Survival Guide for Women in Academia

BOOK REVIEWS If Dury's deconstructive claims do not always seem compelling—for example, to "ancients" in the current division of ancients and moderns in the contemporary critical arena—nevertheless Dury's notes to Stevenson's text are all any lover of the headiest products of annotation could wish. For example, the reader who skims to the famous "war among my members" passage in Jekyll's "confession" finds, in the appended note, that the phrase subtly differs from the biblical usage in Romans 7:23, that the phrase parallels "the theories of Ernst Mach published in the same year," and that elsewhere Stevenson used the phrase in discussing "'division of consciousness.'" For the reader who has wondered what must be meant by "Mr Hyde, blowing in the key" in the incident in which Utterson meets Hyde as Hyde is about to enter Jekyll's residence by its back door, Dury canvasses the OED and the decisions of several translators of the story and concludes that "the meaning here must be "breathing forcefully into the end of the key.'" The duet formed by Dury's notes and Stevenson's text is delightful and instructive from beginning to end. Alan Johnson _______________ Arizona State University Survival Guide for Women in Academia Paula J. Caplan. Lifting a Ton of Feathers: A Woman's Guide to Surviving in the Academic World. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993. xvi + 273 pp. Cloth $45.00 Paper $18.95 AS THE AUTHORS of the prologue ruefully note, Paula J. Caplan's Lifting a Ton of Feathers, a project of the Council of Ontario Universities Committee on the Status of Women, is framed by the 6 December 1989 murder of fourteen female engineering students by a deranged man with an assault weapon at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal. Caplan's study reveals that the continuum of hostility toward women in the academy may on rare occasions culminate in femicide but is manifested routinely in many other ways ranging from sexist jokes to denial of tenure. In fact, Lifting a Ton of Feathers tells almost everything women scholars and administrators ever wanted to know but were too afraid to ask about fighting discrimination in the academy. Caplan, whose training is in the area of Applied Psychology and whose other publications include Between Women: Lowering the Barriers, The Myth of Women's Masochism, and Don't Blame Mother: Mending the MotherDaughter Relationship, stresses that daring to ask difficult questions, building one's self-esteem, and networking with other women (and, if 401 ELT 37:3 1994 possible, with supportive men) are the fundamental principles of academic survival. The style and tone of Lifting a Ton of Feathers is reminiscent of self-help recovery handbooks for survivors of abuse, offering anecdotes, checklists, statistics, and an impressive bibliography , in addition to numerous practical suggestions for coping with the various hazards of academic life and the wide spectrum of discriminatory behavior directed towards women. While much of Caplan's information is all too familiar to battlescarred veteran female academics, the familiarity is a form of affirmation —it reassures us that despite what Caplan terms "crazy-making" encounters with colleagues and institutional policies, we are not paranoid . Conversely, for some readers, at least, Lifting a Ton of Feathers may be a positive reality check, a reminder that things are not as bad as they could be. I must say that reading this book made me significantly more appreciative of my own institution, especially its hiring, tenure and promotion policies and its AAUP union contract. Not surprisingly, Caplan's guide to academic survival strategies is grounded in the feminist critique of patriarchal culture. Her basic premise is that nondominant groups are systematically excluded from power in academia by white, privileged males (anyone allergic to political correctness need not bother to read Lifting a Ton of Feathers). Her findings derive from extensive interviews with "women of colour, indigenous women, immigrant women, older women, women with disabilities, and lesbian and bisexual women, as well as . . . white, younger, native-born, able-bodied, and heterosexual women." However, Caplan does not insist that all women in the academy are victims of white male prejudice and she warns her readers not...