GenX women in higher ed from around the globe

Posts Tagged ‘Feminism’

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Emotional Labor

In Janni's Posts on 2012/05/18 at 00:57

Janni Aragon, writing from Victoria, British Columbia in Canada

I sat on a pedagogy round-table at the International Studies Association in March, and one of the speakers referred to the high cost of emotional labor for the Women’s Studies instructor. Many heads nodded around the room. I do think that emotional labor does not discriminate and that many women faculty, faculty of color and other marginalized groups put in more time with emotional labor. Anecdotally, I perform as much or more emotional labor in Political Science compared to my years in Women’s Studies, but this might be influenced by the fact that I am an Undergraduate Advisor. Now, I know that some readers will agree and a small number might comment, “Show me the data.” Well, there is a genre of higher education literature dedicated to women in academe and other groups noting this phenomena. I am certainly not the first or last to speak to emotional labor.

Last year my teaching observation date was slated for a lecture on violence against women. I had already given the class a trigger warning via email and verbally noted that the array of readings might trigger emotions from students. My colleagues sat at the back of the class, while I lead lecture and facilitated discussion. I ended the class about five minutes early and thanked everyone. The reason for ending the class early was that a student was in the back of the class quietly crying. We chatted and walked back to my office. I will say that I had the appropriate office numbers nearby so that I could give her the referral. This was not the first time in my teaching career that I’ve dealt with this issue and had to help a student in need.

I’ve accompanied students to the police department to report a sexual assault and listened to students explain that the readings or discussion in class triggered old memories for her or him. This is part of the emotional labor of the job. Granted for some students, it’s not issues of violence, but issues related to coming out, finances, a bad break up, eating disorders, and more. My degrees are not in mental health, so I know that it’s best if I listen and then make a referral. Here is the thing – I had never attended a professional development seminar about students and mental health until I was more than 10 years into my career! I am not qualified to help the students with the array of issues that they might have, but I can listen and then find the right person or office that can help them.

Now, thanks to my role as the Chair of the Academic Women’s Caucus, I sit on more committees than I care to count and I have had ample opportunity to go to workshops related to mental health, inclusive work environments, dealing with difficult situations, and other important issues. I do feel better prepared for these moments and here I am, mere months from celebrating my fifteenth year teaching. What I long for though, is more honest conversations about emotional labor in our work. I also want more training on how to deal with the weight of emotional labor, as it is a heavy burden to carry some days.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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Sex, Stars, and Stripes

In Elizabeth's Posts on 2012/04/24 at 02:25

Elizabeth Lewis Pardoe, writing from Evanston, Illinois in the US.

The Big Bang Theory and the Republican Primary have more in common than one might think. The comedy follows a Caltech particle physicist’s pathetic attempts to deal with the irrational world around him. The fictional physicist, Sheldon Cooper, is pure. He wishes only to understand the physical order of the universe without the messy passions that pollute other people’s lives. In Sheldon’s atheistic ideology, disorder replaces sin. Thus, disorderly passions prove repugnant rejections of the good life.

While I adore the program, I struggle with its depiction of academic women.  The men are laughable stereotypes too, but the women bother me more.  Rick Santorum’s opposition to contraception and a group of Republican governors’ affection for trans-vaginal ultrasounds has a lot to do with it.

Sheldon, the academic superstar, surpasses pure.  Pure implies that he has never sullied himself with sin, which is true.  However, Sheldon never suffered temptation in the first place.  His friends’ interest in “coitus” confounds him. Sheldon, like Santorum, wears a uniform.  Rather than sweater vests, Sheldon goes in for graphic tees.  Like Santorum, Sheldon rose from working class roots and loathes the educational institutions that make his rise possible.  Like Santorum, he fails to grasp why people reject him.  Santorum lost his Senate seat.  Naturally, he should dream bigger and run for president.  Sheldon got fired from his postdoc.  Surely, he will win over the Nobel Prize committee.

Not so the woman with whom he would like to create a subsequent generation if immaculate conception were possible.  Poor Amy Farrah Fowler, brilliant neuroscientist, lusts after Sheldon and the buxom blond across the hall.  Her boyfriend is asexual; she suffers acutely as an unsatisfied bisexual.  The joke is at her expense.  She wants to have sex with everyone, but no one finds her physically attractive.  They all respect her brain, but give her half the chance — say with government-subsidized contraception — and she might just live out every insane fantasy Rush Limbaugh harbors about the whorish inner desires of educated women.

Sheldon’s roommate, Leonard Hofstadter, suffers the enduring damage of his “Tiger Mother.” For this high-flying harridan, a postdoc at Caltech seems humdrum.  This female Ph.D. resents the children she bore.  Her insult-ridden mothering leaves him with low expectations when looking for affection among female physicists.  One wishes to use him for “coitus” on a semiannual basis.  The series begins when the uneducated but pneumatic Nebraskan, Penny, moves in across the hall.  She has a sexual past Sheldon and Santorum scorn, but the aspiring actress offers unconditional friendship.  Dr. Hofstadter falls head over high-energy in love.

Why does this make me think of trans-vaginal ultrasounds?  Because their premise assumes that if only the cute but dim, knocked-up girl understood what grew inside her, she would never want an abortion.  She would either get married or give her offspring to another woman with a wedding band safely on her hand.

This, I suppose, is what Calista Gingrich would have done had she not had access to contraception during her extramarital fling with Newt.  Oh wait.  Maybe she had the other problem.  She was a smart woman with access to contraception, which meant her unbridled libido lead men astray.

When I contemplate television’s or the Republican party’s fictional women, my own sense of reality becomes blurred.  I know that before the Victorian era portrayed women as revolted by “coitus” à la Dr. Cooper, centuries of Catholic clerics envisioned every woman as a dangerous Eve poised to drag her man and the world away from Eden.  Perhaps Santorum absorbed a bit too much medieval dogma when he moved toJustice Scalia’s parish.  His highly-educated wife, who bore him eight children, doesn’t seem that dangerous to me.  Then again, neither does Amy Farrah Fowler.  At least we can agree that Sheldon Cooper would make a marvelous monk.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed. 

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Teachable Moments of Feminism

In Guest Blogger on 2012/01/07 at 01:32

Guest blogger, Melissa Sande, writing from Binghamton, New York, in the US. 

Teachable moments are sometimes incredibly ironic. Last week, when leading a discussion on feminist criticism for a literary theory class, I began by asking my students what questions they might pose when taking a feminist approach to a fictional text. I am often met with an awkward silence at the beginning of a lesson, and so, as usual, I waited next to the chalkboard for someone to respond rather than providing an answer for them. One of my male students finally said angrily, “I feel like you’re mocking us when you stand there waiting for an answer. You look sardonic.”

I was, of course, quite taken aback. I am certainly not mocking my students by waiting for them to answer. I like to think that I am making them articulate ideas about what they are learning in this class. In hindsight, I know now that this would have made an intriguing, albeit ironic, teaching moment: I simply ask what a feminist approach entails and a male student responds with frustration and calls me sardonic without further prompting. What does that reveal about the need to spend more time discussing the realization of these theories in practice, beyond their usefulness in approaching literature?

I told the student plainly, in front of the rest of the class, that the comment was irrelevant and somewhat rude, and that we needn’t consider it further, though now, I wish we had. I recalled, too, that when I taught the same class in a previous semester, reactions to feminism had been disagreeable then. The consensus that semester had been that feminism was something obvious that need not be taught alongside other types of theory, something most of the class rolled their eyes at and requested to ignore in the weekly discussion sections.

I relayed the story to a male colleague the next day, who has taught the theory class as well. He seemed less surprised by my student’s comments than I was, and when I questioned whether he is often met with resistance to a conversation about feminism also, he said, “Well, no,” and then asserted that he only hears of such troubles from female instructors because he suspected students have “less respect for women in that position of authority than they do men.”

This leads us to question whether we really have come “so far” with feminism. I often hear the argument that women in this country are now equal with men, and always treated so. Indeed, student reaction to reading Showalter or Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” is often met with the reaction, “this is outdated.” I have to disagree. Even more than the incident with my student, my colleague’s contention that female instructors get less respect from students generally is testament to this. Wasn’t it just this year that Michael Sanguinetti suggested that “women should avoid dressing like sluts” in order to remain safe?

I invoke this year’s SlutWalk alongside my teaching experience because not only do both events demonstrate that the problem of a strong aversion to feminism persists, but with each, a great deal of resistance to change exists as well. On my campus, SlutWalk was publicized, a small version was also organized, and I heard a great deal of male students mocking it and many of the fliers for it were torn down, drawn on, etc. As we try to draw attention to these issues, they are often oppressed. So I question how we can capture positive attention to an event like this and how we might, in higher education, get students to recognize that Rubin’s work is still pertinent, as are other founding works of feminist thought.

Attempting to explain to my student that his balking at my teaching style on a day when we were supposed to be learning feminism, and that he likely wouldn’t address a male professor in such an impolite way, would have been ironic, and probably would have further alienated him from the lesson as well. Is there actually a way to go about addressing it, and actually getting him to realize, without sounding like a martyr, or without having him dismiss me as a martyr and then, of course, the lesson as well? I think one of the biggest matters at hand for young women teaching at the college level now is precisely this one – and how, exactly, do we get the message through to our students and know that they’ve heard us?

 

Melissa Sande is a doctoral student in the department of English, General Literature and Rhetoric at Binghamton University, where she recently began work on her dissertation, titled: Decentering  Genealogies: Alterity, the Nation and Women’s Writing of the 1960s. She specializes in Caribbean literature and postcolonial theory and can be contacted at melraesande@gmail.com.
This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed

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When He Trumps She

In Liminal Thinking on 2011/11/17 at 09:49

Denise Horn, writing from Boston, Massachusetts in the US.

I spent the day grading my midterms, never a fun task. Usually I get into a vague kind of automaton state; as I read for key phrases, look for definitions and the critical use of concepts, and references to key authors and guest speakers. Check, check, check, grade. But this time, I noticed a pattern that I’m sure I’ve seen before but just ignored. It is the gendered attribution that says so much about how students view “authority” (in the author sense) in academia.

My class covers a broad range of literature regarding globalization. We look at global inequalities, economic theories, human rights issues, women’s rights, international trafficking, and many other topics of global concern. The readings I assign are meant to give contending viewpoints, give more detail to my lectures and to teach students how to read academic writing. Importantly, I have intentionally assigned readings that are written by both male and female scholars — almost a 50/50 split.

And yet, in essay after essay, students refer to authors whom they have cited as “he.” With one exception: those authors that wrote specifically about women’s issues or discussed gender are always referred to as “she,” even when the author was male.

On the one hand, this is just sheer sloppiness, and I recognize that. But on the other, I think it speaks to how students perceive the authority of female writers in academia and in the classroom more generally. Are women only capable of writing from the perspective of gender, and male authors cover everything else?  Do students face a mental disconnect when they confront a woman writer or teacher who writes and teaches on “hard” issues, like traditional security and foreign policy?

In my own life as an academic, I have confronted these subtle prejudices time and again, and try to point them out to students as they occur. As a graduate student and a professor, I’ve taught both American Foreign Policy and Introduction to International Relations. American Foreign Policy tends to skew male in terms of class make-up. ROTC guys, particularly, love taking that class. What I noticed over the years was that the male students constantly challenged my lectures — usually after class, and usually when they were standing. I am five feet tall, on a good day, so it doesn’t take much to tower over me — and that was intentional.

The challenges were always of a technical sort, or on a point of historical record. But always, I noticed, with the presumed notion that I couldn’t possibly know what I was talking about (how in the world could I know anything the long and storied history of the V-22 Osprey, for example?). Even when I had revealed that I had grown up on military bases, gone to military schools, studied the military, lived the military, one student wrote in his evaluation “she claims to be from a military family, but she clearly doesn’t understand the military.” (My dad, a Marine vet of 24 years, got a chuckle out of that one.)

But this is not just an issue among male students — it is a deeply embedded bias. In the case of the essay writing, it wasn’t just the male students who automatically referred to authors by the “he” pronoun — both men and women made this slip into the “gender-neutral he.” They had clearly memorized last names and ideas, but not once questioned this slippage in their heads.

Is it important that students (or anyone, for that matter) know the sex of a writer? Perhaps not. But I think this is indicative of something larger and deserves a bit of attention.  Male scholars have, for too long, have been allowed to stand over their female peers, and I’m tired of watching it happen. Maybe in the next essay I’ll require they know first names as well.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

 

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Professing While Female

In Uncategorized on 2010/11/24 at 00:16

Afshan Jafar, writing from Connecticut in the USA

Where does professors’ authority in the classroom come from?

On one level the answer is simple: it comes from our mastery of our subject matter – it comes from our knowledge and training. In that sense, anybody with a Ph.D. who walks into a classroom should have authority. But we know that’s not the case. There are many professors who have to work very hard to establish themselves as authority figures. Some reasons for this have to do with personalities, level of confidence, and other personal attributes. But that doesn’t explain why, for certain groups of professors, their authority is not a “given” and it is not assumed. To believe that it is ignores the connection between individuals and their experience with (or lack of) privilege as members of particular groups. So, yes, we walk into the classroom as individuals who have mastery over our field, but a growing number of us also walk into the classroom as members of under-privileged and/or under-represented groups.

Consider the following examples: When I was in graduate school I once watched students by-pass a 50-something female professor who stood at the front of the classroom and go right to the 26-year-old male graduate TA; they all thought he was the professor. Another time, I was a TA for a class where on the first day of the semester, a student asked the young-looking female professor : “Do you even have a Ph.D.?” More recently, a colleague of mine co-taught a course with a male professor; students routinely referred to her as “Miss” but referred to him as “Professor”. Juxtapose these with another example from when I was a graduate student: I was a TA for a male professor who lost student assignments, lost his train of thought, lost his lecture notes, and lost his matching socks, but never lost his authority in the classroom! By that I mean that students never openly challenged him or his expertise or training, and never once did they think that he was not the one “in charge” (if they did they certainly never let on).

We could explain the above discrepancies by asking about each individual professor’s characteristics. But such a focus would only reveal part of the story. A focus on personal attributes alone would ignore one of the basic insights of social constructionism: Believing is seeing. That is, what we choose to see (how we understand reality) is a reflection of what we already believe to be true. Take the example of the male professor who fumbles and forgets things in class. Students are likely to see him as an example of the stereotypical “absent-minded professor”. Yet, the same behavior in a female professor and/ or faculty of color would likely be seen as evidence of them being unprofessional, or not being qualified for the job. A common perception regarding challenges to professor’s authority in the classroom seems to be that it reflects their own failures as a person, or that individuals somehow “bring this upon themselves” by not playing the role of the professor well enough. This, to me, is a very narrow way of approaching the issue of challenges in the classroom. It is tantamount to arguing that certain groups of people are much more likely to be “randomly selected” at the airport for additional-screening because of their own failure to somehow comport themselves as the ideal traveler. Or that an African American man’s higher likelihood of being pulled over while driving reflects his own failures as a driver. Sure, there are some travelers who act suspiciously, and some people who drive recklessly, but this approach fails to acknowledge that as a pattern certain groups of people are more likely to be screened at the airport, or pulled-over while driving.

We all try and bring our best practices, our most “professorial” personae to our classrooms, but we also bring a whole lot that we can’t leave behind. When you belong to a group of individuals who are under-represented in the academy (or within particular fields), and who have certain expectations and stereotypes attached to them, you quickly come to realize that even in the college classroom you may get pulled aside by students for “additional screening”.

This post was also published in Inside Higher Ed.

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Transnational Academic Feminism: The Case of Handwriting

In Guest Blogger on 2010/09/02 at 09:23

Guest blogger, Karin Sarsenov, writing from Lund, Sweden.

Summer is the blessed time for international conferencing, and for yours truly, this summer has been especially fruitful in this respect. At conferences, you are exposed to the difference between national and professional cultures ruling our interaction.

Compare, for instance, the Berlin Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies in 2005 with the same Congress held in Stockholm this year. In Berlin the organization was impeccable; the ceremonies were performed by people in smart clothes, speaking in smooth, well articulated language, preferably English and German. However, there was a striking absence of East European cultural performance, taking into account the large diaspora communities of Berlin. In Stockholm, on the other hand, Disa Håstad, former correspondent to Moscow, opened the congress in Russian, spurting erroneous case endings, without losing in intelligibility or the attention of the audience. The suits were not as well-ironed as in Berlin, but the performance of the mock choir “Red Army Boys” in helmets and caps with ear-flaps diverted our attention from this fact. Their pronunciation was as lacking as Mrs. Håstad’s, efficiently illustrating the problems facing students of area studies in general, and those faced with the Russian dark “L” in particular (imagine “Volga Volga” pronounced with an “L” as in “lip”).

The field of East European Studies is deeply rooted in the Cold War conflict, and has experienced an identity crisis in connection with its ending. The Stockholm congress took our fascination of foreign cultures as the point of departure, an admirable choice which demands courage, as any fascination is fraught with unscholarly excess and overestimation.

Another example of the difference between national scholarly cultures surfaced during a round table devoted to gender studies. A question from the audience concerned academic imperialism – the tendency of Western scholars to avoid reading or referring to “native” research, published in Russian, for instance, and the acceptance of this habit by peer reviewers and editors. In her response, one established Western historian agreed that Russian scholars often enjoy superior working conditions, having easy access to archives and a more profound linguistic training. She admitted specifically to having troubles reading Russian handwriting from the beginning of the twentieth century. This statement baffled the Russian participants – in their view, her statement equalled a confession of complete professional inadequacy. A historian should not only be able to read her grandmother’s handwriting, but she must also master documents in sixteenth century Gothic script, full of provincial peculiarities and influences from obscure dialects. As I am familiar with this particular Western scholar’s work, I knew that she masters Russian handwriting very well – why on earth did she then expose herself to suspicion?

I think the answer is to be found in the historical development of academic feminism. One of its aspects is its questioning of the competitive, aggressive interaction of a traditionally male dominated academic culture. At many feminist conferences and seminars, the atmosphere encourages you to praise the work of others and to question your own position; there is a striving towards understanding rather than victory in verbal combat. This atmosphere was what attracted me to academic feminism in the first place, and I think that this is the atmosphere which prompted the scholar’s statement regarding handwriting. In Russian academic feminism, on the other hand, no such questioning of masculine academic culture has occurred – here, feminism derives its energies from other sources. On the contrary, Russian feminists rely heavily on their verbal polemic efficiency to carve out space for their ideas. Here, any acknowledgement of lacking competence amounts to suicide.

What morale could we then extract from this story? I think feminist scholars must be frank about the competitiveness of the academia, and train their students in surviving in harsh conditions. Very few could allow themselves the luxury of self questioning, and students must be made aware of that. Nevertheless, I will continue to nurture the dream of friendly Platonic dialogue, aimed at widening our common horizons, without always having to think about greedily accumulating academic field-specific capital.

Karin Sarsenov is a research fellow in Russian literature at Lund University. She worked as an interpreter in Moscow while the Soviet Union was crumbling in 1990, then went there again in 1994 as a marital migrant, raising her first child. She defended her Ph.D. in 2001 and has worked at Lund University ever since, teaching, performing academic leadership, writing articles about Russia, literature and power relations. In 2003, she did her post doc at University of Pittsburgh.

This post was also published on Inside Higher Ed.

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I Need a Wife

In Happy Mondays on 2010/08/09 at 13:08

Mary Churchill, writing from Boston, Massachusetts in the USA.

My office-mate Jessica spat those words out in exasperation one afternoon as she raced into the office with a pile of papers to grade and I raced out, laptop and lecture notes tucked under my arm. We were teaching, working at administrative jobs, finishing up our dissertations, and also working hard on our marriages/partnerships. At that time, neither of us had children but we both knew that we wanted to find time to add a kid or two to the mix and we also knew that something was going to have to give.

Both of us were immersed in reading, research, and writing – in what Nicholas Carr calls “deep thinking.” We found that we had little time for taking care of our partners, cleaning our houses, and cooking fabulous dinners. We needed a “wife” to help us with the caretaking. We found that we could not do it all.

For many of us, this “wife” no longer exists. As a feminist, I am happy to see the demise of the subservient and self-sacrificing “wife.” Although I have made a wise decision in selecting a partner who does his fair share of the caretaking, he is not a wife and neither am I. Perhaps we are both demi-wives, doing the caretaking as a team.

I recently read Jen Howard’s brilliant critique of Carr’s The Shallows. Like Howard, I was struck by the unspoken assumption of privilege. I see the privileged “deep thinker” that Carr and many others mourn the loss of as an upper-middle class white man with a “wife” or caretaker. This deep-thinking “he” has the luxury of time for self-absorption.

“He” is not me.

He is not me because he is not simultaneously attempting to make grocery lists, read the latest book from Hardt and Negri, write up research, prepare for meetings, finish conference papers, respond to urgent emails, unpack and wash the laundry from vacation, decide what to make for dinner, and have engaging conversations with his son on topics ranging from volcanoes and the rules of chess to the Spanish names of fruit and why we should use our words rather than our fists.

The deep thinker is a solitary figure — sitting in his office, in his leather chair, pulled up to hismahogany desk, and pondering the meaning of life. He reads alone — in silence. He writes alone –in silence. He is a genius who creates original ideas that spring forth from his uniquely qualified mind. He is the protagonist of Said’s Orientalism – sitting in England, contemplating the Orient from afar.

Having the time to devote several uninterrupted hours, days, weeks, months, and years to a single task is a rarity. Perhaps it is a relic of the modern age or perhaps it is a romanticized view of the way we never were.

Perhaps the best ideas are not developed in this way. I like to think that Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Michelangelo worked as leaders of teams. I like to believe that “a-ha” moments happen under an apple tree, in the bathtub, and during animated coffee-date discussions.

The present requires that we multi-task, collaborate, and above all, communicate. The majority of the people in the world have always had to prioritize and work with others. Women are finding that we excel at social intelligence, organization, and multi-tasking – skills necessary in today’s world. In “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin asks — “What if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?” I ask — What if the economics of the new era are better suited to what Carr erroneously calls “the shallows”? (“Deep thinking” is not necessarily the opposite of shallow thinking and “deep thinking” is not necessarily smarter or better thinking.)

Perhaps it is neither the end of men nor the end of deep thinking. Instead, perhaps it is the end of privileging a narrow masculinist way of acting and thinking. Perhaps the focus has switched from an extremely competitive version of individualism focused on winning at all costs to a multi-tasking collaborative version of teamwork, focused on developing creative solutions.

However, perhaps it is the end of “man and wife.”

Mary Churchill is the Executive Director of University of Venus.



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This post was also published on Inside Higher Ed.

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Be Careful What You Wish For

In Liminal Thinking on 2010/08/06 at 11:48

Denise Horn, writing from Boston in the USA.

My career has always been important to me, but I never wanted it to dominate my personal life.  Early on, I instated my “8 o’clock” rule: if it’s not done/read/written/graded by 8:00 pm, it would have to wait until the morning. This was the time when civilized people had a glass of wine and ate dinner with someone they loved.

I fell in love with someone who understood my work, and indeed, was proud of it. He lived abroad with me when I had research to do. He read my book manuscript thoughtfully, and worked on the index for me.  He listened to my ideas for lectures and gave me tips on how to use technology more effectively. He took care of the dog when I was away for weeks at a time. He listened to hours of anxiety regarding my reviews.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see that my successes exacerbated his difficulties in finding his dream job. As someone freshly minted into the (non-academic) job market, he was finding his prospects dismal. That year abroad failed to land him the NGO job he’d hoped for and may have hurt his chances when he returned to the States. I didn’t see that my ability to pay bills and have money for dinners and trips highlighted his inability to do so. While he lauded my little triumphs, he wallowed in his own perceived failures. Despite our (often) happiness, the guilt and anxiety for him was too much, and in the end, he moved on to find what opportunities he could.

There is a trend at work here. The July/August 2010 Ideas Edition of The Atlantic boldly proclaims “the end of men,” as Gen-X women come to dominate the workforce, college admissions, and management fields. Young men coming of age during this Great Recession are finding that they are either severely underemployed or not employed at all, for long stretches of time. They are struggling in every way imaginable, while we women are finding our niches in our careers. Gen-X men are being laid off while their wives retain their jobs, but the psychological toll on younger men is incalculable: prolonged unemployment in the early stages of one’s working life is closely associated with dim future prospects, including lower pay over one’s lifetime and limited access to upper-level management positions.

In the classroom, and indeed, across the board at the university, the dominance of women has become apparent. My program, International Affairs, is one of the largest majors in the College and is disproportionately female. We struggle every year to recruit more men to go on our international programs, but every summer I find myself traveling abroad mainly with young women. The Atlantic article points to a sense of lethargy that seems to plague young men in the classroom, and I can attest to that. I know talented male students who admit to feeling hopeless in the face of their prospects, and I see them float through classes while their female counterparts take charge.

As a feminist, I am thrilled that we may be fulfilling the promise of the women’s rights movement. As a professional woman in her 30s I feel empowered in a way that my mother never did. But when I see young men I care about flounder and suffer, and when I see the toll my professional success has had on my personal life, I find it all so bittersweet. The promise of our movement was that women and men would all succeed, and that we would live in a society that valued the talents of everyone, and that we wouldn’t have to give up personal happiness for professional satisfaction.

I wished for a lot. That civilized glass of wine at 8 o’clock now represents a solitary toast to my success.

This post was also published on Inside Higher Ed.

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