Flynn's Book Clarifies Feminist Traditions
by Susan McDaniel
When she was first hired it
was made clear to Beth Flynn that she was to support Michigan Tech's Writing
Across the Curriculum program and to work in the areas of reading and
composition. Her dissertation, however,
was in the area of feminist literary criticism. "The administrators
who negotiated my hire made it clear that I was being hired because of
the work I had done in composition studies after completion of the dissertation
and that this was the area I was to pursue," she said. In the beginning she was able
to get around the restrictions by exploring work on relationships between
gender and reading and gender and composition. She started the book in the
late 1980s, working through the extended illness and death of her husband,
John (to whom the book is dedicated along with her daughter Kate), and
numerous revisions before it was finally published this year. "I wrote the book, in
part at least, to clarify for myself the diverse feminist traditions I
was encountering, especially within the contexts of rhetoric and composition
and literary studies." Said Flynn, "I also hoped that the clarifications
I worked out for myself would be useful to others." Modern feminism sees women
as oppressed because they have been restricted to a domestic life and
not granted the same rights or opportunities as men. It is committed to
equal rights and opportunities for women. Modern feminists believe there
is hope for the liberation of women and equality with men. Antimodernism is associated
with radical feminism, almost the direct opposite of modern feminism.
Radical feminists view the world of men, and of economic, social and political
activity, as the cause of women's problems rather than the solution. They
believe that these patriarchal institutions need to be overthrown or radically
transformed to bring about the emancipation of women. Postmodern feminists question
modern feminism but do not totally reject it. Rather, they are critical
of modern intellectual and social traditions and attempt to find alternatives
to them. They critique rather than reject modernism. Flynn explores the relationships
between these feminist movements in the fields of humanities and the social
sciences and explains how postmodernism moves beyond modernism and antimodernism.
She focuses on the activity of reading and writing common to both, using
the works of modern and postmodern writers and feminist writers. Flynn also emphasizes the importance
of global feminism, which involves developing hybrids of Western and non-Western
feminist traditions to gain global equality for women. She discusses this
in detail in chapter two. She states in the preface to the book, "I
should add that the book was written before the tragic events of Sept.
11. Those events make evident the urgency of the need to develop alternatives
to Western modernism that will lessen the divide between Western and non-Western
cultures discussed in chapter two." Flynn is already working on
an idea for a second book that will provide a revisionary history of early
twentieth century modernism within literary studies and rhetoric and composition,
"The Other Modernism."
But judging from her recently published book, "Feminism Beyond Modernism,"
she never abandoned her first love.
In "Feminism Beyond Modernism," Flynn introduces the reader
to comparisons between three broad feminist movements--modernism, antimodernism
and postmodernism.