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Transforming Scholarship: Why Women’s and Gender Studies Students Are Changing Themselves and the World, Michele Tracy Berger and Cheryl Radeloff (Routledge 2011, $25.95 paperback)
For readers looking to explain the value of women’s studies to students, faculty, or employers, this book is not to be missed. Authors Michele Tracy Berger and Cheryl Radeloff have drawn on Internet surveys and interviews of women’s studies graduates as well as their own experiences as scholars and professors to crystallize an argument in favor of this oft-misunderstood discipline. Opening with a history of women’s studies and an exploration of its various current forms, the book proceeds to articulate the skills, knowledge, and capacities women’s studies scholars can develop and how they might apply their learning to future careers. It offers suggestions for debunking myths about women’s studies and ways to answer the perennial question that many liberal arts students encounter: “What are you going to do with that major?”
Written primarily for undergraduate students wondering what they might do with a women’s studies degree, the book articulates and answers critical questions about the role of a college education and the pathway from college to the workplace. Using concrete, real-life examples, it illustrates how women’s studies students have applied their feminist values and critical-thinking skills to building successful careers in fields closely and distantly connected with their majors. One might hope that such a resource will eventually exist for students in all disciplines. But for now, students and faculty in the beleaguered field of women’s studies are lucky to have Berger and Radeloff writing on their behalf. |
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Professor Mommy: Finding Work–Family Balance in Academia, Rachel Connelly and Kristen Ghodsee (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2011, $29.85 cloth)
It has been empirically established and widely accepted that mothers in academia engage in a difficult balancing act that typically slows their professional progression and sometimes ends their careers altogether. Given the risks, it’s no wonder that the prospect of falling off the work–life tightrope is enough to deter many women from stepping onto it in the first place. But with this new how-to guide for mothers in academia, Rachel Connelly and Kristen Ghodsee invite women academics to muster their courage and proceed despite the potential pitfalls. Their unblinking analysis of the risks and rewards of combining academic life with motherhood is a welcome and unique addition to the literature on the topic.
Connelly and Ghodsee draw from published literature, surveys and interviews of colleagues, and their combined experience to illustrate that it is indeed possible to succeed as both a mother and a faculty member. They offer concrete advice for each stage of the climb from PhD student to full professor, from caretaker of infants to parent of teenage children, encouraging readers to proceed realistically and know that they can achieve their work and life goals if they are committed to the task. The authors are, as they admit, “brutally honest” about the difficult road many “professor mommies” face (8), and they give little credence to the idea that the academy will become more family-friendly in the near future (suggesting that women wait to advocate for systemic change until they have earned the protection of tenure). But this hard-nosed realism is a necessary anchor for their enthusiasm, and the book is an essential resource for anyone considering the life of a “professor mommy.” |
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Still Searching for Our Mothers’ Gardens: Experiences of New, Tenure-Track Women of Color at “Majority” Institutions, edited by Marnel N. Niles and Nickesia S. Gordon (University Press of America 2011, $34.95 paperback)
This incisive and insightful volume sheds light on the continuing sense that women faculty of color are, as Alice Walker suggested, still “in search of [their] mothers’ gardens” when it comes to finding their rightful place in the academy. Focusing broadly on the experiences of young women of color who represent a minority presence within their institutions, the editors set out to create a collection that describes these women’s experiences and “provide[s] realistic strategies for [their] survival in academic environments” (xvi). Taking communications scholarship as critical to understanding how meaning is created, contributing authors apply various communications theories to both personal experience and collected data. The resulting book honestly and authoritatively demystifies the still-intractable academic cultures that dictate the experiences of young women faculty of color across different academic contexts and institutional types.
Written for researchers interested in the topic at hand as well as for women entering the academy, the collection is perfectly pitched to succeed in reaching both audiences. Its contents are at once deeply personal and authoritatively academic—a balance that is difficult to strike but invaluable when achieved. Still Searching for Our Mothers’ Gardens is thus a key resource for scholars of diversity in the academy and for women of color seeking guidance as they carve out their own careers within its walls. Its promise lies in its contribution to helping both groups achieve a shared vision: an academy where women of color are recognized as integral to higher education, and are confident in that success. |
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