Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the Academy [Paperback]

Jane Roland Martin (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 041592488X | ISBN-13: 978-0415924887 | Publication Date: September 1999 | Edition: 1

This text explores the plight of feminist scholars. The author contends that feminist scholars have traded their idealism and concerns about their lived experience for a place in the academy. She looks at the ways that feminists working in the academy find themselves estranged from each other and how estrangement in general is the "membership fee" the academy exacts on all of its members - and feminist scholars in particular. The book concludes that this dissociation can be stopped only by radically reforming the gendered system on which the academy is based, with feminist scholars leading the fight.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In her foreword to Coming of Age in Academe, Gloria Steinem shares Jane Roland Martin's laments about the current state of the academy, among them the exclusionary theoretical jargon that has taken over academic speech and writing. "Perhaps there should be signs on every road leading to Yale, Harvard, and so on," she suggests, "Beware: Deconstruction Ahead." In her clear, accessible argument about what has happened to women in academe, Martin never stoops to jargon herself. In fact, her devotion to plain speaking may at times remind the reader of George Bernard Shaw's devotion to simplified spelling. But in her 30 years as a college professor and philosopher of education, the author has achieved a clarity of vision that is well served by her unadorned prose. She asserts that "the academy charges an exorbitant admission fee to those women who wish to belong." Even worse, she contends, "in turning male and female members alike away from the lived experience of real people in the real world, and especially from society's desperately urgent problems, the academy creates a brain drain within the culture at large." An intelligent summary of familiar problems that also features some unfamiliar proposals for solutions, Coming of Age in Academe should be required reading for college administrators and feminist scholars from the post-Kristevan to the neo-Bovarian. --Regina Marler

Review

Jane Roland Martin...makes a powerful assessment of the state of women in higher education in Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the Academy...Martin writes with clarity and focus...[She navigates this complex terrain with a competence born of familiarity with both the academy and feminist activism...Coming of Age in Academe is a thought-provoking treatment of the continuing inequality in higher education and how it might be ameliorated...Clearly organized and written in a straightforward manner, this critical reflection of the loss of innocence that accompanies a coming of age should appeal to a wide range of readers. -- Book Notes
For those of us in academe who are concerned with moral education and development across the lifespan, no new book is more important than philosopher Jane Roland Martin's Coming of Age in Academe...Her account is piercingly honest...Jane Roland Martin has written an encouraging and valuable book...Her clear observations, cogent analyses and courageous proposals can renew all of our lives if we so choose. -- Journal of Moral Education
Brilliant and also very timely...Jane Roland Martin is perhaps unique among contemporary feminist scholars in her focus on education and her expertise in the philosophy of education. -- Carol Gilligan, author of In a Different Voice
What I find strongest about this work is its clarity of concepts, use of classic references, the brilliance of [Martin's] insights, and the linking of an individual woman's situation with the education-gender system...Jane Roland Martin is a major figure. -- Jean O'Barr, Duke University
Brilliant and powerful, Jane Roland Martin's Coming of Age in Academe lays bare the foundations of education as we know it. Among other things, she shows how academic feminists, indoctrinated by this system, have unwittingly sacrificed the goal of making a positive difference in women's lives. Essential reading. -- Jane Tompkins, author of A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned
In this brilliant and courageous book, Jane Roland Martin speaks to the heart of the women's movement--joining women inside and outside the father's house of academe and reminding us that education is the road to liberation. -- Carol Gilligan, author of In A Different Voice
Coming of Age is required reading for everyone who cares deeply about gender equality and the education of women. Jane Roland Martin's compelling comparison of women in the academy to 19th century immigrants in the US, as well as her elegant analysis of the ways in which the academy estranges its members from women, cast the subject of women's higher education in a brilliant new light. -- Bernice Sandler, Senior Scholar in Residence at The National Association for Women in Education
Coming of Age in Academe is a unique and welcome contribution to the subject of equal rights for women in the academy. Jane Martin has the breadth of view of the philosopher, and the practical experience of a woman with long service as a university professor. Her book is a provocative assessment of how things are, as well as a call to action for the achievement of genuine equality for women. -- Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States
Coming of Age in Academe is a thought-provoking treatment of the continuing inequality in higher education and how it might be ameliorated. --Harvard Educational Review volume 70 number 2 2000.
Brilliant and powerful, Jane Roland Martin's Coming of Age in Academe lays bare the foundations of education as we know it. Among other things, she shows how academic feminists, indoctrinated by this system, have unwittingly sacrificed the goal of making a positive difference in women's lives. Essential reading. -- Jane Tompkins, author of A Life in School: What the Teacher Learned
Martin's passionate treatise leaves us teetering between the radical promise of full feminist participation in the academy and the fundamental price of trying to claim a home within powerful patriarchal structures. -- SIGNS: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society

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Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Routledge; 1 edition (September 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 041592488X
• ISBN-13: 978-0415924887
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,600,248 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Crossing Bridges, November 29, 1999

By 

Jodie S. Holmberg - See all my reviews

This review is from: Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the Academy (Paperback)

This is truly a wonderful book! It's the one so many of us have been seeking. Its appeal has a broad stroke: to in-the-home workers, off-to-the-office workers, to students, and to those in Academe. Don't misunderstand me: this is no feel-good book; it tells it like it is and somehow that's reassuring. It's reassuring because someone out there is representing us. Someone has the scholarship, the background, the style, and yes, the humanity to say it for us. It makes me proud to be an "equal gender."

". . . good philosophy was not supposed to shed light on everyday problems" says Prof. Martin. For those of us who can't live through the day without "good philosophy" reading her book provides the path to sanity. Educators are a lonely lot up there, out there, on the line of fire; just you and a whole class of whatever age, background, and ability. Take my hand, says this book. Let's go there together. I'm happy to continue the bridge-crossing begun, for me, with Prof. Martin in her seminal book,"The Schoolhome." I look forward, and across, to the other truly "essential" shore, when the next bridge beckons us to cross.