Mama, PhD Gear
March 14th, 2009
Did you know that you can get a Mama, PhD t-shirt, onesie, mug, bag, or even beer stein? Show the world you’ve got it going on, body and brain, with some Mama, PhD gear in your life.
Literary Mama Review
March 4th, 2009Esther Wyss-Flamm has reviewed Mama, PhD for Literary Mama; here’s an excerpt:
My first reaction to Mama, PhD, a provocative collection of 35 personal essays and commentaries by 42 women about motherhood and academic life, was a powerful desire to do just what I’ve begun to do here: tell my own story. Edited by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant, the book features deeply personal and engaging essays that bring to life many facets of this topic: the internal fracturing that comes with considering whether or not to have a child, vivid descriptions of the body’s blossoming during pregnancy, poignant accounts of how it feels to be sidelined by insensitive comments, the heartbreak of leaving one’s child in someone else’s care, the infamous fog of Mommy Brain. In addition, much of the writing is peppered with winsome humor, including laugh-out-loud descriptions of wedging a pregnant body into a desk-chair combination of the type that graces most university classrooms (Evans) or of fielding potential names for a baby from mostly male undergraduates (Sheila Squillante).
Please click on over to Literary Mama to read the rest!
Mama, PhD in Mamazine!
March 2nd, 2009We’re sad to hear that after several years of publishing great writing (including this piece of Elrena‘s), Mamazine is shutting down to focus on other projects. We’re pleased that before stopping publication they had time to read Mama, PhD ; here’s an excerpt from Amy Anderson’s review:
Fortunately, while Mama, PhD
has many stories like mine, reading about others’ experiences made me feel (well, duh!) less alone. It also made me remember a few things. For one, I’ve been lucky enough to have department chairs who wholeheartedly support working parents with their words (“Bring that baby in!”) and their actions (“Sure, we can pay for a sub to cover your classes those weeks you’ll be recovering from a c-section.”) Many of the women whose essays are in this book don’t have that kind of support, and the consequences are often dramatic.
Click on over to Mamazine to read the rest!
The MotherVerse Interview
February 23rd, 2009Writer Kris Underwood recently interviewed Elrena and Caroline for MotherVerse; here’s an excerpt from the interview:
MV: In culling through the essays, was there any one in particular that affected you personally?
Caroline: When people ask me how we chose the essays, I always say that we chose the essays that made us cry, and the ones that made us laugh. And I have read these essays many, many times now, and they still touch me the way they did when I first put each one in the “Yes” pile. Leah Bradshaw writes about falling asleep nursing her daughter, and waking to find that a window has blown open and they are dusted with snow— it’s an image of the universal absorption and exhaustion of new motherhood that has stayed with me. I quote the title of Libby Gruner’s essay, “I Am Not A Head On A Stick,” all the time, since it sums up so succinctly the prevailing attitude women are challenging in academia. And I love the affirmations in the essay “Momifesto;” there are two in particular that thrum through my head, depending on my mood: “You are maternally beautiful” and “You can promote motherhood professionally, and it is a political statement.”
Elrena: I read through the bulk of our submissions in the first few days after my son was born, (don’t ask me why, it seemed like a good idea at the time!) so I was pretty affected by anyone writing about having a baby, or nursing, or anything else I could even remotely apply to my situation. What I found, though, was that I saw bits and pieces in each essay we ultimately chose that spoke directly to me. Now, these essays have embedded themselves so deeply in my brain that I often find myself thinking of passages—kind of like the way that song lyrics off of a really good album stick in your mind. Rosemarie Emanuele writes about other mothers helping her to see that her child was not a “behavioral outlier,” I think of that phrase when my children have tantrums; Anjalee Deshpande Nadkarni writes of her life that “every day is a risk and a possibility,” I think that’s a great quote first thing in the morning!
Click on over to MotherVerse to read the rest!
Mama, PhD in Chicago
February 19th, 2009It was wonderful to attend the Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference in Chicago recently and meet some more fans of and contributors to Mama, PhD. Here are some pictures:
Caroline and contributor Sheila Squillante at the AWP book fair
Amy Hudock reading from her essay, First Day of School
Caroline reading at Women & Children First bookstore
Mothers on the Tenure Track
February 4th, 2009Last fall, Elrena and Caroline had the opportunity to talk with Andrea O’Reilly (director of the Association for Research on Mothering) in a conversation for The Mothers Movement Online, moderated by Professor Heather Hewett, Coordinator of Women’s Studies and an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at SUNY New Paltz. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Heather Hewett: I’m struck by the fact that all of you agree that we need to change attitudes as well as policy — and I wonder if that’s why you all chose to collect stories, albeit in different ways. Is there something about personal stories that are particularly powerful for the situation facing moms in academia?
Caroline Grant: Yes, yes, yes. I think personal stories draw you in and make them relate on a level that a numbers report just can’t achieve. Elrena and I were challenged a bit on that point, early in our work on the book, and we felt strongly about making the book conversational, not confrontational.
Elrena Evans: I think it’s kind of like the research that’s been done on birthing narratives — why do women feel compelled to tell their birth stories again and again, sometimes to people they barely know — there’s strength in sharing these stories, in knowing that you’re not, as one of our contributors put it, a statistical outlier.
I like to think of personal essays and more quantitative research as parts of the same whole. Research can give us numbers, data, percentages, “facts” if you will, but the personal essay can provide the story behind the data. I know that for me, personally, it’s one thing to read that X number of women delay children until after tenure, for example; but it gives me a completely different perspective to read about what that was like for a specific woman, the longing, the waiting, the eventual fulfillment of her “heart’s desire,” as one of our contributors writes. And then I can take that story, and begin to imagine all the others behind the numbers, and it really makes me look at the research differently.
Andrea O’Reilly: That leads to another theme. I found Joan Williams’ concept of the wall in academe a fitting metaphor. Today I think that women, if they act enough like one of the boys, can make it academe… but once they become moms, they hit full-throttle that academic wall that completely blindsides them. So my work is looking at how moms are getting through and around that wall. And for many it is the detour route — i.e., taking an academic post that is more compatible with motherhood (not at a research university).
Click on over to The Mothers Movement Online to read the rest!
Top 100 Gender Studies Blogs
January 13th, 2009Mama, PhD has been listed as one of the Top 100 Gender Studies blogs in a terrific list of resources:
Whether you’re pursuing a degree from a top-tier college in women’s studies or taking a few online courses to slowly work towards a degree focused on gender, you can find a number of great blogs online that can supplement your learning experience. Here are a few that we’ve put together that deal with a large range of gender related issues. Here you’ll find blogs that range from defining what it means to be feminine or masculine to understanding your rights under law concerning gender and sexual orientation.
Review at Girl w/Pen!
January 10th, 2009Deborah Siegel’s blog, Girl w/Pen, is one of the smartest ones out there; she and her co-editors produce smart, sharp, feminist commentary on current events, politics and pop culture. So we’re especially proud today to be reviewed there by Elline Lipkin. Here’s an excerpt:
“The contributors in this book, edited by Caroline Grant and Elrena Evans, break the seal of silence that suppresses the intense difficulties and institutionalized prejudice that academics who want to be more than just a “head on a stick” – but rather a whole person, including a maternal body – experience. And the pressures that result for women as their likely prime childbearing years meet squarely with the ticking of the tenure clock is intense. The book’s contributors, from a range of academic fields and even generations, outline in often poignant and sometimes excruciating detail how they are forced to choose between career and family, or find creative, often exhausting, and most likely just plain lucky ways to tie the two together.”
Mama, PhD at the MLA!
January 6th, 2009
Usually, graduate students and professors in the humanities tend to dread the annual Modern Language Association convention. After all, it meets right between Christmas and New Year’s, usually in a very cold city, and everybody’s fretting about giving a terrific paper or speaking brilliantly in an interview.
For me, however, now that I am an academic outsider, it was all pretty fun. I got to visit with old friends from graduate school, attend whatever panels I chose (mostly meta-panels on the state of the profession, but one excellent Russian film panel, too), and hang out at the Rutgers and Inside Higher Ed booths, too. In return for a press pass, I wrote a few articles about the proceedings for Inside Higher Ed. MLA Realities: Then and Now; The Quest for Balance and Support; and Caring for Children and Their Parents. Check them out and leave a comment if you like; I’m curious to know how other academic conferences handle child care, and what other fields are doing to make life easier for their grad student and faculty parents.
Mama, PhD review in Bitch magazine
January 6th, 2009The new issue of Bitch has a terrific review of Mama, PhD by Katura Reynolds. Here’s an excerpt:
“While the overall story arcs are sometimes similar, each writer beautifully articulates the personal details of her own experiences. Some of these moments are startlingly beautiful and surprising: Jennifer Eyre White describes how, when catching a moment to breastfeed her baby, she realizes that “one of the beautiful things about being a female engineer is that the [women’s] bathrooms are always empty and peaceful.” Angelica Duran evokes the excitement of her toddler’s motiation to learn his numbers and letters so that he can help operate the keypad that moves the compact-storage shelves of the rare book library. Leslie Leyland Fields recounts the intense fear of professional rejection when, in front of a conference hall full of hundreds of people, she answers the question, “How do you stay grounded?” by revealing, “I have six children.”
~~
“For those who are not on the professor/mommy path, the punchy, short essays are nonetheless interesting reads. Outcasts are torn between fitting in and dropping out. Outsiders defiantly dispel unhelpful myths. Women contemplate the achievements of their mothers while worrying about how their choices will shape the lives of their daughters. The elite are brought down a notch, but find themselves a little more savvy as a result.”
Look for Bitch at your favorite bookstore or newstand to read the rest!
Join us on Facebook