From the issue dated November 2, 2001
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Why 'Family First' Is Not a Win for Academic FeministsBy PAULA M. KREBSA job applicant wrote to me recently to say that she is willing to leave her tenure-track university position to teach on a temporary contract at my college. She wants to do this, she wrote, because her husband got hired by a university near mine, they have a young child, and she believes the family should be together. That job applicant must have assumed I'd be sympathetic. Who wouldn't be in favor of a young family being together? So why did the letter make me, a mother and a feminist, so angry? The application arrived in the midst of other interactions I've had recently with female job-seekers, interactions in which marital status and child care seemed to be at the top of the agenda for negotiations. I didn't bring those issues up. I'm not allowed to, and I agree with the reasoning behind the law that prevents me. Issues about personal lives should have no bearing on whether or not I hire people. When these candidates raised their family issues in our discussions about their jobs, I found myself seeing them as unprofessional. Some feminist colleagues, who chair departments at other schools, have said that my hostility toward female candidates' declaring their marital and parental status is, in effect, antifeminist. After all, feminists have fought for years to make it possible for women to have personal lives as well as professional lives. Who am I to ask young women to put the personal back into the closet? Since being challenged by my peers on the issue, I've been thinking a lot about that young applicant and what she might represent. Perhaps she had complicated reasons for leaving her tenure-track job, reasons that were based in an egalitarian deal with her husband. But what I keep returning to is this: All I know about the candidate is what she told me, and what she told me was that she was putting her career after her husband's. She could have simply said that she was leaving for "personal" or "family" reasons, without declaring her marital status and motherhood. Should I have ignored what looked to me like typical feminine self-sacrifice and assumed, as someone suggested to me, that because the woman had already gotten a tenure-track job in a tough market, she'd probably be a good hire? Of course, it's not only women who follow men to jobs -- we all can tell stories of men who have followed wives, or people who have followed samesex partners. What I'm taking issue with is women job candidates identifying their heterosexuality and motherhood, two absolutely standard cultural prescriptions for women, in their job-application processes. To attempt to negotiate for a spousal hire is a different matter, full of its own difficulties, whether or not the spouse conforms to cultural expectations. For generations, the profession demanded that female academics either forgo a family life or pretend we had none, as male academics did. A woman who recently retired from my own department started her academic career living in the dorms with students, as was required for unmarried female faculty members. I am not nostalgic for the days when personal concerns, especially children, were forbidden subjects. But I do think that women are not so secure in our place in the academy that we can afford to risk being seen as taking our careers less seriously than our personal lives. But again, why shouldn't a woman expect a job to accommodate her family? Isn't the personal political? Why, I asked myself, did I admire the job applicant at a friend's university, who took time out from an interview to nurse her infant, when I was annoyed with the candidate at my own college who was straightforward in explaining that she wanted the job so she could be with her husband and child? I suppose it seemed to me that the breast-feeding candidate was the more feminist, the one who was forcing the academy to recognize women's lives but was pursuing a career full-throttle at the same time. The other, it seemed to me, was demanding no change from the institution but instead was asking me to approve of and participate in the most conventional kind of prioritizing: his career and their family before her career. Perhaps what it comes down to is this: Who is willing to force institutional change so that any number of personal lives can be accommodated in the academy? What actions serve individuals and what actions change institutions for everyone? If we start not with the powerless job applicant but with the tenured, or at least tenure-track, professor, we can see that those of us who have some power need to start demanding that our workplaces accommodate relationships, parenthood, and other elements of the personal. We who are past needing campus day care, job sharing, or more flexible schedules must advocate for those who will need them. Only when we force change in the institution will our job applicants be able to assume that the jobs we offer will be compatible with a family life of any sort. At my own institution, the administration was happy to arrange for domestic-partner benefits for gay and lesbian couples, once the faculty asked for them. But untenured junior professors or closeted staff members could not agitate on such an issue; the impetus had to come from people who already had some power. I try to mention our domestic-partner policy to job applicants so they don't have to identify themselves as gay or lesbian. If we had a day-care facility, I would mention that as well, so applicants wouldn't have to ask. Would building an institution that made it easier to have both a personal and a professional life prevent young women from selling their careers short for the sake of heterosexual romance or domesticity? Straight men, and gay partners, too, sometimes sacrifice career for relationship, of course -- but that's different. In our patriarchal society, the default position is that a woman's career takes second place to a man's. A gay relationship has no such default position on the basis of gender, and a straight man who sacrifices his career goals is countering societal expectations, not bowing to them. Although feminism has created big changes in the canon in many disciplines, it has a long way to go before it transforms the workplace of higher education itself. In the American academy, women do not yet have the full right to a career and a family, because men are not yet seen as having the full responsibility for both. Things are changing, to be sure. A young man in my department brings his baby to all kinds of formal campus events. He changes her diaper in the department office and brings her to meetings and readings, and he is establishing in the collective mind of the campus the idea that male faculty members can be primary caregivers for their children. Of course, we all should be able to have personal and family lives along with high-powered professional careers. But we need to challenge our own institutions if that is to happen. The young father in my department may be unaware that, in doing what women could not get away with, he is exercising a kind of male privilege. Though he may not know it, bringing his child to campus does not threaten his professional status at our progressive college -- a man who is taking responsibility for child care is seen as nonsexist, and nonsexist is seen as good. I benefited from a similar privilege when my daughter was a baby: Everyone thought it was exciting to have a lesbian mom on the faculty, and as I was not the biological mom, my taking responsibility for child care was also seen as nontraditional. When it comes to child care or care of elders, women have long been in the cultural role of primary caregiver. For married women to embrace that role at the expense of career possibilities is not a challenge to sexism. That is not to say that we should not be primary caregivers; it is just to say that it is not a feminist victory for us to choose to do so. Here's a difference between personal and institutional success: It is not a win for feminism when faculty members can bring their children to campus on school holidays; it would be a success for feminism if the university provided backup child care for such occasions. Feminism does alter our perception of the relation between the personal and the professional, but feminism has to go further, to force change on an institutional level. Female professors and would-be professors owe a lot to those who will follow us. We owe them a more family-friendly workplace, and we owe them a profession in which women and men take their jobs and their personal lives equally seriously. Ours is neither a feminist nor a postfeminist profession. A job candidate who describes her job search in terms of her family obligations, as did the candidate I described at the beginning of this article, is relying on the sisterhood of a female department chair, or the sympathy of a male one. That is risky business. Feminist or not, many department chairs will have trouble respecting a woman who declares that she puts someone else's interests ahead of her own. The ideology of self-sacrifice has long been pushed on women. Trust me on that; I'm a Victorianist. When it comes down to it, interrupting the wife's career trajectory instead of the husband's is the same choice now as it was in 1856, when Elizabeth Barrett Browning created Aurora Leigh, who shocked her beloved Romney by refusing to put his career before her own. If, a century and a half later, you want to put Romney's career before yours, that's your right, of course. But it's your risk as well. Paula M. Krebs is the chairwoman of the department of English at Wheaton College, in Massachusetts. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Page: B24
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Copyright © 2001 by The Chronicle of Higher Education