The Liberation of Winifred Bryan Horner: Writer, Teacher, and Women’s Rights Advocate is both a story of a unique and admirable woman and a representative story of how hard women have fought for a place in the male-dominated academy. It is also a labor of love by Horner’s mentee and friend, Elaine Lawless.
Horner was born in St. Louis in 1922 into a family who taught her to value herself and not be limited by gender expectations. Like many of her day, she married quickly before her fiancé—a childhood friend—went off to World War II. He was stationed in the US throughout the war, and Horner moved with him as he was reassigned from base to base. Rather than a story of a woman merely following her husband, Horner’s account of her early marriage reveals the bravery of a woman in charge of her life, and though her marriage is not the main story here, the mutual love and respect this pair had for one another shines through as the bedrock upon which they built their lives. Following the war, the two settled on a Missouri farm, her husband’s dream, and had four children—leading to twenty miserable years for Horner, as she was a city-girl not a farm-girl. According to Lawless, “Win’s ‘liberation’ came not in a rejection of her role as wife and mother, but rather in her desire to ‘have it all’—her marriage, her children, her writing, and her career. But, as she would repeat often, she just couldn’t have it ‘all at the same time’” (8).
Lawless skillfully stitches together Horner’s recorded telling of her own story; her diaries, letters, and other writings (published and unpublished); and Lawless’s own memories, beginning when the two met in 1983. Horner had been unable to write her memoir as she’d hoped to do, and after a little convincing she agreed to allow Lawless to record her. The plan was that Horner herself would edit the recordings into a memoir, but she died before she could do so. Thankfully, however, she and Lawless had met weekly for four months in late 2013 and early 2014, and finished recording just before she passed, and so Lawless, with the support of Horner’s husband and children, was able to complete it for her.
Horner’s story is one of the extraordinary determination of a woman who fought her way out of depression and into a remarkable career as a professor and scholar of rhetoric. She told Lawless, in a moment of understatement, “I discovered that a farm is really the best place in the world to raise youngsters. It just wasn’t the best place for me” (75). Horner was an incessant writer who began to publish her essays in magazines. Her turning point was a 1956 Saturday Evening Post story which—ironically, considering her misery as a farm wife—bemoaned the demise of American family farms. Following this publication and the modest fame it brought her, she approached the English Department at the University of Missouri at Columbia about teaching and learned she’d need a master’s degree; she quickly earned her degree and began not only teaching in the English Department but also directing the composition program. By this time it was the 1960s, and though she had become a tenured assistant professor, Horner was not taken at all seriously by her male colleagues—with one important exception, the provost, who offered her a one-year paid leave in order to pursue a PhD.
Her years of moving around during the war come to seem as practice for the future stages of her life, as she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, to pursue her doctorate; her husband and youngest child remained on the farm, supporting her from afar. Once she’d received her PhD at the age of fifty-three and returned to MU she was stunned as she, one of two women faculty in the English Department, continued to be treated with near total disrespect and only received promotions—first to associate and then full professor—after repeatedly appealing the decisions of the promotion committees. Meanwhile she was publishing widely (eventually authoring or co-authoring nine books and many articles) and becoming a star in the field of rhetoric.
It is during this period that Elaine Lawless met Horner during her visit to interview at MU. They became fast friends, and Horner helped Lawless navigate her early years there. Horner was finally recognized in 1985 with an endowed chair position at Texas Christian University, and once again, she picked up and moved away from her husband, as she pushed her career to new heights. In 1996 she retired and returned to Columbia.
Horner’s life and career spanned the decades during which women created spaces for themselves in academia; through Horner’s life story, we are reminded of both how much has changed and how much has not. Lawless provides just enough of her own story to make it clear that she and Horner experienced similar trials. She briefly relates, for instance, that following her successful attainment of tenure and promotion, a male colleague casually told her that no one actually read her work; they just “counted the pages” (171). Ultimately, though, Lawless achieves a delicate balance of allowing Horner’s story to be told in her own voice while, in her celebrated style, not allowing the reader to forget that though the vast majority of the words in the book are Horner’s, they are stitched together by Lawless.
The Liberation of Winifred Bryan Horner will be of interest to both general and academic readers with an interest in the challenges faced by academic women of an earlier generation—and a must-read for those with no such interest. Readers will come away feeling like they’ve come to know Horner just enough to wish that they, too, had been her mentee and friend.
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[Review length: 964 words • Review posted on January 30, 2019]