Working-Class Women in the Academy: Laborers in the Knowledge Factory - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0870238353 ISBN 13: 9780870238352

Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993

Synopsis

"My mother still wants me to get a 'real' job. My father, who is retired after forty-four years in the merchant marine, has never read my work. When I visited recently, the only book in his house was the telephone book."
"I do not know that my mother's mother ever acknowledged my college education except to ask me once, 'How can you live so far away from your people?'
Thus write two of the twenty women from working-class backgrounds whose voices are heard in this unique collection of essays. Each of the women has lived through the process of academic socialization - as both student and teacher - and each has thought long and deeply about her experience from an explicitly feminist perspective.
Among the questions the contributors explore, What are the issues - pedagogical, theoretical, and personal - that affect the professional and private lives of these women? How do they resolve tensions between their roles as middle-class professionals and their roots in working-class families? How do class and gender intersect in the academy?

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth A. Fay is assistant professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Review

Written by teachers, students, and retired academics in styles ranging from formal academic essays to informal personal narratives, each of these twenty diverse and enlightened essays makes an intense and powerful examination of the various realities working-class women encounter in academic life. Several authors write of the difficulties inherent in taking part "in projects to which they are not completely committed" and the contradiction they experience when vying for jobs with "male-identified women" whose "career goals outweigh their sense of responsibility to their community of colleagues and of students." The majority discuss the often confusing and always painful privileged class assumptions predominant in academic discourse. A few, especially those previously trained to perform manual tasks, speak of their difficulty in valuing the activities of reading and writing as real work. And, without exception, all address the academy's failure - often expressed as blatant and hostile refusal - to address the reality of class issues. This collection provides the first forum for many of these scholars to analyze and discuss the recurring affronts they experience as their language, concerns, traditions, and culture are rendered "invisible." Through these twenty singular voices and histories comes a remarkably unified and penetrating analysis. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Jesse Larsen

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0870238353
• ISBN 13: 9780870238352
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 344
• Editor: Tokarczyk Michelle M.