I came to Towson State College in
1973, as Towson’s Women’s Studies
Program, one of the nation’s earliest,
was first offering pioneering courses.
The culture shock of life in suburban
Maryland after 12 years—yes, the
’60s—in Berkeley bewildered me and
my family to the extent that I almost
didn’t realize my tremendous good
luck in finding such brilliant, generous
colleagues in Women’s Studies and the
English department (the co-directors
of Women’s Studies were Elaine
Hedges and Sara Coulter in English,
who were supported by Dan Jones,
their chair).
I did, however, enjoy that luck. I
could not have had better mentors
and friends than the multi-disciplinary
committee that worked together
to find new kinds of thinking and
teaching. I had just finished a dissertation on the novels of Virginia Woolf;
Elaine, Sara and Annette Chappell
proposed that I join them in team-teaching an upper-level English course
in women writers for the spring of
1974. We hoped that women’s own
imaginative accounts of female experience would illuminate for students
the realities that history and sociology
document. And we all worked hard
on that course, but I have to take full
responsibility (“credit” is hardly the
right word) for including among other
books on the syllabus the 19th century
novel Middlemarch (nearly 900 pages)
by George Eliot, born Mary Ann Evans; Doris Lessing’s 1962 masterwork
The Golden Notebook (not even 700
pages!); and Virginia Woolf’s relatively
short although lyrically dense To the
Lighthouse.
As we planned the class, we were
fascinated by the chance to discover
and reconstruct forms of women’s
Professor Jan Wilkotz taught a variety of
courses in her 37 years at Towson including
Women’s Words, Women’s Lives and the 20th-
Century British Novel. Her chapters, reviews,
and nationally presented papers concern
film adaptations of literary works, feminist
pedagogy, and authors such as Jane Austen
and Virginia Woolf.
literary history, but I was the only one
to assume that our students would
read as I did, loving fiction so much
that a long great novel would be even
better than a short one and that prose
both beautiful and difficult could only
add to the fun. I learned a lot from
teaching that course.
Students continued to teach me.
They nagged me to design an ad-
vanced writing course, Women’s
Words, Women’s Lives, and from the
first semester through May of 2010
that class drew me into many of my
most difficult and happy experiences
in teaching. Students created wonder-
fully interesting work from their own
hands and minds in Women’s Culture
and Creativity, a course I inherited
from Elaine Hedges when she retired,
and in the 21st century, after Elaine’s
untimely death in 1997, I began the
course with the entry that summarizes
her life and contributions in volume
five of Harvard University Press’s
splendid biographical series Notable
American Women, so that students at
Towson University could claim a his-
tory of their own.
