My main goal for 2020 is to finish my book on faculty wives. I hope to complete chapter five, which I have been working on for over a year, shortly. I would then have five or six chapters left. At the very least, I need to pick up the pace.
When I was thinking about my progress, I realized that I would need more structure, focus and motivation to achieve this goal. Beginning the end of January, I will be participating in the year long non-fiction manuscript group that the Pioneer Valley Writers Workshop offers. Most of the other members of the group will be memoirists but I think paying for the workshop and having regularly scheduled meeting once a month will provide a lot of structure and motivation.
The other writing commitment that I am undertaking is being part of Nerissa Nield’s Writing It Up in the Garden workshop for ten weeks. This is two hours once a week. Both of these writing groups require a commitment which I hope will benefit my rate of production for the book.
Besides writing the book, my other big commitment is to my ice skating. Having competed in October, my focus is now on being part of an adult group number, for the annual skating show of the Skating Club of Amherst. I hope I will be less nervous skating on home ice. My other skating goal is to complete at least one three turn this year. Here is link to a video, by a professional, of a three turn. After today I will have 357 days left to do it.
Because finishing my book is imperative, I am going to try to keep my schedule free from the other activities. This will not be easy; I have trouble saying no. The only thing I will consider getting involved in is efforts to defeat Donald Trump.
What are your goals for 2020? I would love to hear them.
This post is an expansion of a comment I made to Tenured Radical’s post, “Never Mix, Never Worry: A Brief (and incomplete) History of the Academic Couple”. She wrote the post in response to Caroline Bick’s essay in the Sunday New York Times, “Is the Husband Going to Be a Problem.”
That question arose in the mind of a professor interviewing Bick for her first academic position. Bick’s essay mentions this sexist thinking about her husband potentially being a hiring issue. However, this is not really the main point of the article, which is not about sexism in academia but is about the intersection of careers and relationships.
Her advisor reassured her potential employer, not Bick as Tenured Radical indicates. Bick wishes she could have responded. She would have told them that it would be no problem because she planned to chain him under the bed. Bick does acknowledge that the “adult” behavior expected of her in the moment would up influencing her choices for many years.
Tenured Radical and many of the commenters felt that Bick’s story had a happy ending because she, her husband, and their children live together in the same city. It is a successful conclusion from the point of Bick’s relationship with her husband. The husband’s first career ended and he had to reinvent himself. As I know from personal experience this can be very difficult. If the woman had to give up her chosen academic career but got to live in the same city with her husband and children would it still be a successful conclusion?
Tenured Radical feels that the issue of “academic commuting” is a recent problem. “Once women decided to stop baking cookies for their husband’s seminars and type manuscripts for love and pin money, it occurred to them get their own advanced degrees (it was around the mid 1960s, when women’s liberation really took off,…)” Was feminism really as straight forward and simple as women making a conscious choice to stop baking cookies and get PhDs? I guess there were not any social forces that kept them baking and no changes that enabled woman to have more options, in both career and personal life.
The post contains several pictures of Elizabeth Taylor from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and the reader might assume she represents the prototypical faculty wife. Honey, the younger woman in Edward Albee’s play, actually better fits the stereotype of the faculty wife.
Sandy Dennis, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Martha, the character Elizabeth Taylor plays, is an alcoholic, frustrated and vengeful woman. Her frustration does not seem to be related to her not having obtained an academic job. She does not really fit into the point Tenured Radical makes about secret drinking by faculty wives.
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
College campuses across America have scholarship funds for women returning to school, loans for students, funds for campus beautification, and wings in medical centers because of faculty wives. Apparently, these women found time to do other things besides baking cookies and becoming alcoholics.
Spousal hires are much more likely if one or both of the people are stars or if they are looking for jobs at large public universities. In general, small private liberal arts colleges cannot easily add a second line when trying to hire someone. In addition, spousal hires can often conflict with affirmative action goals.
Two people in the same field are unlikely to wind up with two jobs at the same institution. Someone will have to give up and do something else; that is what happened to Bick and her husband.
