Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia, and: Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe, and: Gender on Campus: Issues for College Women (review)

Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice for Women in Academia by Emily Toth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997, 222 pp., $15.95 paper.

Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe by Judith Glazer-Raymo. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 1999, 237 pp., $38.00 hardcover.

Gender on Campus: Issues for College Women by Sharon Bohn Gmelch. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998, 309 pp., $42.00 hardcover, $16.00 paper.

In the spring of 1992, Emily Toth began offering advice to academic women in the "Ms. Mentor" column of Concerns, the journal of the women's caucus of the Modern Languages. Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice to Women in Academia is a book version of such advice offered in a question and answer format. I purchased my copy of Ms. Mentor on the first day of the NWSA Conference in St. Louis. After gathering up my stack of other book purchases, I headed for the campus cafeteria, bought lunch, and selected Ms. Mentor's Impeccable Advice to Women in Academia for perusal. I was hot, tired, and in need of cheering up. Nicole Hollander's art work on the cover promised humor. I was not disappointed, Ms. Mentor provided not just smiles, but belly laughs.

Emily Toth is not just the funniest woman in the academy, she may well be the funniest woman in America. With Ms. Mentor, we savor Toth at her best--being simply outrageous but right. Where else could you find "balls" indexed, except perhaps in physical education texts? These are not the balls Emily Toth has in mind. No, the balls she discusses are the ones we are constantly told that we women decidedly lack. She tells us that the academic game is a man's game and the rules consist of various versions of "Whose Is Bigger" (60, 196). For those of us who would dare doubt this, she asks us to ponder how work is described in the academy. For example, one might describe the length of one's vita, one's penetrating scholarship, one's seminal text. You get the picture. While Toth does not deny that there is plenty to be sad about, even down right depressed about, concerning women's status in the academy. Her advice to us is to get beyond being sad and mad by getting even. And how do academic women get even? They get tenure. Indeed, a substantial portion of the text's offering is geared towards demystifying the medieval process of earning a Ph.D. and gaining tenure.

Emily Toth states that all the questions she answers in Ms. Mentor are ones sent to her by academic women. She asks readers to e-mail their own questions to her at etoth@unix1.sncc.lsu.edu. I say we all should. I am on the third reading of my copy, and I know we have enough questions to fill another book. Her answers have a way of making me feel sane and wise. This laughter heals and connects. We could use large doses of it in the humorless halls of the academy. I recommend buying not one copy but two and giving one to a woman friend confronting survival through a graduate program, a job search, tenure, or even retirement. I also recommend contacting your university's library staff and asking that this gem be purchased for circulation.

Judith Glazer-Raymo's Shattering the Myths: Women in Academe blends a life history approach with the current statistical results of large research studies. Blending these approaches is useful for informing readers of the status of women on the university campus. In "The Personal and Professional: Becoming a Feminist," Glazer-Raymo recalls that her freshman year was spent at the University of Michigan, where she discovered that much...