Ivory tower? Feminist women's experiences of graduate school

Eight African American women's mentoring experiences in graduate school are examined pertaining to lessons learned, characteristics and behaviors of African American female mentors, challenges with White mentors (male and female), and stereotypical images of African American female mentors. The findings support mentoring as a method of empowerment and uplift.

Venus rising, Furies raging: bodies redressed in contemporary visual art

PhD-trained researchers are increasingly leaving academia to seek alternative career opportunities that may offer higher salaries, less pressure to secure funding, and perceived work-life balance advantages. It is crucial to understand the experiences that influence graduate students' decisions to pursue career fields outside of academia upon graduation. Brown et al. (2023), analyzed the careers of Biomedical Sciences PhDs who graduated over a 24-year period, identifying both external and internal factors that contributed to students' decisions to either pursue or shift away from a career in academia. These factors included the lifestyle of principal investigators (PIs), a mismatch between values, interests, and the career and skills of the PI, and negative graduate school experiences. The current study examines whether rewarding and/or challenging trainee experiences influence the decision to pursue a postdoctoral position and contribute to researchers' retention in academia. Between May 2023 and December 2024, 18 Biomedical Sciences PhD graduates from Augusta University (AU) participated in an exit interview facilitated by the assistant dean of the graduate school. The interview explored various aspects of their graduate school experience, including academics, interactions with administration, challenges in meeting milestones, and post-graduation plans. The key themes identified as the most rewarding aspects of their graduate program were presenting original research, publishing manuscripts, developing as independent researchers, receiving extramural funding, and successfully achieving milestones. Conversely, the most challenging aspects were maintaining work-life balance, experiencing feelings of isolation in the laboratory, challenges in writing, and relationships with PIs. Of the 18 graduates, 16 had immediate plans to pursue a postdoctoral position (with three having not secured a position at the time of graduation). Additionally, two of the 18 graduates were MD/PhD students who immediately matriculated to complete their medical training. A survey was developed and distributed via Qualtrics to approximately 130 AU postdoctoral fellows to assess their reasons for pursuing a postdoctoral position after PhD graduation. The survey also aimed to understand their future career goals, preferred topics for career and professional development workshops and seminars, and the current challenges they face in career progression. By understanding both the positive and negative factors influencing the career goals of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, we can better support our trainees throughout their graduate school and postdoctoral experiences. This abstract was presented at the American Physiology Summit 2025 and is only available in HTML format. There is no downloadable file or PDF version. The Physiology editorial board was not involved in the peer review process.

Reviewed by: The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I by Lynn Dumenil Anita Anthony Vanorsdal (bio) The Second Line of Defense: American Women and World War I. By Lynn Dumenil. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Pp. xi, 340. $39.95 cloth; $38.99 ebook) [End Page 272] As Americans observe the centennial of the Great War, historians are exposing more about the lives of various actors in wartime mobilization and participation. Lynn Dumenil's history of American women's experiences during World War I provides both field experts and an interested general public an engaging narrative that encapsulates the political and cultural contexts, working lives, and national service opportunities that shaped women's abilities to contribute to the war effort. Dumenil weaves a carefully crafted synthesis of secondary sources on women's progressivism, wartime opportunities, political motivations, and personal desires to underscore her new avenues of research on what the war meant for American women in particular. While her focus is on "the way in which diverse women used the war for their own agendas of expanding their opportunities, sometimes economic ones, sometimes political, sometimes personal," she arranges her chapters to expose how women sought opportunities while encountering challenges from employers and unions, military and government policies, and cultural components that hindered their activism (p. 4). Dumenil does an exemplary job at weaving her new research and theories with a wide variety of secondary sources and reveals the nuances in women's lives that both helped and hindered their wartime participation. She employs a variety of contemporaneous accounts from newspapers, magazines, personal correspondence, films, photographs, and wartime posters alongside official government documents and war committees' reports to reveal that women's hopes for substantial long-term changes in politics, military service, professional advancement, and work opportunities would not last long after the armistice in November 1918. Dumenil does emphasize, however, that although long-term advancement in women's opportunities was not accomplished, the war did help to accelerate changes for women that would impact later generations during the New Deal and in the women's movement of the 1970s. While Dumenil's epilogue does provide an excellent explanation of the First World War's short-term impact on American women, [End Page 273] she does not offer much information on the state and local laws passed during the war, such as mothers' pensions, food benefits, state-supported health care for women and children, which shaped many women's daily lives into the 1920s and 1930s. She does a careful job of delineating the differences among women by class and race (concentrating on white and black women's different experiences), but leaves this reader desiring more information on how age, regional location, access to technological improvements, and club membership may have also segregated women and altered their wartime opportunities. Dumenil does underscore, however, that class and race shaped women's wartime experiences and activism, and she presents a careful analysis of the different ways gender dynamics complicated class and race. While focusing her analysis on racial and class divisions during the war, she also explores some of the subcategories that splintered politically active women in the 1920s and uses these experiences to highlight the lack of long-term change. Dumenil does an excellent job of providing a nuanced understanding of women's wartime experiences, including the political divisions among women, traditional gender role issues that were under siege during the war, economic concerns and the expansion of women's work opportunities, women who served overseas as nurses and aid workers for Allied soldiers, and the depictions of wartime women in popular culture. Rather than focusing on a single aspect of wartime experiences of American women, Dumenil offers a more complete, and more complex, view of women's war experiences that also offers potential for further research by scholars who seek to understand the Great War's impact on Americans, especially American women. [End Page 274] Anita Anthony Vanorsdal ANITA ANTHONY VANORSDAL recently completed her PhD at Michigan State University. Her current research focuses on the Woman's Committee for the Council of National Defense and women's social welfare activism during the Great War...

Just Fantasy? Online Pornography's Contribution to Experiences of Harm

erda Lerner's article beautifully captures the major historiographic shifts and developments in women's history since 1969. It is impor- tant, thirty-five years later, to reflect on the ways in which the study of women's experiences has evolved. Perhaps the most significant ideologi- cal influence on early women's history was the feminist movement, which sought to overthrow male domination, patriarchy, and gender discrimina- tion. As Lerner notes, the result was a proliferation of feminist scholarship in the 1980s, which placed women's voices and experiences at the center of scholarly inquiry. Specifically within the field of history, feminist thought advocated for a woman-centered approach, and argued that there was a common sisterhood among women. 1 The creation of new feminist para- digms was tremendously useful in liberating White women from scholarly neglect and oversight, and therefore a debt of gratitude is owed to the schol- ars who blazed the trail and took intellectual risks to create this field. Despite the importance of these early contributions, however, I be- lieve that the most significant progress has been made since the 1980s, after Black scholars raised critiques regarding the implicit racism in women's history that systematically overlooked how race and class func- tioned in the lives of women of color. As Eileen Boris and Angelique Janssens explained, feminists found themselves increasingly under at- tack for ignoring differences of race and ethnicity. The universalizing rheto- ric of gender claimed to embrace all women when in fact it derived from the standpoint of usually middle-class white women in North America or northern Europe. 2 Although these criticisms slightly destabilized the field, the resulting creation of intersectionality, which examines how race, class, gender, and sexuality simultaneously influence women's lives, was an important step in constructing the stories of women's experiences. 3 Yet as Lerner points out, the changes were not only dramatic and pervasive, they were also confusing (13). At this moment in the development of women's history, we must be willing to look deeply at our approaches and evaluate their effectiveness. In my opinion, the scramble to incorpo- rate race into the narrative, while critically important, was often clumsy, awkward, and strained. The problem is twofold; first, although feminism is a useful paradigm for White women, the attempt to force Black women

The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson: Catholic, Socialist, Feminist

The issue of the personal voice in a literary or critical text raises a number of questions: does a written text contain more useful information if we know about the background of the writer? Is a reader better able to assess information or interpret a text if that reader knows where the text originates, what physical body or social identity or individual personality has created and shaped it? I came to the panel on personal voice at the 1996 meeting of the American Philological Association because these questions have vexed me on both a personal and professional level. I have come to understand the personal voice as a rhetorical posture that gains meaning according to its context and the motivations of its speaker or writer. In this paper, I will discuss my interpretation of Samuel Butler’s The Authoress of the Odyssey in the context of my own graduate school experiences. I will demonstrate the varieties of the “personal” as they are opposed to the “professional” in Butler’s work, specifically how the “personal” is allied with the feminine voice. I will then discuss the personal voice as a mode of discourse in the culture of professional training in graduate school and my own experience with this. In conclusion, I suggest that responsible pedagogy must engage with the issue of personal voice at all levels in order to deepen and enrich the imaginative and expressive lives of students and to aid their critical faculties as readers. The Authoress of the Odyssey (1897) was written by Samuel Butler (1835‐1902), a Victorian amateur scholar and satirist who, after enduring the harsh life of a clergyman’s son, amassed a fortune in New Zealand and went on to write Erewhon (1872), a satire of English social and economic

Specific groups have historically been, and continue to be, underrepresented in the biomedical research workforce, especially academia. Career choice is a multifactorial process that evolves over time; among all trainees, expressed interest in faculty research careers decreases over time in graduate school, but that trend is amplified in women and members of historically underrepresented racial and ethnic groups (Golde and Dore, 2004; Fuhrmann et al., 2011; Sauermann and Roach, 2012; Gibbs et al., 2014; Roach and Sauermann, 2017). This work was designed to investigate how career interest changes over time among recent neuroscience PhD graduates, and whether differences in career interests are associated with social identity, experiences in graduate school and postdoctoral training, and personal characteristics. We report results from a survey of 1479 PhD neuroscientists (including 16% underrepresented scientists and 54% women scientists). We saw repeated evidence that individual preferences about careers in general, and academic careers specifically, predict current career interest. These findings were moderated by social identity and experiences in graduate school and postdoctoral training. Our findings highlight the important influence of the advisor in shaping a trainee’s career path, and the ways in which academic culture is perceived as unwelcoming or incongruent with the values or priorities of certain groups. They suggest several areas for positive growth, ways to change how we think about the impact of mentorship, and policy and programmatic interventions that extend beyond trying to change or “fix” the individual and instead recognize the systemic structures that influence career choices.

Pursuing graduate studies is a fulfilling and rewarding experience, and sometimes challenging. Thus, this study examined the life concerns likely to contribute to the students’ graduate school journey. The study was conducted in the College of Graduate Studies, Palompon, Leyte, Philippines, utilizing a descriptive-correlational research design, with respondents recruited from the master's and doctoral degree programs. Relevant data were collected using survey questionnaires prepared in Google Forms. Data were analyzed using means, standard deviations, and the Spearman rank-order correlation. Results showed that the current study sample found their graduate school journey slightly good. Study findings revealed further that two demographic factors - age and work positions, were found negatively correlated with the graduate school journey, and this implies that younger graduate students tend to have better graduate school experience than older ones; and students holding supervisory positions have struggling graduate school experience. Correlation analysis indicated a significant negative relationship between work-related concerns and graduate school experience. Overall findings pinpoint the need for graduate school practitioners to consider initiatives that address students' life concerns and likewise formulate policies and guidelines that may provide them with a support system that helps students find their graduate school journey smooth, happier, and fulfilling.

The revival of the women's movement in the late 1960s sparked a resurgence of interest in women in Russia and the Soviet Union. Historians then already had foundations on which to build such as S. S. Shashkov's survey of the history of women in Russia' and Elena Likhacheva's monumental pre-revolutionary study of women's education in Russia which extended beyond the limit of its title to explore the birth and growth of the Russian women's movement.2 Historians and social scientists in the 1970s attempted to find women omitted from previous accounts of Russian and Soviet history. In 1978, Richard Stites published his monumental and pioneering study that maps vast portions of the terrain that other scholars would later explore in greater detail and from different perspectives.3 Some members of this new generation of scholars, myself among them, were personally and politically as well as intellectually motivated. Feminism encouraged women historians of Russia, as it encouraged historians of the US and western Europe, to seek past, to tell herstory. To correct the masculine bias of earlier accounts, we hunted through archives and published sources, looking for traces of women's experiences, trying to hear women's hitherto silent voices. If we studied literate women, as most of us did, we pored over diaries, memoirs and letters. To the usual questions of historians and social scientists, this feminist cohort added new ones, questions concerning the power that men exercised over women and its impact on women's ideas and experiences. We questioned the nature and sources of patriarchal power and asked how being female shaped a woman's choices and activities. And even as we carefully gathered and sifted evidence, as professional historians do, explicitly or not and in varying degrees, we often brought our own experience as women and as subjected beings to the materials we examined.4

In this qualitative study, we explored women's pregnancy intentions and experiences of intimate partner violence before, during and after pregnancy. Unintended pregnancies in the context of intimate partner violence can have serious health, social and economic consequences for women and their children. Feminist and phenomenological philosophies underpinned the study to gain a richer understanding of women's experiences. Eleven women who had been pregnant in the previous two years were recruited from community-based women's refuges in one region of the UK. Of the 11 women, eight had unplanned pregnancies, two reported being coerced into early motherhood, and only one woman had purposively planned her pregnancy. Multiple in-depth interviews focused on participants' accounts of living with intimate partner violence. Experiential data analysis was used to identify, analyse and highlight themes. Three major themes were identified: men's control of contraception, partner's indiscriminate response to the pregnancy and women's mixed feelings about the pregnancy. Participants reported limited influence over their sexual relationship and birth control. Feelings of vulnerability about themselves and fear for their unborn babies' safety were intensified by their partners' continued violence during pregnancy. Women experiencing intimate partner violence were more likely to have an unintended pregnancy. This could be attributed to male dominance and fear, which impacts on a woman's ability to manage her birth control options. The women's initial excitement about their pregnancy diminished in the face of uncertainty and ongoing violence within their relationship. Women experiencing violence lack choice in relation to birth control options leading to unintended pregnancies. Interpreting the findings from the victim-perpetrator interactive spin theory of intimate partner violence provides a possible framework for midwives and nurses to better understand and respond to women's experiences of violence during pregnancy.

BackgroundIn addition to the benefits of a diverse faculty, many institutions are under pressure from students and administrators to increase the number of faculty from historically excluded backgrounds. Despite increases in the numbers of engineering PhD earners from these groups, the percentages of Black/African American and Hispanic/Latino tenure‐track faculty have not increased, and the percentage of women remains low.PurposeThe purpose of this study is to identify how experiences in graduate school encourage or deter PhD earners from historically excluded groups in pursuing an engineering academic career.MethodWe conducted 20 semi‐structured interviews with engineering PhD students and recent graduates, with half of participants interested and half disinterested in pursuing an academic career after graduation.ResultsThree key factors emerged as strongly influential on participants' desire to pursue an academic career: their relationship with their advisor, their perception of their advisor's work–life balance, and their perception of the culture of academia. Participants extrapolated their experiences in graduate school to their imagined lives as faculty. The results illuminate the reasons why engineering PhD earners from historically underrepresented groups remain in or leave the academic career pathway after graduate school.ConclusionsThe findings of this study have important implications for how graduate students' and postdoc's relationships with their advisors as well as perceptions of their advisors' work–life balances and the culture of academia affect future faculty. We make recommendations on what students, faculty, and administrators can do to create a more inclusive environment to encourage students from historically excluded groups to consider academic careers.

The Ronald E. McNair Scholars Program is a U.S. Department of Education TRIO Program, funded at 152 institutions across the United States and Puerto Rico. In 2013, total funding reached over $35 million--of which, Portland State University received approximately $211,000 (US Department of Education, 2013). The program's goal is to introduce first-generation, low-income, under-represented group college students to effective strategies for succeeding in doctoral programs so they may become professors and create a more supportive environment for future non-traditional students. One way to explore program effectiveness beyond completion of the McNair Program is to ask the McNair Scholars themselves about program impact. This comparative interview study explores McNair graduates' understandings of issues they face in adjusting to graduate school and how participation in the McNair Program prepared them to address these issues. Typically, McNair program evaluations emphasize the collection and analysis of quantitative data - e.g. graduate school enrollment and degree attainment. However, little qualitative research has been conducted on graduate's perceptions of the impact of program participation on their graduate school experiences. This study, which uses Bourdieu's Theory of Social Reproduction, along with the sociology-based ideas of role-as-resource, role mastery, and expertise development, explores students' perceptions of the McNair Program's effectiveness in regards to helping them understand the "graduate student" role and use that role to succeed in graduate school and beyond.

The purpose of this study was to identify and analyze the adjustment problems encountered by international graduate students enrolled in American universities. Issues of interest included motives for attending graduate school, factors involved in facilitating and constraining the graduate school experience, personality traits that contribute to successful performance in a graduate program, and suggestions for future international graduate students. Semi-structured interviews of two international students were conducted with four major themes emerging. These were (a) student needs for a successful graduate program experience, (b) initial barriers to the graduate school experience, (c) consistent barriers to the graduate school experience, and (d) factors that facilitate a successful graduate school experience. These themes were further broken down into internal, external, and combined factors in an effort to better understand the graduate experience of international students. The importance of overcoming initial barriers, such as communication problems and culture shock; addressing consistent barriers to adaptation, such as becoming comfortable in a new learning environment and culture; and focusing on the development and enhancement of factors that facilitate adaptation, such as organizational skills, intrinsic motivation, social interaction, balancing time, and others are addressed. This article concludes with a series of recommendations to facilitate a better graduate school experience for international students.