Back to the Classroom, Without the Kids

By BARBARA KATZ ROTHMAN

Not only have I made mothering issues the main focus of my scholarly work, but by widely spacing the arrival of my three children, I have been actively mothering across three decades and up the academic ladder, as I climbed from graduate student to full professor. So it is with some authority that I can speak of the way things have changed in academe, for better and for worse, for mothers and for children.

When Daniel, my first child, arrived in the 1970s, I