Flannery, Kathryn Thoms. Feminist Literacies 1968–75. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. 256 pp.

by Monica Barron

The preface to Kathryn Flannery's Feminist Literacies 1968–75 contains a photograph of a flyer generated in a 1973 New York Women's Political Caucus workshop. The flyer's six statements are directives to the larger caucus that, if followed, might elicit participation in the caucus by a larger, more diverse group of women. I studied the flyer and Flannery's discourse analysis of it and thought, I could use this. Flannery's analysis is designed to help readers get or recover a sense of the importance of the context in which a text was produced, since it is her contention that "no text is ever readable independent of a complex rhetorical matrix" (xi), some aspects of which may have been ephemeral. Flannery not only recovered some of the original context of the document, she also made me mindful of the context in which I was reading and my own desire to make the text mean something, be of use in that particular rhetorical context. By the end of the preface, I was hooked.