The Family Silver: Essays on Relationships among Women

Five. Hurts of the System

Five hurts of the system In this essay, i speak of how I have been hurt by institutional rejections . My purpose is to make my own reality visible and to see how my individual experience is a female experience. I also wish to identify how faults of an institution are felt as the faults of an individual. Speaking of discontent with institutional arrangements seems to me particularly important for women, for too often the failures of the outer world to respond to us are internalized and felt as an inner failure. When I acknowledge my own pain and its sources, I feel relief. I also feel dissatisfaction and wish the academic world were more accepting of a wider variety of people. My tone in this essay is often acutely sad, for I speak from a great depth of feeling. I wish to acknowledge hurt and something wrong in academic institutions. I wish to speak of the inner emotional costs of being overlooked, being devalued, being a woman in a male setting. inner hurts, outer world The teaching position I have had for the past six years has been eliminated . Next year, I will be paid just a small amount and will teach only 1 0 9 one of my courses. I will teach not so much for the money—I would do it for almost nothing—but for the continuity. I want no one to know there is a change in my institutional status. I want not to feel that change myself. I feel stripped of protection upon losing my position. I feel that what I teach is not valued and that I am not valued. I ¤nd it hard facing my classes this year knowing that only one of them will be there next year. In that course, Women and Organizations, I ask the students to speak about their experiences of refusing to play by men’s rules—the frustrations and lack of rewards that occur when they act, instead, like women. When I speak of my own experiences of this sort—of not reproducing a male academic style, for instance, and not seeking career advancement in the usual manner—I fear the students will view me as a failure. In my second course, Feminist Methodology, I encourage the students to do social science as I do—in a personal and idiosyncratic way— knowing that a consequence of being like me is to be unemployed. I do not want the students to be without jobs, but I do want them to assert different values in their work and to require the academic world to change so that it accommodates them. I want them to be aware of being women and of how that affects their perspectives. I would like a university to be a different sort of environment than it is. I know too well, however, the dif¤culties involved in asserting a more individual and female orientation, especially the internal problems of self-worth that arise. A few weeks ago, I ¤nished teaching a brief version of my Women and Organizations course in a graduate program at a nearby women’s college. The students appreciated the course. Then, in the last class session , they asked me, “Exactly what is your position at the university?” I didnotwanttotellthem.Oneof thesestudentssaidshefeltencouraged because this course showed her it was possible not to be like the men. Since I was doing differently and I had arrived, maybe she could too. “ButIhaven’tarrived,”Itoldher,lookingacrossthetableatherthrough a sudden rush of inner tears. “Well, you’re teaching at X University. To me, you’ve arrived.” What if these students truly knew? I thought. What if I no longer had a status in what they felt was a prestigious university ? Would they value me then, or want to follow my example? Do 1 1 0 a c a de m ic s e t t i n g s they know that there are costs to my choices, and that the important thing is the nature of my choices, not the nature of my gains? I, myself,¤nd that hard to remember and keep clear. For twenty years, I have worked to have privileges of the academic system—a stable source of income, library use, a position higher than the lowest, a place in a university at all. The highest I have ever been appointed is as a visiting assistant professor. Mostly I have been...