program and to note the volume and scope of new work being done by so many scholars working on so many writers. If this new society wants to ensure that "gains made in the study of women's literature in the late-twentieth century not be lost in the twenty-first" (as its founding manifesto phrases it), the present gathering testifies wonderfully to its likely success. As for personal history, I'm more comfortable talking about women writers than about Nina Baym, the woman scholar. I've never been good at self-disclosure, and I've suffered some catastrophic results on the few occasions when I spilled the wrong beans at the wrong time. I can say, however, that as a woman scholar, the most rewarding aspect of my career by far has been mentoring women students. Of the thirty-four Ph.D. students I've turned out to date, twenty-three have been women, and most have worked on women writers. Two of those former students are at this conference, in this audience -- Jill Bergman, now at the University of Montana, and Karen Tracey, now at the University of Northern Iowa. I want to close by returning to the larger discipline and the situation of the woman scholar within it, with the discipline here being "American literature" rather than "American women writers," which I take to be a subfield within the larger field. The great majority of those in the subfield are themselves women; women outnumber men overwhelmingly at this conference, for example. In that women are a minority in the larger field overall, the large number of women working on women writers means that the number working on male writers is extremely small. In the field of "American literature" as represented, say, by an American literature anthology, women writers must enter as part of the whole picture. I would never counsel women to abandon their work on women writers and start writing about men, but I would urge scholars to remember the whole picture. In the highly gender-asymmetric culture that we still inhabit, a woman-centered specialty pursued almost entirely by women necessarily becomes a minor enterprise. The habit of dismissing women writers for their p