Joanne S. Frye, emerita professor of English at ΊΪΑΟΙη, passed away on July 22, 2024, at the age of 79 in ΊΪΑΟΙη, Ohio. Her career at the College spanned over thirty years, beginning in 1976 until her retirement in 2009.
Although her home was the English department, Frye was instrumental in the beginnings of the Collegeβs womenβs studies major, now known as womenβs, gender, and sexuality studies. In her first year as a professor at the College, she proposed to teach a class specifically on women authors. The following year, she was appointed chair of the Committee on the Status of Women, which brought the proposal for a womenβs studies minor to the faculty in 1978. The womenβs studies minor was unanimously approved in 1979, and a major was officially added to the College catalogue in 1989.
Frye chaired the womenβs studies program for many years and taught a variety of interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses, including Introduction to Womenβs Studies, Womenβs Studies Seminar, Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, and Fiction by Women. As she explained in a 1992 ΊΪΑΟΙη magazine article about the Womenβs Studies Program, βGender touches all of us in very immediate ways. Even the most academic discussion of gender makes us rethink how weβre living our very own lives.β
Much of Fryeβs scholarship focused on understanding the representation of motherhood in literature and how women authors resist expectations for both themselves and their characters. βIβm interested in finding a narrative form that gets at things that havenβt found voice in novels,β she said in a profile in ΊΪΑΟΙη magazine upon her retirement. βFiction about motherhood, for example, tends to be sentimental, clichΓ©d, and stereotyped. Reality is much more complex.β A prolific writer, Frye published three books to get at this central question of her academic work: Living Stories, Telling Lives: Women and the Novel in Contemporary Experience, Tillie Olsen: A Study of the Short Fiction, and Biting the Moon: A Memoir of Feminism and Motherhood.
Frye graduated from Bluffton College with a bachelorβs degree in English and went on to receive a doctorate in English from Indiana University, Bloomington in 1974. Her thesis focused on the works of Virginia Woolf, a passion that would follow her throughout her career.
Frye is remembered as a dedicated, forward-thinking educator and scholar whose impact on the College is felt by students to this day. Memorial services will take place on Saturday, July 27, 6 p.m. at Custer-Glenn Funeral Home, 2284 Benden Drive, ΊΪΑΟΙη. Read more about Fryeβs life and family in her obituary, available .