The Sista’ Network: African American Women Faculty Successfully Negotiating the Road to Tenure, by Tuesday Cooper (Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 2006, $19.95 paper)

Tuesday Cooper combines qualitative research data with literature and research on the tenure process, African American women in the academy, and black feminist thought in her book, The Sista’ Network: African American Women Faculty Successfully Negotiating the Road to Tenure.  Drawing on the unique lived experiences of nine black female faculty members at different stages in the tenure process, Cooper explores how the intersectionality of race, gender, and class is experienced and perceived in a system that is governed as much by informal networks and unspoken rules as by formal associations and explicit policies.  Because this book expands on Cooper’s dissertation the statistical data included in the early chapters is somewhat outdated.  Unfortunately however, the numbers have remained relatively unchanged over the past six years. 

Cooper’s analysis of the data, the tenure review process, and earlier literature on black feminist thought and black women in the academy is cogent and concise, and helps establish a clear context for her interview subjects.  Rather than use a traditional format to share quotes and blocks of transcribed speech interspersed with research interpretation, Cooper employs a technique known as the “imperfect narrative” to present the text from the interviews as a roundtable discussion between her subjects.  By “tell[ing] a truthful story in a fictional format,” Cooper is able to draw readers into the narrative in a more active and contextualized way.  Though Cooper interviewed each subject individually, she presents their voices as a conversation.  Their perspectives, experiences, and wisdom are mutually reinforcing, the interplay between their comments and advice seamless.

Cooper announces early in her book that she does not want to focus solely on the challenges and struggles of black women in the academy, but rather draw from the lived experiences of her interview participants, as well as from the theoretical literature, to develop principles and recommendations.  She ends by providing updates on the participants six years out of the interviews, in which eight of the nine women acknowledge they would “take on the tenure process again” because they felt the rewards were worth it. 

Cooper identifies four primary areas of challenge: leaning the rules of the game; balancing teaching, research, service, and outside responsibilities; collegiality; and identifying a mentor.  She also outlines twelve Guiding Principles for African American Women Faculty.  These principles range from the political--network strategically, meet with your dean and department chair--to the academic--create a research agenda early on and stick to it--to the personal—“decide if you will be a minority voice.”  Cooper’s book is a quick and informative read, and presents an engaging combination of statistical and theoretical background, qualitative data, and practical suggestions for personal success and institutional change.

Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965, by Linda Eisenmann (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006, $45.00 hardcover)

In her recent book, Higher Education for Women in Postwar American, 1945-1965, Linda Eisemann, an educational historian, explores the cultural, political, and economic landscape that informed both higher education generally and women’s connections with and participation in colleges and universities.  Eisemann names two interpretive goals for her book: to explore “why, with their numbers on campus increasing, women were nevertheless viewed as ‘incidental students’ by postwar educational planners and policymakers” and “to understand the nature of postwar advocacy for women.”  She cautions readers to think critically about the postwar environment, a context in which women’s individual choice and advocacy were more prevalent than structural or systemic reform, in order to recognize that women’s activism was still occurring, though in very different ways than those employed by the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. 

Eismann uses an institutional perspective to analyze women’s participation in and relationship with higher education as this approach “allows the tracing of threads” across different associations, commissions and projects, and educational movements. She uses the first section of the book to explore how multiple and often conflicting societal expectations of and for women influenced how, when, and to what extent they participated in higher education.  She also examines the relationship between these societal expectations, how they informed what women thought of education and their influence on the curriculum. 

The second and third sections examine women’s postwar activism and its various manifestations and goals.  Part Two includes a close reading of different organizations and commissions, including the American Council on Education’s Commission on the Education of Women, the America Association of University Women, the National Association of Deans of Women, and President Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women, and their commitment to improving research on, practice for and by, and policy on behalf of women.  In Part Three, Eisemann narrows her focus a bit by concentrating specifically on the growth of continuing education programs for women, which she constructs as an example of women’s advocacy. 

Eisemann is careful to acknowledge that, because of the societal and historical context of her topic, much of the text and analysis focuses on middle and upper middle class, often white, women.  She explores race and class where there is sufficient data to do so, and is responsible in identifying many contexts in which the individuals and organizations about whom she’s writing ignored these categories. This is particularly important given the various societal pressures and expectations she describes, many of which placed enormous emphasis on the concept of women’s individual choice and the relationship between individual choice and the balancing of responsibilities.  Dominant patriotic, economic, psychological, and cultural expectations of women often presumed an element of choice in women’s participation in each of these areas.  It was middle and upper middle class women who also had the greatest access to higher education, which persisted even through the beginning of the women’s continuing education movement.

Eisemann’s book provides a highly detailed and informative analysis of each element of women’s participation in and relationship with higher education she lifts out. From the way she contextualized the status of women in relationship to the GI Bill and shifting demographics on college and university campuses to how she assesses the multiple ambitions and challenges of different national associations, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America is consistently engaging and illuminating.