Balancing Act

The Bachelorette in Academe

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By Sara M. Bradshaw

When I received the offer, everyone congratulated me. I had landed a tenure-track job, one of the old-fashioned kind, with a light teaching load and plenty of time for research. What more could a young historian want?

Only one person voiced a concern. My adviser asked hesitantly, "Are you sure that a small town in a rural region is a good place for a single woman?"

Eager to show that I was a dedicated historian, I quickly asserted that Rural Town in a rural state out West would be an OK place for me. Hadn't I moved to Madison, Wis., London, the Bay Area and a whole host of other places by myself? And hadn't I been successful in finding relationships and carving out a social life in those areas? Why should Rural Town by any different?

Even as I answered his question, I worried. As a scholar of 18th-century British history, I knew that jobs in my field were few and far between. I was fortunate to receive any job offer at all. Still, I had serious doubts as I called to accept the position.

That year, the buzz among graduate students was all about the difficulities of being part of a two-career academic couple, and the tensions caused when one partner became the "trailing spouse." Each time I told people about my new job, I was told how fortunate I was that I was single and did not have to worry about finding a job for a partner.

No one thought to raise the issue of how difficult it would be for a single person to live in a rural town in a rural state that emphasizes "family values." And like many single people, I was too embarrassed to point out exactly how worried I was.

I was not single by choice. I had always wanted to marry and I had dated throughout college and graduate school; somehow, I just had not found the right person. Moving to Rural Town would, I was pretty sure, make it even more difficult to find Mr. Right (or Professor Right).

At the orientation for new faculty members that fall, I discovered with a sinking heart that, except for a new faculty member in my own department who was gay, every one of the newly hired male faculty members was married.

Still, I believed that I could make a life for myself. While I studied the 18th century, I lived in modern-day America: The Internet, cheap long-distance phone service, and air travel would help me build a life.

That first year at Rural Town taught me the limits of technology. I was looking for someone with whom I could interact at the end of the day -- not a resident I could e-mail in the nearest major city more than eight hours away. Telephone calls helped but they could not replace an afternoon spent with a friend. Finally, airline tickets proved prohibitively expensive, and traveling anywhere meant changing planes multiple times and spending an entire day in airports.

Technology had done little to transform Rural Town, too. It still lacked theaters, museums, interesting lectures on politics, walking tours, good cafes, and even good bookstores in which I could while away a lazy Saturday. In place of those, the town offered only an eerie silence. I couldn't even find a good nonacademic book group. I had never really understood how isolated certain parts of the country can be until I lived in one of them.

When I was not in the classroom, the silence became deafening and I became clinically depressed. I love to read and I love solitude, but like everyone, I need some social interaction.

My colleagues, on the other hand, often worked at home, and when they came into the department, they shut their doors and hibernated. Having spouses and families at home, they had no need to create social relationships at work. I found myself drifting with my only interaction being with my students or a clerk in the grocery store. I began to wonder if my voice would expire from lack of use.

By year three, I was desperate enough to give up my tenure-track job for a non-tenure-track one -- a two-year appointment as a visiting faculty member with a higher teaching load at a university that had less prestige than my rural college. The university was still in a small town, but the campus was only 40 miles from my hometown and just 80 miles from a major metropolitan area.

My situation, however, improved only marginally. True, I was now able to date, and I commuted nearly every weekend to the large city in order to do so. I was also able to spend time with my family. But my depression continued to deepen.

At some point I began to realize that my problem was exacerbated by the culture of academe. In both of my jobs, I lived in quaint rural college towns with populations under 20,000. Everyone seemed to have partners or families, and those who didn't were students. The towns seemed to have no room for people like me who were neither students nor family members.

Moreover, moving from a tenure-track job to a visiting one only made me more irrelevant on the campus. Academics often candidly admit that they don't bother getting to know visiting professors because the person will move on in a year or two. Two of my 12 colleagues never even bothered to introduce themselves during the two years in which I worked there.

Gradually, I realized that the only solution to my problem was to leave academe. I couldn't wait around for a tenure-track job in a better location that might never materialize. Much as I loved history, I could not sacrifice my life for it. While my transition to the nonacademic world was difficult, I ultimately found a wonderful job in a city I love -- and yes, I found a job that enables me to practice history.

Leaving has given me an opportunity to meet people, among them, Mr. Right. My greatest revelation came, however, not when I met Mr. Right (that was a revelation of a different order) but rather when I met a woman in one of my three book groups (that's the good thing about a city -- you can belong to lots of book groups and none of the members will know that you are seeing others).

Bright, funny, and well-read, Emily had dropped out of a Ph.D. program in history. She was single and working as a librarian. Tentatively I asked her, "But you are so bright and you have such a passion for history, why did you ever drop out of graduate school?"

Her response: "Early on, I realized that academe has no office culture. I know office culture is always seen as a joke but I realized that as a single person, I was going to need some interaction at work. Academe couldn't offer me that -- but a library could."

It took me a while to mull that one over: Librarians are more socially outgoing than academics? Admittedly, there was a little envy on my part, too: If I was so smart, how come I hadn't figured out, as Emily had early on in her graduate career, that I wasn't going to be spending large chunks of my academic career sipping sherry with my colleagues while we discussed a range of issues?