Wooster mourns passing of Joanne S. Frye, emerita professor of English
Joanne S. Frye, emerita professor of English at The College of Wooster, passed away on July 22, 2024, at the age of 79 in Wooster, 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 College’s women’s studies major, now known as women’s, 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 women’s studies minor to the faculty in 1978. The women’s studies minor was unanimously approved in 1979, and a major was officially added to the College catalogue in 1989.
Frye chaired the women’s studies program for many years and taught a variety of interdisciplinary and cross-listed courses, including Introduction to Women’s Studies, Women’s Studies Seminar, Feminist Perspectives on Motherhood, Virginia Woolf, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen, and Fiction by Women. As she explained in a 1992 Wooster magazine article about the Women’s Studies Program, “Gender touches all of us in very immediate ways. Even the most academic discussion of gender makes us rethink how we’re living our very own lives.”
Much of Frye’s scholarship focused on understanding the representation of motherhood in literature and how women authors resist expectations for both themselves and their characters. “I’m interested in finding a narrative form that gets at things that haven’t found voice in novels,” she said in a profile in Wooster magazine upon her retirement. “Fiction about motherhood, for example, tends to be sentimental, clichéd, and stereotyped. Reality is much more complex.” 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 bachelor’s 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, Wooster. Read more about Frye’s life and family in her obituary, available here.
Posted in News on July 25, 2024.
