Customer Reviews

Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove

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Although written more than a decade ago, this book is still a valuable reference about the difficulties women in academia face. Based on interviews with 25 tenured women and 35 women off the normal academic career track, the authors discuss recurring themes in the experience of academic women. Arguably, little has changed since the interviews were conducted. Many of these themes indicate that women ascribe to values counter to the academic system, such as cooperation rather than competition, inclusivity rather than exclusivity, relative knowledge rather than absolute knowledge, and an impulse to integrate a work life and a personal life as a wholly natural way to live. The authors suggest that any achievement of equality of women with men in academia is necessarily a revolutionary process because it requires a change in powerful traditional social norms.

Though some people seem set on dividing the universe into arbitrary segments, the universe is not so tidy. This book supposedly is aimed at women working in universities. It is of value to a wider audience, however. It shows the "rules" by which women are expected to play, explains where the rules came from, and shows how female academics have engaged in counter-hegemonic discourse and action. The role of mentoring is emphasized. This is a good source for blue-collar women who assume university professors have it made, for students who intend to teach, for academics of both sexes, and for readers who are starting to suspect they have feminist tendencies.

As a first-generation college student who advanced to a Ph.D. and university faculty position, I can firmly state that this book is an essential read for anyone who wants to know what it's like to be a woman in academia. Had I read it early in my career, there's no doubt that I would have had fewer problems, fewer incidences of my work being ignored and a less traumatic tenure process. The ivory tower experience in academe exists only for men of a certain age and complexion, despite the advances made by women in the last 50 years.