Faculty Wives Research Articles

Nostalgia for the Belief in a Female-Friendly Academic World to Come

Abstract In the academic novel of the 1980s, which Elaine Showalter dubs the feminist towers, women characters are not limited to beautiful and seductive students or faculty wives, whose husbands’ academic career appears to be also their own goal. Although the very presence of women in academia is often interpreted as a threat to the male reign over the ‘small world,’ female scholars are determined to expose and fight against gender inequity and inequality in order to be perceived and valued as fully-fledged scholars. Paradoxically, even if women are considered serious candidates for different university positions, they cannot indulge in the same intense pleasures of academic life as their male counterparts due to the overpowering feeling of being the other. An analysis of female scholar characters and their diverse attitudes towards feminism is based on two academic mystery novels written in the 1980s, Death in a Tenured Position by Amanda Cross and Graves in Academe by Susan Kenney. It is followed by an investigation of the reasons making academics feel nostalgia for the university of the 1980’s, i.e. the milieu before the emergence of the protective power of the Me Too movement and reports on sexual harassment of women in academia published by the NASEM.

Has the University Always Been “Neoliberal”?

Has the University Always Been “Neoliberal”?

Mary Quayle Innis: Faculty Wives' Contributions and the Making of Academic Celebrity

Mary Quayle Innis (1899–1972) was instrumental in forging the career and legacy of her husband, Harold Adams Innis (1894–1952). Her labours on his behalf included typing, editing, writing, researching, preparing indices, curating his papers, revising his publications, and bringing his manuscripts to press. Quayle also ran errands, shopped, did laundry, prepared food, and provided care for Innis and their four children. She further often networked and hosted academic gatherings. All of this work made it possible for Innis to publish prolifically, advance his career, and become central to the English-Canadian academic canon. This article argues that it is time to give Quayle the credit she is due. It is also time to re-evaluate the importance of caring labour within the academy.

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Turns Forty! Reflections from Former Editors

Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies Turns Forty!Reflections from Former Editors Kathi George (bio), Alanna Preussner (bio), Elizabeth Jameson (bio), Louise Lamphere (bio), Jane Slaughter (bio), Sue Armitage (bio), Patricia Hart (bio), Karen Weathermon (bio), Susan E. Gray (bio), and Gayle Gullett (bio) Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies is celebrating its fortieth anniversary. To help us commemorate this impressive achievement, we invited former editors of Frontiers to share their experiences in creating and reinventing the journal. We asked about their favorite memories as well as their views of how the field of women’s studies has evolved over the past forty years. Every movement for social change needs some expendable people. People willing to give up financial gain and/or professional advancement for the cause. As a founding member of the Frontiers Editorial Collective, I was expendable because the University of Colorado, our first home, had no way to punish me for my actions. In the spring of 1974, I was not a graduate student, a faculty member, an adjunct faculty member, a tenure-track professor, a staff secretary, or a faculty wife at cu. Of all the members of the Frontiers founding editorial board, I was the only one with nothing to lose: an independent, self-supporting feminist willing to work for free for thirteen years. Along with a total lack of respect for authority, this nothing-to-lose status and a sense of “situational ethics” served me well as one of the first Frontiers editors and as her first publisher. Lyin’, cheatin’, and stealin’—these are among my favorite memories during the early years at Frontiers. With a touch of humor and a wave at country-western song lyrics, I write from the perspective of forty years about the risks I was willing to take and the lengths I was willing to go to in order to help launch a journal with a unique purpose—to try to bridge the gap between academia and the real world. [End Page 194] I was the only member of the founding committee for the Women Studies Program and Frontiers who had been a staff secretary at cu. As such, I knew how the University’s financial system functioned from the inside. I knew what a Code 3 account was and how to open one, so I did that for Frontiers. A Code 3 account was an independent, self-funded account that operated outside the supervision of the dean or the chancellor or the budget office. Our self-funding at the journal was to come from subscriptions, ads, and/or grants. If you had a Code 3 account at cu, you were not allowed to have an outside business account at a commercial bank in Boulder. I cheerfully opened one of those, too, using my own social security number this time. Technically, this was “illegal.” Frontiers never had any money. Our subscriptions barely paid for printing and postage for three issues a year. And since we were not an official part of the Women Studies Program, we got no funding from them. Eventually, the Code 3 account slipped into the red. This went on undetected for quite a while. Years. The deficit was small, but still … The cheatin’ continued. To save money on postage, we used a special library rate that was restricted to use by nonprofit libraries to send books back and forth to each other. My friend Robbie in the vast cu Mail Services Room winked at me as he processed trays of outgoing issues of Frontiers. I had a rubber stamp made (“library rate”) and used the correct postage. As long as the trays arrived in zip-coded order, Robbie sent the issues out and on their way to individual subscribers. So that leaves stealin’—my personal favorite. In the beginning, Women Studies and Frontiers were friends. The two entities were founded almost simultaneously and by many of the same women. Faculty in Women Studies served on the editorial board of Frontiers, including the first two chairwomen. But when they left, a cabal of women sociologists took control of the Program. Carpetbaggers, these women were not feminists and had been no help during the establishment of the...

“The Hand that Rocks the Cradle Should Rock the U. of C.”: The Faculty Wife and the Feminist Era

This article analyzes struggles among women at the University of Chicago to rearticulate their role on campus in the 1960s and 1970s. In those years, feminist politics generated a controversy between female students and instructors who sought access to the university on their own terms and the faculty wives who proclaimed the value of their supportive labors. The wives argued that their unpaid work for their families and the university earned them a respected role on campus. Feminists countered that women should instead seek recognition as men’s peers. Administrators chafed against the new climate of women’s liberation. In the end, feminists won new access to academic jobs but were frustrated in their campaigns for more systemic changes. This partial success helped to remake the domestic labor that facilitates academic careers as a private concern, thus marginalizing the reproductive labor that still typically falls to women—even those who teach and study alongside of men.

Editor’s Introduction

Arien Mack Editor’s Introduction IN LIEU OF A TRADITIONAL EDITOR’S NOTE, I WANT TO USE THIS space to remember John Hollander—a remarkable poet, scholar, and teacher, and my good friend. I met John in 1957 when he came to Connecticut College (then Connecticut College for Women), where I was a recent faculty wife and he was a young assistant professor just emerging from the Harvard Junior Fellows program. We soon became friends, and John quickly became an important part of my life, some­ one from whom I learned many things and who was as loyal a friend as one could have. He and his wife saw me through the death of my husband in 1958. Soon thereafter we all left Connecticut College for New York City, where we continued to see each other with a frequency that increased when some years later I married someone who was a good friend ofJohn’s. John was extremely important to me as editor of Social Research. A true polymath, he was always ready to talk about and suggest themes for possible issues and the best people to write about them. Because of his seemingly unlimited interests, the topics we discussed ranged widely, far beyond the normal reaches of literature and the social sciences. It was John with whom I first discussed the possibility of organiz­ ing a public conference as the basis for an issue of Social Research. His enthusiasm for the idea and his help in realizing it were responsible not only for our first conference in 1988, In Time of Plague: The History and Social Consequences of Lethal Epidemic Diseases, which we held at the height of the hysteria about the AIDS epidemic, but for many others that followed as well, each of which also became a special issue of Social Research. He often came up with conference themes that we worked Editor’s Introduction xxi on together with other people who came to our extraordinary plan­ ning meetings, for whom he was very much the magnet. It would be hard to forget John’s contribution to our conferences, Home: A Place in the World, or In the Company ofAnimals because he was the magician who crafted what were among our very best conferences and issues. In all John spoke at seven Social Research conferences. We are now coming up on our thirtieth. There never would have been a first without him. John’s importance to the journal and as an extraordinarily learned and generous friend are things for which I will always be grateful. xxii social research ...

How Being Female Influenced My Professional Experiences and Growth

In this paper I describe some of my professional experiences as a female, both as a graduate student and throughout my career. My own experience was unique because I began graduate school a few months after arriving in the U.S. with limited knowledge of English in a very competitive and demanding program , in addition to the fact that I was a faculty wife in that department.A major dilemma in achieving a successful academic career involves finding an optimal balance between the demands of a career and those of motherhood. In earlier years the burden of compromises dictated by the needs of children customarily fell on the shoulders of women, and this often delayed the development of their careers. This has changed some over the years as many couples share child-rearing responsibilities, but remains a hurdle for many professional women.While institutional biases and conflicting demands still produce special challenges to women who strive to make significant contributions to their fields, such women are more in charge of their careers today than they were 30 or 40years ago. But in my experience, the achievement of contributing significantly to knowledge in the field, for both men and for women, involves quite a few sacrifices.

Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada (review)

Reviewed by: Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada Heather Murray Paul Stortz and E. Lisa Panayotidis, editors. Historical Identities: The Professoriate in Canada. University of Toronto Press. x, 438. $70.00 At first glance, the contention of this volume appears counter-intuitive: that the professoriate is the under-examined element in analyses of higher education. This statement may slight the amour-propre of faculty members, who see themselves as central to the university; indeed, as composing the university (although the erosion of peer governance should have put paid to this utopian notion). But, according to editors Paul Stortz and Lisa Panayotidis, 'in previous studies, the professoriate has been treated opaquely, in roundabout ways, without concentrating on the agent itself' by researchers concerned with larger institutional questions. The intent here is to put the professorial horse back in the front of the academic cart. If previous work has operated too generally, it would be equally unwise to compensate by concentrating on individual scholars, however interesting those careers might be. (A focus on 'great men' and their inferred impact already is a weakness of English-Canadian intellectual historiography.) The professoriate is not the driving force, nor, to continue the motif, is it in the driver's seat. The intent is to relocate professors as 'agents' without seeing their actions as unfettered or automatically causal. Rather, the editors assert that 'the culture of the professoriate in particular time and space does not separate environment and agent' (8). This is what the title term Historical Identities is meant to convey. (Pierre Bourdieu's conceptualization of 'disposition' would be relevant here: actions are largely determined by material circumstances, yet personal differences help to account for dispersions in the cultural – or institutional – field.) The editors detail [End Page 129] potential avenues of research for those wanting to follow this analytical middle way. This route is not taken by all of the essayists, but what Historical Identities lacks in theoretical cohesion, it gains in variety. William Bruneau surveys international scholarship on the professoriate and assesses the state of the art. Michiel Horn challenges the myth of professorial apoliticality with the stories of scholars running for public office, as does Steve Hewitt's research on faculty who were targets or informants in 'cold war' on-campus surveillance. E. Lisa Panayotidis also shows the professoriate in the public eye, through a visual culture analysis of the be-gowned and bewhiskered caricatures in the student annual Torontonensis. This volume is noteworthy for its geographic diversity and for escaping from University of Toronto–centricity, which commonly occurs, given the depth of that provincial university's archive. Barry Moody narrates the nineteenth-century battle over the Didactics appointment at Acadia, setting the contretemps in its financial, political, and theological networks. Malcolm MacLeod's statistical study of Memorial faculty during the post-war period of exponential growth reveals shifting demographics, while Donald Fisher's more anecdotal study of Bishop's in the same period tracks changes to traditional academic culture. Thérèse Hamel examines the devolution of the Normal Schools in Quebec, and the universities' assumption of educational credentialing, from the point of view of the faculty affected. Gender, sexuality, and family background also receive consideration. Elizabeth M. Smyth details the work of the women's Roman Catholic teaching orders and their arduous transition into higher education, and Dianne M. Hallman focuses on the teaching vocation of one woman religious, Irene Poelzer. Marianne Ainley offers biographical accounts of some pioneering women in mid-twentieth-century science faculties, while Alison Prentice (who has long insisted that 'support' staff receive their academic due) exposes the dependency of male professors on the unacknowledged work of the 'faculty wife.' Cameron Duder's is a groundbreaking study of lesbian and female-affiliated faculty, centred on the personal papers of microbiologist Frieda Fraser. In a closing study, Paul Stortz has analyzed the composition of the University of Toronto faculty at mid-twentieth century to discern which formative factors in early life underpinned their professional choices. A useful selective bibliography completes the collection. Historical Identities in total makes a strong argument for placing the professoriate under the analytic lens. As the contributors would themselves note, more research is required...

BOOK REVIEW: James Covert.A VICTORIAN MARRIAGE: MANDELL AND LOUISE CREIGHTON. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2000.

Mandell Creighton (1843-1901) and Louise von Glehn Creighton (1850-1936) are familiar to diverse Victorianists, as they circulate through many texts. Mandell, born in [End Page 378] Carlisle, educated at Durham Grammar School and Merton College, Oxford, became an Oxford don (1867-74), a northern vicar (1874-84), Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge (1884-91), Bishop of Peterborough (1891-96), and finally Bishop of London (1897-1901); he was the first editor of the English Historical Review (1885-91) and author of, among many other books, an important six-volume History of the Papacy (1894). Louise, born in Sydenham of German and Scottish descent, held fewer august public positions, of course, but was a prolific author of popular history; she was an active figure in women's philanthropic and reform organizations, including the Girls' Friendly Society, the National Union of Women Workers, various social purity organizations, and forums discussing the role of women in the Church of England. She may remain well known to contemporary scholars less for any individual role or publication than for her presence in diverse texts, from memoirs recalling her as a young and aesthetic faculty wife in Oxford, through her years of appearances on the rosters of various organizations, through glimpses of her in the diaries of Beatrice Webb and Virginia Woolf.

An American poet in Paris: Pauline Avery Crawford and the Herald Tribune

An American Poet in is a literary biography of Pauline Avery Crawford, a remarkable American expatriate who wrote for the Paris edition of the New York Tribune in the 1930s and 1940s. Interspersed in the biography are numerous quotations from Crawford's poetry and letters, along with an account of her fascinating life in Paris, a life that included the turbulent years before, during, and after World War II.Crawford was reared in the frontier town of Fort Collins, Colorado, went east to attend college, and then became a faculty wife. Her early happiness was marred by tragedy when her husband committed suicide, leaving her with two small boys, and her sister, whom she had joined in Paris, died of tuberculosis. Crawford contracted acute articular rheumatism and had to spend two long, painful years in the American Hospital in Neuilly. Despite the loss of a leg, this widow with two young children carved out a new life for herself in the pages of the Paris Herald Tribune. Therein she recorded the events of those dramatic pre- and postwar years in both poetry and prose.As a constant contributor to the Mailbag, the column of letters to the editor, Crawford became a celebrity in the Anglo-American community even though she advocated American intervention in the war in a newspaper whose readership was largely isolationist. In the postwar years, the editor asked her to create a column that he dubbed Our Times in Rhyme. In this column, which she wrote until shortly before her death in 1952, she provided an amusing, sometimes sarcastic, and often cheering commentary on world events and life in Paris, leavened with some of the more serious sonnets she had always loved to write.Well informed and well written, An American Poet in throws light on a particular time and place as seen through the eyes of one extraordinary woman, in an unusual and pioneering American newspaper. Crawford's poetry and wit still sparkle, the controversies in which she indulged remain of interest, and her detailed description of life in occupied Paris is especially compelling.

Thorstein Veblen’s Neglected Feminism

Critics have rarely failed to remark that Thorstein Veblen was quite the gallant. The story goes, for example, that in 1905 the dean of the University of Chicago called Veblen into his office to inform the young professor that he was being dismissed for having dallied with the wives of various colleagues. The dean began by saying, We have a problem with the faculty wives. Oh yes, I know, Veblen allegedly rejoined, with a solemn shake of the head. They're terrible. I've had them all. Veblen left the school at the end of that semester. Despite this presumably chastening experience, Veblen continued to philander. No sooner had he arrived at his new appointment at Stanford than he was forced to resign under circumstances similar to those at Chicago [Tilman 1992, 31. The new episode led him to exclaim publicly, What is one to do if the woman moves on you? [Lerner 1948, 9; Dorfman 1934, 295]. Following this incident, Stanford President David Starr Jordan wrote to University of Chicago President Harry Pratt Judson:

Revising the Biography of Thorstein Veblen

It is both fitting and reassuring that this revisionist treatment of Thorstein Veblen has been written from outside the academy by a couple with more than eight decades of life experience?fitting because it is acade micians who have distorted Veblen's place in American higher learning; reassuring because it demonstrates the capacity of mature lay intellect to address the errors of institutional scholarship. Indeed, Henry and Elizabeth Jorgensen have accomplished some of the scholarly sleuthing that creden tialed Veblenists ought to have done decades ago. A central problem in assessing Veblen's intellectual legacy is the rela tionship between his life and his work. Already during his lifetime contem poraries sought to diminish the import of his ideas by demeaning his charac ter, a relatively effective device given the singularity of his personality and his penchant for challenging established Victorian verities. It was Veblen's association with women that elicited the open rebuke of university adminis trators and other tightly corseted members of the Victorian establishment, although it was his critique of prevailing business practices that most dis turbed them. While J. P. Diggins and others have propagated the notion that Veblen brought down the wrath of his academic employers by challeng ing their manliness (recall Veblen's apocryphal retort to University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper about alleged intimacies with faculty wives: "I've tried them all. They are no good."1), it was his public dissection of Guilded Age social mores as reflections of the economic order, including gender relations, that won him the enmity of the captains of industry and higher learning. Imputed sexual peccadilloes legitimated his dismissal, in every sense. The fancied accounts of Veblen's erotic exploits have a momentum all their own, despite the lack of credible evidence and recent scholarship

Twenty Years on: "A Literature of Their Own" Revisited

In 1965, when I began to do research for my Ph.D. dissertation on Victorian women writers, feminist criticism did not exist. Virginia Woolf's letters and diaries were scattered and unpublished . Scholars still called Elizabeth Gaskell Mrs. and Frances Burney Fanny. No one edited women's studies journals, or compiled bibliographies of women's writing. At the University of California at Davis, where I was studying, Theory was not even a shadow on the sunny horizon, and the New Criticism, F.R. Leavis, Northrop Frye, and seven kinds of ambiguity marked the boundaries of my critical sophistication. I had chosen my thesis topic in part out of lingering anger at my undergraduate college, Bryn Mawr, where English majors were required to read every tenth-rate male Romantic poet and Elizabethan dramatist, but virtually no women, and in part out of my own devotion to the Victorian women writers. Professional opportunities for academic women seemed so limited in the mid1960s that I felt paradoxically freed to write about the books I liked, rather than the ones most likely to get me a job. Gwendolyn Needham, my thesis adviser at the University of California at Davis, was sympathetic to my ideas and demanding about my scholarship, but my dissertation, The Double Standard: Criticism of Women Writers in Victorian Periodicals 1845-1880, was a hybrid, an attempt to write about women in an outmoded and inadequate critical vocabulary. Princeton University, where I actually wrote most of the dissertation as a faculty wife from 1966 on, did not hire women, but it had the fabulous Parrish collection of Victorian fiction, and all the Victorian journals were still on the open shelves, although only the first volume of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals was available to help me identify anonymous reviewers. By 1970, when I got my Ph.D. and had my second child during the same month, the mood of the country had changed, and I had become an active member of the women's liberation movement. I had spent the summer of 1968 in Paris with my husband and daughter, living in a communal household of French, English, and American students and professors in the aftermath of the politically transformative ve'nements of May, and I had been involved with the anti-war protests at the MLA that December. In Princeton, a branch of N.O.W. opened in 1969, and I joined immediately. There were only seventeen of us at the beginning, but we were full of energy and organized a daycare center (still running), consciousness-raising groups, a newsletter which I edited, a booklet on sex-stereotyping in children's books, a state conference on women's rights, and trips to meetings with groups in New York and Philadelphia. By 1970, I was president of the group, had started writing for Radical Feminism, had joined the advisory board of the Feminist Press, and was editing an anthology called Women's Liberation and Literature. At Douglass College, the women's college of Rutgers

Academic Faculty Wives and Systemic Discrimination —Antinepotism and "Inbreeding"

In the past, the academic careers of women married to professors have often been disadvantaged by anti-nepotism rules in universities and by informal department policies against hiring one's own Ph.D. graduates. To determine if these two systemic forms of discrimination, which especially affect faculty wives, are still operating, a study was made at a large university, the University of Waterloo. UW calendars show that some departments have hired academic spouses and many have hired their own Ph.D.s; however, a survey of UW professors indicates that a sizable number are against hiring spouses in a department and against a department hiring its own Ph.D.s. There is still cause for concern, therefore, if a university wants to hire the best candidate for a position and she happens to be a faculty wife.

Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson , and: Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings (review)

Reviewed by: Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson, and: Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings Nancy Walker Judy Oppenheimer . Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Putnam, 1988. 304 pp. $19.95. Julius Rowan Raper , ed. Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts: A Collection of Her Writings. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1988. 262 pp. $30.00. The opportunity to know more about two of America's most intriguing women writers of the twentieth century is richly—though differently—afforded by these two recent books. Oppenheimer's Private Demons is the first full-length biography of the author best-known for her short story "The Lottery," and Raper's is a collection of previously uncollected nonfiction and one short story written by Glasgow between 1895 and 1941, the most productive decades of the novelist's career. The differences between these two books derive from more than genre, however: Oppenheimer, a journalist, has invested herself in the frequently painful life of Shirley Jackson, attempting with considerable success to understand her subject's unhappy childhood, her deeply committed though tumultuous marriage to critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and the mystical turns of mind that led Jackson to write such works as The Haunting of Hill House and "The Lottery." Raper, on the other hand, is so detached a scholar of Glasgow's work that despite the usefulness of his collection, the sexism of his introductory remarks and the intrusive over-documentation of the text threaten to obscure Glasgow's own work. Private Demons successfully revises the only other extended account of Shirley Jackson's life: Hyman's introduction to The Magic of Shirley Jackson (1966), a paean of praise that belies the fact that at the time he wrote it, two years after Jackson's death at the age of 48, he was married to the much-younger woman he married immediately after her death. Jackson and Hyman had a relationship that would now be termed a codependency; their mutual reliance on alcohol, food, cigarettes—and, in Jackson's case, stimulants and tranquilizers—left scars on their four children, about whom Jackson wrote so amusingly in Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons. Interviews with Jackson's children, along with letters she wrote to the parents from whom she professed to be estranged after she—an overweight, unattractive adolescent—rejected their upper-middle-class values, are important sources for this biography, and Oppenheimer uses them well, bringing a journalist's trained objectivity to bear on essentially subjective material. [End Page 290] Oppenheimer describes the circumstances surrounding the composition of "The Lottery" as a combination of Jackson's mystical proclivities and the stark reality of her position as an "odd" faculty wife in Bennington, Vermont, where Hyman taught at Bennington College. The vitriolic response of readers when the story was published in The New Yorker in 1948 indicated a fictional power at odds with the lack of control over her personal habits that led to Jackson's early death. Oppenheimer convincingly presents Jackson as an unusual combination of what would today be called "supermom" and committed career woman: a fierce defender of her children, an unflagging hostess, and a writer who became increasingly reclusive—even agoraphobic—as staid Bennington came to seem the enemy to her often unorthodox habits and views. Private Demons is readable, almost novelistic. One wishes, however, that dates were provided more frequently in the text; because the reader is seldom located in time, it is, for example, shocking to realize that Jackson died while her children were still adolescents. Still, this is a compelling analysis of a woman who wrote some of the most humorous and most haunting fiction of the mid-twentieth century. Ellen Glasgow's Reasonable Doubts, in contrast, nearly sinks under the weight of its scholarly apparatus, much of which betrays the editor's intent to make Glasgow an interesting female artifact rather than an important American writer, although there is no doubt that Raper, author of two previous books on Glasgow (Without Shelter: The Early Career of Ellen Glasgow and From the Sunken Garden: The Fiction of Ellen Glasgow, 1916 to 1945) speaks with authority. In the Preface and other...

Geographic Constraints on Married Women's Careers

Data from 275 questionnaires and 38 interviews with “faculty wives,” plus 50 questionnaires from “faculty husbands” are analyzed to study how moves for a husband's job or lack of geographic mobility for a wife's own employment may affect women's careers. Women with advanced degrees and greater career commitment are found to experience greater geographic constraint. It is suggested that, as women become more professionalized in training and aspirations, geographic mobility may become a more salient problem in dual-career marriages if one or both spouses are in fields where the market is tight or where geographic moves are necessary for advancement.

The Miller's Wife and the Professors: Questions about the Transactive Theory of Reading

rT HE SCENE: spring at a large midwestern university. 10:15 A.M. A seminar room. Around the long table and in outer rows of seats are gathered a score or so of professorial-looking types from the English department, some senior, some junior. About a quarter are women, some of them, it turns out, faculty wives. They have assembled for a Working Teachshop by the Visiting Fireman. It is the morning after the lecture and party the night before. People are gearing up for the day or, having taught 9:00s, gearing down. Those seated at the table are holding photocopies of a poem. As they banter, they seem to be approaching the morning's exercise in a spirit of curiosity. Let's play the VF's game and see what happens. The VF himself, neatly dressed if slightly hung over, sits in the middle of one long side. He speaks in a friendly but hesitant voice, feeling his way with this group, new to him. He begins by reading the poem aloud:

Baby Bust and Baby Boom: a Study of Family Size in a Group of University of Chicago Faculty Wives Born 1900-1934

After over a century of declining birth rates, the fertility of American women rose during the baby boom of the 1940s and 1950s. The study group, of 60 University of Chicago faculty wives (30 of whom were born in the years 1900-1914 and the remaining 30 in the years 1920-1934) had a pattern of fertility similar to that of the U. S. population in general. Two models are proposed to account for the rise in fertility. Model I is based on Easterlin's hypothesis that postwar affluence, contrasted with remembered poverty during the Depression, made young couples feel able to afford large families. Model II is based on Ryder's finding of a high level of unintended fertility during the baby boom. The study was conducted by means of interviews. The findings support Model II. Case material is presented and possible reasons for the findings are discussed.

The participation of men and women in educational research: Another look

Within recent years the professional status of academic women has been well documented, particularly in terms of graduate school admissions, degrees granted, faculty salaries and promotions, and research productivity (Astin & Bayer, 1972; Tittle, Saario, & Denker, 1975). In addition to such visible and quantifiable activity, in most university communities there are other (married) women who covertly participate in their spouse's career. A survey by LipmanBlumen (1972) showed that a majority of graduate student wives expected to satisfy their achievement needs primarily through the success of their husbands. Papanek (1973) notes that faculty wives, in order to facilitate their husband's success, perform various social duties as well as an assortment of paraprofessional tasks ranging from typing to actual fieldwork. Astin and Bayer (1972) present demographic data which indicate that among married faculty members, men with large families attain higher rank. While allowing that this relationship may result from financial pressures, the authors speculate that these men may also have wives who encourage or assist their career goals. No similar relationship was found for female doctorates. The present study was designed to compare the contributions of men and women to booklength publications in the field of educational psychology. In contrast to other assessments, however, I wanted to look not only at authorship but also at the participation of spouses and others whose involvement has been recognized only informally. A preliminary review of book acknowledgments suggested that participation of both types could be examined by (1) noting the gender of book authors and (2) analyzing the content of their acknowledgments.

Adapting to the revolution of equal opportunity for the handicapped

New Directions for Higher EducationVolume 1979, Issue 25 p. 81-111 Article Adapting to the revolution of equal opportunity for the handicapped Cornelia W. Bailey, Cornelia W. Bailey Cornelia W. Bailey has just finished a year's study of higher education and the 504 regulations for the Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education, on which this chapter is largely based. Mrs. Bailey was instrumental in starting the HEATH Project while employed in Washington, D.C., as public policy associate for the College and University Personnel Association. This chapter also reflects the variety of her experiences with higher education and with government, including two years with the Boston office of the US. War Labor Board and three years with the federally-funded Syracuse University TTT Project on education innovations. She has observed the university scene for more than three decades as a faculty wife and a dean's wife, and has done editing, interviewing and research for her husband, Stephen K. Bailey.Search for more papers by this author Cornelia W. Bailey, Cornelia W. Bailey Cornelia W. Bailey has just finished a year's study of higher education and the 504 regulations for the Sloan Commission on Government and Higher Education, on which this chapter is largely based. Mrs. Bailey was instrumental in starting the HEATH Project while employed in Washington, D.C., as public policy associate for the College and University Personnel Association. This chapter also reflects the variety of her experiences with higher education and with government, including two years with the Boston office of the US. War Labor Board and three years with the federally-funded Syracuse University TTT Project on education innovations. She has observed the university scene for more than three decades as a faculty wife and a dean's wife, and has done editing, interviewing and research for her husband, Stephen K. Bailey.Search for more papers by this author First published: 1979 https://doi.org/10.1002/he.36919792510Citations: 2 AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume1979, Issue251979Pages 81-111 RelatedInformation