Blackboard Exercises
Women in Composition
Description
Context: Elizabeth A. Flynn published “Composing as a Woman” in 1988 in College Composition and Communication, and in the same year CDs outsold vinyl for the first time, Benazir Bhutto became the first woman to head an Islamic nation, the Human Genome project began, James Berlin published “Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class”, and George Bush was elected President of the United States. The cultural context for the article’s publication is as follows: in 1983, Columbia University, the last all male Ivy League began accepting women, and in1986 Lester Faigley published “Competing Theories of Process: A Critique and a Proposal.” In 1987, the U.S. Stock market droped 22% on October 19th, known as Black Monday, condom commercials began to appear on TV, the US budget reached the trillion dollar mark, the world population reached 5 billion, Berlin published Rhetoric and Reality, and Graff published Professing Literature. The year after “Composing as a Woman” was published, Mike Rose published Lives on the Boundary, the Berlin wall fell, Salmon Rushdie faced death threats and a fatwa (religious edict) issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Exxon Valdez spilled oil in Alaska, students protested on Tienanmen Square, a worldwide ban of ivory took effect, the stealth bomber was finished, Collin Powell was appointed Joint Chief of Staff, Burma changed its name to Myanmar, and the Montreal Massacre, targeted at women who had succeeded in non-traditional female employment, left 14 women dead and 13 injured at the Ecole Polytechnique.
Author
Marlene De La Cruz-Guzman
Date of Upload
11/03/09