This dissertation takes as its starting point a recurring problem within the composition classroom: women writers silencing themselves in compliance with patriarchal expectations that frame the good girl role. In the process, these students subordinate, if not entirely erase, their own feminist agency. The disempowerment of women within the writing classroom is especially worrisome given that the NCTE Mission Statement defines one of the main aims of this classroom as helping students use 'language to construct personal and public worlds and to achieve full participation in society.' If the composition classroom aims to help students develop and practice rhetorical agency, how can this goal be successfully met when women students are implicitly and explicitly taught to adopt a classroom persona of silence? To address the problem of the good girl identity within the composition classroom, I turn to an exploration of feminist agency enacted beyond academia. Women have not - perhaps have never - been completely disempowered or completely silenced. Citation reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC. Abridged abstract reproduced with permission of ProQuest LLC. Full text available at URL below.
