Joanne Frye

Joanne Schultz Frye (born November 6, 1944) is a Professor Emerita of English and Women's Studies at the College of Wooster. Frye is known for her feminist literary criticism and interdisciplinary inquiry into motherhood. She specializes in research on fiction by and about women, such as the work of Virginia Woolf, Tillie Olsen, and Jane Lazarre.
Frye's first book, "Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience", was featured in Betsy Draine’s 1989 review essay, “Refusing the Wisdom of Solomon: Some Recent Feminist Literary Theory,” and in Ellen Cronan Rose's 1993 essay "American feminist criticism of contemporary women's fiction," both in "Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society". Draine cites Frye’s chapter on “Feminist Poetics” as an affirmation of “the explanatory possibilities of narrative, to develop new paradigms through which we can see our own experience” and notes the book’s emphasis on “the subversive first-person female” to move beyond the language of patriarchy. In the preface, Frye claims “a dual commitment: to the importance of affirming women’s own perspective on female experience and to the power of literature in shaping our culture awareness.” Rose notes this commitment to literature as “stimulus to personal and social change."
Frye has also been celebrated for her 2012 memoir, "Biting the Moon: A Memoir of Feminism and Motherhood", in which she continues the concerns of her critical work and her past, which Frye situates in literary and cultural context.
Frye married Ronald Tebbe in 1989. Her two daughters are teachers and writers; each is the mother of two sons.
Early life and career.
Frye was born in South Bend, Indiana, to parents of Mennonite heritage. She attended Bluffton College in Ohio, studied modernist English literature in graduate school at Indiana University. Frye completed her dissertation on Virginia Woolf at Indiana University in 1974.
In 1968, at age 23, a second-year doctoral student in English literature, Frye married Lawrence O. Frye, a German professor ten years her senior. While completing her dissertation, she lived on a farm and gave birth to two daughters, in 1971 and 1975. Following their divorce in 1976, Frye became a single mother to her two daughters. She writes in detail about her life in her memoir, "Biting at the Moon: A Memoir of Feminism and Motherhood". Reviewer Marina DelVecchio describes Frye's memoir as a story that "introduces us to a woman who acts with feminist conviction before she even calls herself a feminist—before she establishes a successful Women’s Studies program her college."
Frye was hired into the English Department at the College of Wooster in 1976, where she taught courses in writing and literature, including single author courses on Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, and Charlotte Brontë; she chaired the English Department from 1991-94. In 1978, Frye led the Committee on the Status of Women in formalizing the Women’s Studies Program as a minor. In 1989, she led the program committee to faculty approval of a Women’s Studies major. Both proposals were collaborative efforts, building on the work of earlier faculty, including history Professor James Turner.
Frye served as chair of the Women's Studies Program unofficially from 1978-1982 and again in 1983-84, and eventually as the first “official” chair of the Program from 1985-1989. In 2009, Frye retired from the College of Wooster, where she taught both English and Women’s Studies for thirty-three years.
In a 2016 interview with College of Wooster student Alex Kauffman, Frye described her experience founding the Women's Studies Program (now Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies [WGSS] Program):Reflecting on these forty years of Women’s Studies at Wooster, I am acutely aware of the ongoing importance of studying the force of gender and sexuality in our lives, the intersecting powers of race and class, and the ways in which culture moves in response to concerns with gender. Clearly there is much work to be done, but I take great joy from the recognition that this work carries forward in classrooms at Wooster and in the scholarship of students and faculty here and, now, around the world.