Three years ago, The Chronicle interviewed me for an article about professors who share tenure-track appointments. "She has all the usual reasons for wanting to split an appointment," the article reported, "a spouse in the English Department, a 17-month-old son, a desire to further her literary scholarship."
Three years later, I still have that son -- he's 4 now -- and a desire to further my scholarship. My tenure case is on the docket at Oberlin College as I write. What I no longer have is a spouse in the English Department. I've been separated for almost two years; by June, my divorce should be final.
Since that article appeared, I've seen others about professional women choosing to share a job or work part time in order to balance career and motherhood. Rarely does the question arise of what might happen should those women divorce. The prospect of becoming a single mom is simply not mentioned.
In the debate over whether feminism was about giving women the opportunity to have it all -- family and career -- or simply to have choices -- more family and less career, no career at all -- divorce lurks uncertainly. I have searched in vain for stories of other women in my situation. I have bitten my tongue (or at least my nails, when I couldn't hold that tongue) as friends have entered into similar job-sharing arrangements. And I have tried hard, and unsuccessfully, to convert my permanent part-time position into a full-time one.
Without my husband's income, my half-time salary doesn't cut it, even though salaries at Oberlin College are good and Ohio is generally a cheap place to live. So far, I have been able to obtain temporary work at the college to pad my salary. Oberlin has a long history of creating part-time, tenure-track positions, and it treats its growing number of part timers quite well. When part timers take on additional work, our salaries are calculated exactly as if we were full timers. That means that if I double my workload in a given year, I receive twice my base pay. I've done this for the past three years, and thus have not had to confront making ends meet on a half-time salary.
However, I haven't been able to transform those temporary fixes into a permanent full-time position. Oberlin doesn't have a surplus of unused full-time positions to hand out. And in recent years, my institution, like many others, has gone from a place of plenty to a place of want. Extra work has been harder and harder to come by.
How does, or how should, a college respond to divorce? Should it create job shares in reverse -- call them divorce reups, perhaps -- so that if an academic couple splits, the partner with a half-time appointment gets a full-time one? I'm not sure. Sometimes I think Oberlin has no obligation to secure me permanent full-time work. After all, I chose part-time work, and I am a highly educated, professional woman who likes to see herself, and be seen by others, as independent and self-sufficient.
I wouldn't have accepted a part-time position on the tenure track had I not been part of a package deal with my then-husband, so in hindsight, I can't help questioning the wisdom of spousal hires. Having blurred the line between the professional and the personal when we make hires, shouldn't we also do so after the fallout? Perhaps we should cease taking employees' personal lives into account in making hiring decisions.
When it became clear that I needed full-time work, and that it wasn't going be dropped into my lap, I went on the academic job market. If being a long-distance academic couple is complicated, and if having children complicates that more, being a long-distance divorced academic couple with a child is nauseatingly complex.
Right now my soon-to-be ex and I share custody of our son. We split his daycare, medical, and other expenses. I receive no spousal support. I have had to ponder which to privilege -- remaining geographically near my son's father or securing a reliable living wage. And if I were to leave, with full custody of my son during the school year, would I be able to prosper in a full-time, untenured position? Then again, staying put carries no promises, either: Given my husband's new life, he could decide to move, leaving me with custody of my son during the school year and too little money.
In the last few years, as I've maneuvered to get extra work assignments at Oberlin, I also developed a new program there, brought in some modest grant money to finance it, and convinced the institution to employ me above my half-time status to direct it.
For academic 2004-5, I've pieced together a sabbatical and administrative work to earn a full-time salary. So I've managed to avoid living on my half-time salary for one more year. Still, this hustling is exhausting, (not to mention the fatigue attendant upon going through a divorce, helping raise a preschooler, and, of course, being an untenured faculty member). For academic 2005-6 and beyond, I only have a half-time contract.
That means that in the fall I will probably go on the market again, this time with a school-age child, and, thus, even more reluctance to relocate. If I am tenured, I will be even less mobile. So in addition to trying to keep myself marketable as a scholar and teacher and developing administrative experience, I've begun researching alternative careers. Unfortunately, good academic institutions don't always sit within prosperous regions. I live in a rural, depressed area, where desirable nonacademic jobs are scarce.
Left behind in the exigency of finding more work, of course, is the question of whether or not I would prefer to stay home to spend more time with my son. In this regard I've been lucky, and my decision to become a professor has proved a wise one. Academics have flexible schedules, and my colleagues have been accommodating, so I don't feel as if I've missed too much of my son's early years because of work.
In choosing part-time work, I had access to my husband's full-time income. From the standpoint of "the personal is political," that fact didn't bother me then. Now it does.
Should I have known better? My mother, one of three women in her 1961 law-school graduating class, worked full time while I was growing up. My female graduate-school mentors and senior colleagues -- many of them mothers, too -- had to fight hard to obtain any tenure-track position.
Was I cavalier about dismissing the opportunity that those women had created for me? I chose the half-time option; I could have taken my chances as a full-time candidate during the hiring process, rather than join with another finalist and proffer myself as half of a split appointment. At the most critical juncture in my career, I decided upon part-time work. When I wondered at the time if I might later want to work full time, I dismissed any worry, sure that I could always convert my half-time gig into a full-time one. And never once did I consider the possibility that I might not be able to depend upon my husband's salary.
In an article in The New York Times Magazine last fall about well-educated women who have chosen to "opt out" of professional careers, the work-and-family pundits are quoted as saying that we as a society are much better at exit solutions than re-entry ones. I agree.
If, in 2000, my job-sharing arrangement was newsworthy because it presaged a trend, perhaps my experience now, three years later, does as well. But in the debate over feminism and the decision to work part time or not at all, divorce must become more prominent.
I feel somewhat foolish that I left myself without independent financial means. Why are so many young professional women -- including just about all my friends who are mothers, every one an heir to feminism and some the children of divorce -- failing to take a hard-nosed view of what might happen down the line? Why didn't I? How have I, a 37-year-old woman who thought I would be able to have it all -- professional success, financial independence, and a family -- gotten myself into this mess?
