Finding My Complicated Truth as an Academic Daughter megan pincus kajitani As a former teacher of feminist studies, I can easily tear down the whole have-it-all myth with a few choice words about our flawed patriarchal sys­tem and media spin. Yet this pesky cultural ideal has nagged at me, per­sonally, for many years. That happens […]

martha ellis crone When I was young, my mother told me that I could be anything I wanted to be. I see now that she, mother of two, employed in a series of part-time jobs, may have meant this as encouragement in the face of certain obsta­cles, or simply as a message of hope. But […]

The Long and Winding Road jean kazez I started off my career as a college professor in a promising way, with four tenure-track job offers. Although the job I accepted wasn’t the most pres­tigious, it offered intellectually congenial colleagues and the advantages of big-city living. That is to say: lots of men. I was thirty-five, […]

leslie leyland fields 8:55 a. m. I stand in the front of the classroom, dressed in a navy skirt, maroon blouse, low navy heels. My hair is freshly washed and styled, my face bright with lipstick. I am waiting for my students to arrive. “Hi, Mark, hi, Ivan. Come on in. You guys had your […]

Jennifer cognard-black When I’m at dinner or out for drinks with colleagues, I sometimes joke that my daughter has been orphaned by my profession. It’s a line I picked up from one of my students, a young man named Toby—a student who has the odd distinction of having taken me for seven separate courses (he […]

On Being a Teacher and a Doctor and a Mommy elisabeth rose gruner I walked into the history professor’s office with my two-and-a-half-year-old on my hip and the signature page in my hand. My dissertation was done. The history professor was the last to sign off. I’d first met this professor three years earlier, when […]

I am fifty-three years old. I have three children: Emma (twenty-two), Jacob (seventeen), and Lucy (thirteen). I have had two academic husbands, one with whom I had my two oldest children, and one with whom I had my youngest at the age of forty. I no longer have the husbands. They have moved on to […]

Tillie Olsen and Maternity in the Classroom julia lisella “I Stand Here Ironing,” written in 1961, is Tillie Olsen’s landmark story about the conflicted feelings of a mother who works outside the home and wonders, as she stands ironing her daughter’s dress, what effect her crowded, overburdened life of scrambling to put food on the […]

della fenster The airmail letter arrived five months after the birth of my third child. I had just begun a year-long leave of absence, ostensibly to adjust to mother­hood in a family of five. I hoped to keep my research moving along by writ­ing one short article that year, but that was the full extent […]

What Having a Baby Taught Me about Aristotle, Advanced Degrees, Developmental Delays, and Other Natural Disasters irena auerbuch smith Jordan was conceived shortly before the 1994 Northridge earthquake, and I always wondered afterward if our first crack at conceiving a child literally caused the earth to move. The earthquake hit at 4:30 a. m. on […]