Academic Motherhood in a Post-Second Wave Context

Challenges, Strategies and Possibilities

Edited by D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein, Andrea O’Reilly

Contributors detail what it means to be an academic mother and to think about academic motherhood, while also exploring both the personal and specific institutional challenges academic women face, the multifaceted strategies different academic women are implementing to manage those challenges, and investigating different theoretical possibilities for how we think about academic motherhood.“

”The contributions to the collection present diverse stories and perspectives from the personal to the theoretical and empirical. I finished reading feeling not only more informed but empowered....Several hundred thousand women are currently employed as post-secondary teachers across North America; all of their Chairs, Deans, and Provosts should read this book and all academic women should know about it.”

 - Elissa Foster, Director of Education & Program Evaluation, Department of Family Medicine, Lehigh Valley Health Network

Contents

Challenges

1. In Spies Like Us: The Lives of Double Agents Evolving Identities and Strategies of Mothers in Academe/ Bethany Crandell Goodie

2.“We Shoot Our Wounded”: Pregnancy, Mothering and PPD on the Tenure Track /Kerri Kearney and Lucy Bailey

3.“You Can Slip One in Between Your Thesis and Comps”:  Unanticipated Consequences of Having a Baby in Graduate School/ Serena Patterson

4. Balancing Work and Family in Higher Education: Best Practices and Barriers/ Heather Wyatt-Nichol, Margarita Cardona and Karen Drake

5. “Which June?” What Baby?: The Continued Invisibility of Maternity in Academia/ Laura J. Beard

6.  Academic Mothers Climb the Ladder of Promotion and Tenure: One Rung at a Time/ Michelle L. Vancour

7. Contract-Faculty Mothers On the Track To Nowhere/ Linda Ennis

Strategies

8. From Motherhood, Through Widowhood:  The Path to Receiving the Academic Hood/ Yvonne Redmond-Brown Banks

9. Non-Tenure-track Academic Work … The “Mommy Track” or A Strategy for Resistance?/ Jill M Wood

10. Demeter on Strike: Fierce Motherhood on the Picket Line and the Playground/ Laurie JC Cella

11.Re-Writing the Script / Jennifer Hauver James

12. Being a Mother Academic: Or, I didn’t get a PhD to become a Mom/ Joanne Minaker

13.Integrating the Personal and the Professional / Rachel Epp Buller

14. Halving it all:  Co-parenting in an Academic Couple / Karen Christopher and Avery Kolers

15. Great Expectations for Moms in Academia: Work/Life Integration and Addressing Cognitive Dissonance / Marta McClintock-Comeaux

Possibilities

16. Academic Autonomy: Authority, Self-Confidence, and Resistance / Sylvia Burrow

17. Being and Thinking Between Second and Third Wave Feminisms: Theorizing a Strategic Alliance Frame to Understand Academic Motherhood / D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein 

18. 0The Cost of an Education:  Exploring the Extended Reach of Academe in Family Life / Amber Kinser

19. Basketball, Skating, and Scholarship:  Or How to do Research from the Bench, the Rink, and the Car / Elizabeth Podnie

20. Academic Mother crossing Linguistic and Cultural Borders / Masako Kato

21. Mothers in Law:  Re-thinking Equality to do Justice to Children in Academia / Isabelle Martin and Julie Paquin

23.Liberalism’s Leaky Legacy: Theory and the Narratives of Graduate Student Mothers / Jamie Huff, Sarah Coté Hampson and Corinne M. Tagliarina

About the Authors

D. Lynn O’Brien Hallstein is Assistant Professor of Rhetoric in the College of General Studies at Boston University.  She is the author of White Feminists and Contemporary Maternity:  Purging Matrophobia, and has co-edited Contemporary Maternity in an Era of Choice:  Explorations into Discourses of Reproduction, which won the Organization for the Study of Communication, Language, and Gender’s 2011 Outstanding Book Award for an edited volume.

Andrea O’Reilly is  Full Professor in the School of Women’s Studies at York University. She is author/editor of eighteen books on Mothering/ Motherhood including Mother Outlaws: Theories and Practices of Empowered Mothering. O’Reilly is the founder, director of the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement (MIRCI) (formerly the Association for Research on Mothering 1998-2010).