Gender and Composition

Flynn, Elizabeth A. “Composing as a Woman.” College Composition and Communication, Vol. 39, No.4, (Dec. 1988), pp.423-435

Writing in 1988, Flynn, a Humanities professor from Michigan Technological University, describes the “new” field of composition studies as a feminization of previous writing theory. She writes that, “In a sense, composition specialists replace the figure of the authoritative father with an image of a nurturing mother.” (423) Flynn identifies many “foremothers” of composition studies: Janet Emig, Mina Shaughnessy, Ann Berthoff, Win Horner, Maxine Hairston, Shirley Heath, Nancy Martin, Linda Flower, Andrea Lunsford, Sondra Perl, Nancy Sommers, Marion Crowhurst, Lisa Ede. The field, she says, has been “shaped by women.” (424) She notes that composition studies is a marginalized field, and links that marginality to the marginality of its constituents, many of whom are women who teach part-time. Flynn traces major theories of gender difference, gives examples from student texts to illuminate gender differences, and gives some suggestions for bringing gender difference into the light of the classroom.



Brody, Miriam. Manly Writing: Gender, Rhetoric, and the Rise of Composition. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993.

Brody, an associate professor in the Writing Program at Ithaca College, presents a history of composition theory focused on the frequent, pervasive use of gendered metaphor in works of rhetoric and writing advice, tracing a lineage of “manliness” in these texts from classical Rome all the way to Peter Elbow. This tradition serves to value (as masculine) certain writing and to devalue (as feminine) other writing. Plain, forceful, and true writing is valued as the product of those who are productive, coherent, virtuous, and heroic, while other writing, reviled as effeminate, is identified as ornate, unconvincing, and sometimes deceitful, and the product of uncertainty, vagueness, and timidity. “Good” writing is identified in these texts as a masculine virtue, and “weak” writing as “a feminine subversion that undermines a manly enterprise.” (3)