Women with PhDs Speak Out About Motherhood

Both familiar and poignant, the first-person narrative accounts of balancing motherhood and work in these two anthologies continues the feminist tradition of consciousness-raising and demonstrates that the personal is indeed political. Mama PhD and Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory grapple with the question of why women with PhDs are not succeeding in academia and the sciences at the same rates as men. Both books suggest that the answer is not essentialist gender differences in abilities, but rather the difficulty in combining these types of careers with motherhood, given that women are likely to bear the brunt of child care responsibilities.

Mama PhD is edited by Elrena Evans, a mother and PhD student who is unsure if she will complete her degree, and by Caroline Grant, a mother with a PhD who resigned from a teaching position after the birth of her child. They begin the book with a short discussion of the literature on women in academia and state that "this is the book we needed when we entered graduate school and the job market. We wanted to know that blending family life with life in the ivory tower might be possible; we needed to know that others were attempting this tricky balancing act" (xxiii). This volume includes essays by forty-one women who either have their PhDs, are working on a PhD, or started a PhD and left their program as a result of motherhood. This compilation is divided into four sections. The first, titled "The Conversation," includes accounts of conversations with partners about whether or not to have children, the experience of pregnancy, and thoughts on motherhood by women with PhDs who are not mothers, some of whom are unable to become mothers. The second section, "That Mommy Thing," includes accounts of thirteen mothers who successfully balanced motherhood with a career in academia. Included in the third section, "Recovering Academic," are the stories of seven women who left academia; some who left because they could not balance a PhD program or an academic career with motherhood, and some who looked upon childbearing as a convenient time to exit an unsatisfying academic career. Finally, "Momifesto" includes essays in which mothers critically assess the problems in academia, offer suggestions for change, and give advice to future mamas with PhDs.

Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory is edited by Emily Monosson, a mother with a PhD who spent several years as a laboratory scientist before starting to work from home and who "still doesn't know how to categorize [her] life in science" (164). The book starts with an introduction written by Monosson that thoroughly reviews the literature on the sparse number of women in the upper echelons of scientific careers and presents the aim of the book: to "highlight the accomplishments, challenges and choices made by women scientists as they combine motherhood and career" (5). Within this volume are personal accounts of motherhood and scientific careers as written by thirty-four contributors with PhDs in the natural sciences. Authors related their personal life histories and described how they balanced their careers with motherhood. Several women included their own thoughts and observations on general problems of combining family with scientific careers. Essays are organized by the decade in which authors received their PhD (1970s–2000s) and each section is preceded by a short vignette about the editor's life and women's progress in scientific careers during those decades. This method of organization was not particularly enlightening, as there did not seem to be a clear pattern of change over time.

The essays in these books contain several themes that will be familiar to researchers of work-family balance. Several women wrote of the importance of female mentors who had successfully balanced an academic career with a family, while others bemoaned the absence of such mentors. The importance of pregnancy timing loomed over most...