Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (3 results)

  • Article
Thinking Gender Papers (2009)

Edith Summers Kelley's novel Weeds was published in 1923 by Harcourt, Brace. Despite receiving critical praise, the novel was not a commercial success, and was not reprinted until it was “rediscovered” by Michael J. Bruccoli in 1972.1 Weeds is the story of a woman coming of age in a tenant farming community in Kentucky. The novel contains some of the most graphic depictions of both childbirth and of a woman's attempt to induce a miscarriage. Interestingly, the childbirth scene was cut from the original edition by Harcourt, Brace, while the detailed description of the protagonist's attempts to abort a pregnancy were allowed to stand. Summers composed the novel after her and her husband's unsuccessful attempt at tobacco farming in rural Kentucky.2 Kelley depicts the debilitating labor of farming tobacco, and the precarious living to be had from its sale, which is subject to shifting market prices, the seemingly inevitable extremes of rain and draught, illness, and other forces that are beyond the farmers' control. The tension between the outer (environmental) and inner (biology) conditions that determine the fate of the characters places the novel in the tradition of American literary naturalism. In this paper, I will attempt to disentangle the relationship between environment, gender, and biology that is at the core of the work's signifying economy. Kelley focuses in particular on the labor of the women in the community, who work in the home and in the fields, and whose bodies become increasingly exhausted by both physical labor and repeated childbirth. In Weeds, Kelley centers the relationship between reproduction and degeneration around the disabling effects of physical labor and repeated childbirth on a women's bodies. I will read this in the context of both eugenic discourses that emphasized improving white racial stock by controlling who reproduces, and activism by early feminists such as Margaret Sanger who advocated for the availability of birth control as a means to ensure the health of women. 1 Charlotte Margolis Goodman, “Afterword,” Weeds. New York: The Feminist Press, 1982. 2 Ibid.

    Cover page: “Human Weeds”: Dysgenic Breeders in Edith Summers Kelley’s Weeds
    • Thesis
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC San Diego Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2010)
    "Degeneration Nation: Reproduction, Disability, and Biofuturity in American Literature, 1880-1930" disentangles the relationship between Progressive Era American fiction and eugenic science. Specifically, I argue that race, gender, class, and disability converge in the discourse of the degeneration, which, by contesting rigid standards of corporeal and cultural normalcy, represents the threat of difference posed by people with disabilities, poor people, and ethnic and racial minorities. I contend that as a rhetorical answer to the specter of degeneracy, a culture of biofuturity emerged in the U.S. in the late nineteenth century. I use the term "culture of biofuturity" to capture how literary and cultural production as well as social movements of the Progressive Era imagined a future in which improved social relations were inextricable from the improvement of the body through scientific eugenic reproduction practices that enabled "better breeding." In "Degeneration Nation," I read literary works by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frances E.W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Charles Chestnutt, Edith Wharton, and Edith Summers Kelley in relation to contemporary socio-cultural projects of the period, such as the Panama Pacific International Exposition (PPIE), public health initiatives in San Francisco and Panama, post-Reconstruction black uplift movements, eugenic family studies such as Charles Davenport's The Hill Folk, better baby and fitter family contests such as Mary Watts and Dr. Florence Sherbon's "Fitter Family for Future Firesides," and the birth control activism of Margaret Sanger. I also discuss medical writing by major medical figures of the period, such as S. Weir Mitchell, George M. Beard, and Miles Vandahurst Lynk. I read literature in conjunction with social and cultural texts in order to contextualize the literary works under study here as participants in complex social activities, as constituted by specific discursive practices and as outgrowths of a specific mode of production, as a means of better understanding the symbolic economies of the texts which govern their possibilities for meaning
      Cover page: Degeneration nation : the body, medicine, and the culture of biofuturity in American Literature, 1883-1928
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      Journal of Writing Assessment, Volume 13, Issue 2 (2020)
      This article examines a pilot study of a learning contract in an online first-year writing program. The program uses a master-class model with a shared curriculum and serves more than 3,500 students a semester. In this pilot, we implemented the contract within half of our courses. Our goal was to understand the impact of a learning contract on student retention in our first-year writing courses. We also hoped to determine if the learning contract helped shift student and instructor focus from grades to skill transfer. In this article, we first discuss the process of developing a learning contract, including the challenges of collaborating with faculty to address their needs and concerns; building instructor and instructional designer buy-in; and working through the limitations of the learning management system (LMS) to implement the contract in online courses. Second, we assess the results of the initial pilot to determine whether the contract functioned as we hoped by tracking the differences in retention, pass rates, and grade distributions between learning contract and traditional courses. We also examine survey data from students and faculty to make initial observations about students' and instructors' perceptions of how the learning contract impacted teaching and learning.

      Keywords: learning contract, first-year writing, assessment, online writing instruction, writing program faculty development




        Cover page: Rebuilding Habits: Assessing the Impact of a Hybrid Learning Contract in Online First-Year Composition CoursesCreative Commons 'BY-NC-ND' version 4.0 license
        Top