review article on MADWOMAN IN THE ACADEMY

["Pamela Banting" <pbanting@ucalgary.ca>]

This review isn't about literature and the environment but about a collection of articles about the ivory tower, so please delete or read at your pleasure.  It was originally published online in Prairie Fire Magazine's review of books.  Pamela

The Madwoman in the Academy: 43 Women Boldly Take on the Ivory Tower

Ed. Deborah Keahey and Deborah Schnitzer

Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2003, ISBN 1-55238-081-5, 215 pp., $24.95 (softcover)

Reviewed by Pamela Banting



Mommas, don=t let your babies grow up to be cowboys

Don=t let >em pick guitars and drive them old trucks

Make >em be doctors and lawyers and such. . . . 



Willie Nelson ought to read this book. Obviously he knows next to nothing about the life which so often follows from becoming a doctor of the Ph.D. kind, especially if you happen to have been born a woman. 

At regular intervals, reports and anthologies on the working conditions for women at universities and colleges in North America appear. In the Canadian context, I think for instance of the memorable and influential Chilly Climate Report (1989) by Constance Backhouse, University of Western Ontario, in which one woman reported discovering an $18,000 difference between her annual salary and that of a man with comparable qualifications hired at the same time, and another described being picked up bodily in the halls of academe and moved to the side by a male colleague who said she was in his way. 

As anyone who has edited an anthology knows, a collection is dependent for its success on who responds to the call for submissions, who has time and inclination prior to the deadline to write something for consideration, the network and contacts of the editors, and other factors. No doubt the editors of The Madwoman in the Academy also had to contend with the difficulty that many women in academia are untenured, and even those who are often feel constrained to keep quiet about their working conditions. 

The anthology has been designed and produced in a very enticing format. Soft cover rather than hard, a slim volume rather than a heavy tome, bright red, eight by eight inches square, with varying fonts, it recounts incidents and records confessions such as how, in accord with the expectations of the academy that one publish, not procreate, when one of the co-editors, Deborah Keahey, discovered she was pregnant she immediately took up smoking as a kind of denial of her pregnancy. The other editor, Deborah Schnitzer, recounts how when her water broke she could only be persuaded to get into the car for the one-hour journey to the hospital to deliver her second child by being allowed to take her dissertation-in-progress along. She wanted to be able to work on it at the hospital and refused to leave home without it.

When I offered to review this book, I thought it would be by and about diverse angry, agitated and politically agitating women, and as I often feel pretty angry at abuses of power within institutions of higher learning, I thought I was a good potential reviewer. While I caught the allusion in the title to Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar=s classic study not of universities but of literature, Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), I thought that twenty-five years later this collection would not be about madness as hysteria, insanity or other psychopathology but madness in its other sense: resentment, anger, deconstruction, backtalk, protest, or fury. I suppose in retrospect, I should not have been surprised to find more sorrow, bitterness, regret, confusion, and feelings of defeat than resistance, bonding with other women, shakedowns, coups, or triumphs. 

Even while recognizing many of the reactions of the women included here and systematically asking myself the test question Awould I do that, or feel that way,@ and often answering in the affirmative, nevertheless I was astonished by the absence of resistance recorded here by many of the contributors. While I was shocked by the stories of Keahey, Schnitzer and others about their responses to their pregnancies, I was even more surprised to discover that the experiences of pregnancy, birth and motherhood did not in turn shock them out of their investments in the patriarchal structure, hierarchy, practices, and prejudices of the university. I was then shocked again to discover that, after reading this book in bed for a couple of hours before going to sleep one night, I woke up the next morning with a revival of the old shame and depression I battle periodically with regard to my own academic career. I found myself wearing the old shame dress which I thought I had if not burned at least crumpled up, thrown on the floor of the closet and neglected. 

I would have hoped that as women we (I include myself) would have both strengthened ourselves, even toughened up a bit, and become more politically savvy in order to resist, refuse and revise the structures which make our professional lives so conflicted. Jennifer Kelly writes about the emotional tailspin she went into after receiving a conditional pass on her dissertation. A conditional pass is a pass with the requirement that the manuscript be revised. While B no question B it would be very disappointing to have to revise, especially if one is about to birth a baby and has also recently moved to a new community, writers revise manuscripts according to editors= suggestions all the time. Annoying, time-consuming, even infuriating though it may be, having to revise is not a judgement on one=s worth as an intellectual or as a person, and it was dismaying to see a young scholar get snared in this academic hoop. In the same breath that she laments being stereotyped herself Aparita Bhandari stereotypes other feminists. AAdmittedly, I was never a male-bashing, bra-burning feminist,@she writes. Daisy Beharry=s overt classism clashes with her feminism to create a batch of inner contradictions which remain unexamined. 

I could be wrong, but I could not help but wonder whether the ethnic and regional diversity and age range among the contributors to this volume mask common middle-class origins. What I longed for in this collection were more stories of agency, stories of how a woman or several women went together to administration and demanded fair treatment, how some woman who had been through the institutional meat grinder helped a colleague over obstacles, stories of mentoring or, as the book=s subtitle promises, of boldly taking on the ivory tower. Or never mind my pollyanna-ish longing for more positive outcomes. Stories of material, concrete exploitation would make for avid and ultimately empowering reading. 

But with notable exceptions, overall this collection focuses more on breaches of etiquette and assaults on one=s self-esteem than on breaches of ethics. It is as if some of the forty-three contributors understand one-half of the statement that Athe personal is the political.@ That is, they fully understand the message that what happens to you personally is political, but they have yet to accept that your own actions in turn are political and potentially transformative as well. Suppressing or repressing them in the hope of being perceived as a team player, a willing worker, a dedicated teacher, or a good girl works only some of the time, and it doesn=t help other women facing similar obstacles at all. In fact, I found the repetition from article to article of these tactics for dealing with the chilly climate for women at universities downright scary, especially because I=ve practised some of this good girlism myself. As I read this book, I was often reminded, by contrast, of an American anthology, also written in the first-person, in which working-class women relay their conflicted feelings about the university milieu but also recognize that the coping skills, creativity and strengths they have brought from their working-class origins have allowed them to survive and even thrive in their newfound situations, Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Elizabeth A. Fay=s Working Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory (1993). I am not here setting working-class women against middle class women: it is important that all women=s stories be told and attended to. However, the contrast between the two books with regard to feelings of empowerment along the journey is significant (though possibly some of the malaise of the more recent collection has to do not only with social class but also with raised expectations over time). 

The exceptions are striking. Ranjini Mendis=s essay, including excerpts from court testimony, about how her husband tried to have her certified insane because she wanted to pursue graduate studies in English is well-written and very powerful. The dialogue between Nisha Karumanchery-Luik and Helen Ramirez comes to terms with some of the material conditions of sessional teaching contracts. Administrative assistant Susan Phillips writes an amusing piece about an imaginary stress tester cap for working in a university department. Aritha van Herk=s Aglossary@ for survival in academe, which reads as frivolous or cynical, nevertheless contains advice based on practices she says she has honed over her own lengthy career. Under Adeportment@ she writes: AWhistling, or B horrors! B out and out laughter, suggest delight, enjoyment, and a happy disposition. It is far more important to look melancholy, sigh frequently, and appear to be slightly harried or absent-minded . . .@ . I was grateful when I had read my way up to Keith Louise Fulton=s essay, in which she repeatedly emphasizes capability, resistance, responsibility, and agency. She counsels against suffering and makes the point that AWe remake the university each day as we walk through the doors and take up our work there.@ Kay Stone=s essay AClimbing the Walls of Academe,@ the title of which puns nicely with the idea of craziness, also stresses agency. When her department forgot to list her folklore course, leaving her with no students, no course to teach and no income, she called a few friends, who called some friends, and before long she had a class: AMy department was astonished that anyone would do something so bold, but perhaps this encouraged them to keep me on with seasonal contracts . . . .@ To my recollection, Stone is one of only two contributors who either comes from or acknowledges her working-class background, the only one who describes herself as having been Alucky,@ and one of two who credits her labour union with having played a role in improving her tenuous position. Kristjana Gunnars outs the hostility on campuses between writers and >pure= professors, noting that in Canada at least the two don=t mix. Jane Cahill addresses the lack of role models when she entered the profession. Her essays begins AWhen I was an undergraduate only two of my professors were women. I thought them pitiful. They dressed strangely and looked odd. One of them lived with her mother and the other lived alone. The academic life didn=t serve them very well. The first committed suicide and the second was murdered B in her office, at her place of work.@

Judging by this collection of essays, it would seem that although theories of social equality sometimes appear to have been developed and patented at universities, universities are among the least likely places to practice what they preach. Several years ago following upon the deconstruction of categories of race, class, gender, ethnicity, and ability there was a flurry of discussion about agency: how to put action, activity and resistance, if not rebellion, back into the theoretical equation like caramilk into the caramilk chocolate bar. This too came out of universities, but this collection suggests that what often gets taught and written about focusses more on analysis of categories of oppression than on agency or creative strategies for institutional change both at the micro and the macro levels. While several of the contributors to The Madwoman in the Academy (Beharry, Donnan, others) praise academic discourse with having helped them understand the nature of their oppression, few credit it with having strengthened their sense of power to change even their own lot, let alone that of others. In any case, I wish more of the pieces included in this volume reflected a greater sense of boldness. I=d have loved to read essays by women who left the academy in disgust or delight, women who went into related or utterly different fields of endeavour. Women who organized or tried to organize coalitions or unions on campus or fought for sessional and/or instructor rights or who tried to get native languages recognized as satisfying second language requirements in graduate programs. I know they are out there. Most of us know the names of several of them. 

In addition to contributors' concerns about ongoing untenured employment, tenure, keeping the peace, and not making oneself a target, I think narrative itself is a problem.  In writing narratives of encounters with harassment, university hierarchies, salary discrimination, and micro-management (a perfectly legal way to harass women), it is very easy to lose one's ability to perceive a narrative structure in any of it, and the piece can either go nowhere or madly off in all directions. Paradoxically, the gift The Madwoman in the Academy offers may be the way it demonstrates, through its very failures and weak spots, the power of narrative.  The writing often suffers from an impaired sense of narrative possibilities, which in turn shows up on the page as lack of agency (or vice versa). Poet Kristjana Gunnars summarizes the problem best when she writes AI discovered that these jobs that can be so destructive to women and women=s lives don=t implode on you. They don=t stand up with some disaster in their hands yelling >Quit me! Quit me!= They just peter out like a lousy story.@ 

Of course, Wille Nelson=s advice not to let your babies grow up to be cowboys is nothing but irony. Even while appearing to advise parents to steer offspring away from careers as cowpokes, he is touting and glamourizing the life of the cowboy. For a while after reading the essays in this collection, if one brackets BSE, creeping exurbanization, low prices, low pay, and "them old trucks," I felt, along with Willie, that the cowboy way may well be a more flexible, healthy and satisfying life than that associated with doctoring literature. On the other hand, as the best pieces in The Madwoman in the Academy clearly indicate, there=s clearly a lot more to the story. 



Pamela Banting professes English at the University of Calgary. 


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