I think that Dave may have missed my point. As it stands right now, studying literature in a typical high school or college level literature class means you read Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald. I am arguing that current literature classes are incomplete because woman, along with many ethnic groups and people of faiths beyond Judeo-Christianity, have only had the capability to become famous and become published, really in the last hundred years.

I want to study literature, but not just literature as it was defined by the men that ruled our society a hundred years ago. I want to study the literature of today. You cannot fully understand a subject while being taught from a narrow-minded point of view.

I’ve got to say that in this case I agree a lot with your husband’s way of thinking. As long as there are labels placed upon people, white, black, hispanic, male, female, old, young, jewish, catholic, there is going to be discrimination. The only time that you can truly eliminate discrimination is when you have eliminated all the titles and people see themselves not as “European American” or “Native American” or “Jewish American” but simply as a united whole “American” (substitute other countries at will for American).

Affirmative action is nothing more than discrimination under a different name.

The problem is that as a whole people love to discriminate. Its in our very basic nature to say “I’m better than ______ because of _____.”

We won’t ever loose it completely because it is in our very nature.

How does this relate to literature? Well I think that literature is one of those fields that could so easily illustrate our very fundamental discriminatory natures. Introduce people to works but don’t tell them until way later in life that this was written by X. The race, creed, sex of an author should no more matter into determining what is ‘good’ than their native language.

I think that if you are interested in studying Literature a Woman’s Literature isn’t a very good way to go. Certainly any time we study something we have to ‘discrimate’ as there is not time to study everything, but if you want to study Literature, or even an aspect of Literature I think that focusing on the gender of the author is a poor choice of the availible ones out there.

Now, if one is interested in studying gender roles and the evolution of Woman’s rights than studying woman’s literature makes sense. It will tell you a lot more about women though than it will tell you about literature.