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Articles Conference Reviews |
D.37 Women’s Ways of Making ItD.37 Women’s Ways of Making It—or Making Do?: Off and On the Tenure-Track with Children Inspired by the book Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (Routledge, 2008), the presenters on this panel explored the unique challenges female academics face in the field. As one of the presenters noted, academia is largely based on a patriarchal model of work, and women have been expected to fit into this system, often despite their duties as mothers. Consisting of six speakers, the session was organized into commentaries and brief talking points from each presenter on the topic of “making it” in the field. The speakers, all mothers in academic positions, shared personal experiences, critiqued the book, and spoke more broadly on the topic of being a mother and a full-time academic. At the end, there was sufficient time for questions and discussion, in which several audience members shared personal experiences and offered suggestions for what CCCC and academic units can do to support female academics. Written by Michelle Ballif, Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford, Women’s Ways of Making It was previewed in a 2007 CCCC featured panel at which each author along with other female academics spoke about the book and offered their advice for what they termed “making it.” The focus (of the 2007 panel and of the book) was on tenure-track jobs, and the authors generally assumed the audience in 2007 would want to know how to “be successful” by getting and maintaining a tenure-track job at a research-intensive university. Needless to say, this type of position is rare and increasingly becoming extinct, and this emphasis fails to recognize the numerous benefits found in other positions at a variety of colleges and universities. The question and answer session at the end of the 2007 panel got heated, when at one point a woman stood up in the back of the ballroom and stated that she had worked her entire career at a non-tenure track job. She loved what she did and had never wanted to change institutions. Did that mean, she asked the panelists, that she did not “make it”? Was she not “successful” because she did not hold a tenure-track position at a research institution? While the 2010 CCCC panelists’ views of the book were positive in general, some presenters remained critical. Christa Albrecht-Crane critiqued the weaknesses of the authors’ survey. In the book, the authors distributed a survey to female academics in Rhetoric and Composition from across the country, reporting their findings regarding the status of women in the field. However, their survey respondents only emphasized a single academic experience: the R1 institution. Albrecht-Crane noted that of the 131 participants, only half had children, most were Caucasian, all but fourteen held a tenure-track position, and all but five were employed at an institution which offers at least an MA degree. This is not at all representative of the majority of jobs held by female academics in Rhetoric and Composition, according to Albrecht-Crane. Mary P. Sheridan-Rabideau contributed a different perspective by talking about what she viewed as the larger problem of silence among female academics. This silence, she noted, is seen as complicity, and she encouraged audience members to begin discussions of these issues in their own departments as a way to take action. This silence, she explained, is a structural problem in academia in need of broad structural change. As the panelists (and those involved in later discussion) emphasized, however, the first steps can be taken by just one person. In fact, change is happening, as Sheridan-Rabideau reminded the audience of childcare now offered at the conference. It was noted on several occasions during the 2010 panel that much of the book focuses on the research aspect of the job, as the authors attempt to define “making it” in narrow and quite traditional terms. Christine Peters-Cucciarre, another panelist, described her experience reading the book, admitting that she “felt ashamed” because “the way this [book] defines it, I’m not successful [since I’m] in a non-tenure track position.” Panelist Lee Nickoson-Massey then posed several open-ended questions to the audience, taking a critical stance on the words of the title, asking “what do we mean by ‘making it’?” “Who determines ‘it’?” “How do we ‘make it’?” During the question and answer part of the session, panelists and attendees returned to Sheridan Rabideau’s call for change, and several suggestions were offered for how audience members could help to create the structural change needed. There was also discussion of the success of the childcare program at the conference as well as a suggestion that CCCC/NCTE draft a statement regarding the rights of pregnant women and nursing mothers during campus visits. |