Academic Motherhood: How Faculty Manage Work and Family

Chapter 1. Motherhood and an Academic Career: A Negotiable Goal

1 Academic women courageous (or foolish) enough to mention to their colleagues an interest in children and family are often met with a barrage of bad news, the received wisdom of the challenges of a journey fraught with difficulties. The general narrative suggests that both faculty life and parenthood are all consuming and irreconcilable, and that only a fool would attempt to balance a tenure-track academic career with the desire for children and a family life. Any encouragement usually falls in the form of a warning: You can have a faculty career and a family, so long as you time everything perfectly, perform at an unreasonably high level, learn to function without sleep, neglect any personal needs, and forgo happiness and sanity—at least until you get tenure. If you have heard these messages, or if you have repeated them to others, this book is for you. We explore the origins of these beliefs and stories, and then offer a counternarrative, demonstrating that academic women with children can do more than simply survive the rigors of the tenure track—they can find satisfaction and success in all of their many roles. While acknowledging the realities and difficulties that motherhood and academic work entail, we hope to provide an institutional and cultural context within which women who are both professors and mothers (and the administrators and policy makers with whom they interact) can view the decisions and choices they must make, and can realize that motherhood and scholarship are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic. Here are the stories and the lessons learned of real women, neither foolish nor perfect, who have managed to merge successfully their academic chapter 1 O Motherhood and an Academic Career a negotiable road 2 academic motherhood and family lives. The stories of these academics and their families, and the personal and policy choices they suggest, counter the traditional tales of trauma and travail by highlighting a narrative of promise and possibility. Countering the negative narrative is important because its pervasiveness may have ill effects on the choices women make. It may influence women, for example, to forgo or delay having children in order to pursue an academic career. It might encourage women to avoid academic careers altogether or opt out of full-time tenure-track careers or into positions that are different from those they might otherwise desire because they see motherhood as irreconcilable with academic career success. These decisions could have long-term personal ramifications for individual women. These choices could also affect the quality of the academic profession and the ability of colleges and universities to recruit and retain the best and brightest, regardless of their gender or family status. This book explores the choices women make and attempts to contextualize and even problematize them by highlighting the way women who have made the choice to be both mothers and tenure-track faculty members, in all its messiness, have made their lives work. This book shows how choices are constrained by gendered and academic workplace norms and how women manage these norms to manage their multiple roles. Before moving on, it is important to delineate the parameters of this book. It is based on a longitudinal study of women faculty members with children. These women were initially interviewed starting in 1998, when they were in their early careers and had young children (under the age of five). We then conducted follow-up interviews with the same women starting in 2008, to examine career and family progression at mid-career. The women in the study represent an array of disciplines and institutional types within academia. The focus on women is purposeful, as societal expectations of women, especially in terms of the demands of childbirth and taking care of young children, are very different from those for men. This is not to say that men may not experience these issues or are not important, but they are not the focus of this book. The choice of interviewing women on the tenure track is also intentional. Although it is true that many women faculty members are in non-tenure-track positions, the institution of tenure as the marker of a successful academic career is undeniable and makes the focus on achieving it all the more important. Recognizing that institutional motherhood and an academic career 3 context shapes the tenure process specifically and academic life in general, we also took...