Composing as a Woman

I think it's interesting to look at composition theory in terms of gender, as it seems to be one of the only fields I've researched so far in which women didn't have to "emerge." A fairly new area of study, composition theory came to be recently enough that there are female minds who are considered the "founders" or "experts" in the field, and for that reason, I think it presents an interesting case study from which to approach the question of gender.
Flynn's opening statement that composition studies is a "feminization" of conceptions of writing and the composition process ties in with an article I read on womens art. This article began by outlining the psychological differences between men and women and then traced these differences to their physical manifestations. One of the observations made by this author was the tendencies of males to focus on singular details, whereas females are much more inclined to look at the big picture. I believe that it is this tendency that led to study of writing to be limited to product versus process for so long. The technical "masculine" style of analysis also is evidenced in Carol Gilligan's views that Flynn ties in, the idea that men view morality in terms of competing rights and rules, whereas women see it in terms of conflicting responsibilities. The evolution of composition studies away from the technical nit-pickery to a more comprehensive study of why people write the way they do does then seem, to be a "feminization" of sorts, shifting focus from the concrete product to the abstract process, and illustrating the differences in the individual writer while doing so.