NYMA:
Mother Always Said
What is most true for me each day is that there is never enough time: not enough time to be a good mom, a good teacher, a good researcher, a good administrator. Torn in so many directions at once, I find that I am shuffling through life, each day trying to just keep the biggest fire from getting even bigger.
When I do my work as scholar, I find that I have to spend a significant amount of time explaining why I have the authority to speak. I can’t just say what I want to say; instead, in apostolic fashion, I have to trace back my authority to speak to the many others who have had thoughts similar to mine. This takes time. And when the scholarship gets relegated to, at best, the last two hours of the day before bed—when I have to come back to school after doing all of my teaching and administering from nine to five and my mothering from five to nine, taking 25 minutes to get into an argument to say what I want to say impedes the conversation.
Yes, I have made choices that got me to this place, and no, I did not have to choose to have a family and a life. But I did. And I chose this field, in part, because I thought it wouldn’t punish me for having made those choices. But as the quote above suggests, academic life hurts women, continues to hurt women who make similar choices. If we are not going to change it, we should at least acknowledge it.
“Academic life hurts women, still hurts women, may be designed to systematically eject those of us who discover and believe other ways of knowing and learning.” (Gail E. Hawisher and Patricia Sullivan, 1998, p. 195)
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Academic life hurts
