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Summary
Argues that institutional change must accommodate women’s professional and personal life stages.
Staging Women’s Lives in Academia demonstrates how ostensibly personal decisions are shaped by institutions and advocates for ways that workplaces, not women, must be changed. Addressing life stages ranging from graduate school through retirement, these essays represent a gamut of institutions and women who draw upon both personal experience and scholarly expertise. The contributors contemplate the slipperiness of the very categories we construct to explain the stages of life and ask key questions, such as what does it mean to be a graduate student at fifty? Or a full professor at thirty-five? The book explores the ways women in all stages of academia feel that they are always too young or too old, too attentive to work or too overly focused on family. By including the voices of those who leave, as well as those who stay, this collection signals the need to rebuild the house of academia so that women can have not only classrooms of their own but also lives of their own.
Michelle A. Massé is Dean of the Graduate School, Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University, and President of the Women’s Caucus for the Modern Languages. She is the coeditor (with Katie J. Hogan) of Over Ten Million Served: Gendered Service in Language and Literature Workplaces, also published by SUNY Press. Now retired, Nan Bauer-Maglin was Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, and Academic Director of the City University of New York Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies. Her books include Final Acts: Death, Dying, and the Choices We Make (coedited with Donna Perry).
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction
Part I. Graduate School
1. A Job That Gets Old Fast: Age Studies, Academic Labor Criticism, and the Graduate Employee Heather M. Steffen
2. Discourse of Aspiration: A Community of Nontraditional Women Students Nancy Scott Fox
3. The Accidental Academic, or How to Succeed in Academia through Failure and Doubt Jennifer Ann Ho
4. Uses of My Anger: Negotiating Mothering, Feminism, and Graduate School Martha Pitts
5. The Chaos of Kairos: Conflicting Discourses of Timing, Mothering, and Flexibility Jessica Ketcham Part II. Early Career (Including Pre-Tenure)
6. Working-Class Women on the Tenure Track Lynn Arner
7. My Double Life in Academia, or Extreme Parenting on the Tenure Track Mariana Past
8. Solo on Stage: The Single Mother’s Solitary Path to Tenure Hélène E. Bilis
9. Square Peg, Round Hole: My Journey toward Professor of Practice Kheli R. Willetts
10. Currency Elline Lipkin
11. Settling Down without Settling: Reflecting on Ambition, Agency, and Acquiescence Jessica McKelvie Kemp
Part III. Midcareer (Including Post-Tenure)
12. Lives Like Mine: Notes at Midlife on Career Change Cynthia Miller Coffel
13. The Good Enough Academic Mother at Midcareer Devoney Looser
14. Solitary in the South: Confessions of a Single Academic at Midlife Cynthia Port
15. (In)Visibilities: A Woman Faculty of Color’s Search for a Disabled Identity That Fits Ellen M. Gil-Gómez
