Abstract
Mari Castañeda and Kirsten Isgro effectively bring together a group of diverse women recounting their personal testimonies of their shared experience of being a woman and a mother in the workforce, specifically academia, and the tension between these two roles. Both an affirmation and a call to action, Mothers in Academia is “an attempt to make apparent how mothers’ voices about their lives in academia are critical for inspiring policy and cultural shifts” (p. 8).
In a professional role that is rigorous, limitless, and all pervading yet perceived by others as flexible and congruent with the demands of motherhood, women in academia are often struggling in isolation with parental guilt and a sense of work–life imbalance. Weaving together personal narratives, research statistics, and feminist scholarship, Mothers in Academia highlights the gender ideologies of our culture that put mothers into a role that depicts an all or nothing scenario. Focusing on the tension between the tenure clock and the biological clock and the inherent incompatibility between mothering and the tenure track, Castañeda and Isgro promote the idea of the personhood of women in academia and the nurturing of employees as whole people.
Castañeda and Isgro will prompt the reader to ask important questions, such as how do we find a sense of balance and still be successful in academia? What does work–life balance look like for each individual mother academic? How do women promote mother-friendly university policies for staff, students, and other faculty? How do we make these ideas applicable to every woman in the workplace? Mothers in Academia offers illustrations of how we can begin to take action to change the institutional culture toward mothers, family leave policies, and work–life balance.
All mothers in the academy will be able to relate on some level to the descriptions of women feeling compromised in the quality of their academic work and their parenting, nursing one’s baby while working at the computer, and derogatory comments from colleagues about maternity leave and adjusted teaching schedules. Castañeda and Isgro successfully link a collection of narratives that affirm the all-encompassing yet clearly privileged experience of those of us who believed we could “have it all” and knowingly or unknowingly walked into the challenge of combining an intellectually stimulating academic career and the pleasures of motherhood.
Mothers in Academia could be an excellent addition to any advanced social policy, family studies, women’s issues, or PhD seminar course. Students could write their own testimonials about work/life balance or use the text as a springboard for a community action project. Faculty could also find it to be a helpful framework for organizing an awareness-raising, campus-wide discussion on how women at various stages of their academic careers have dealt with the challenges of finding work/life fit. Mothers in Academia will resonate with and offer a sense of community to any mother-academic attempting to combine work and family, as well as anyone who is interested in reforming work/life policies at institutions of higher learning.