Coming of Age in Academe: Rekindling Women's Hopes and Reforming the Academy

First Published in 2000. At what price entry? Philosopher of education Jane Roland Martin contends that feminist scholars have traded in their idealism for a place in the academy. In Coming of Age in Academe, she looks at the ways that academic feminists have become estranged from women. Determining that this is the membership fee the academy exacts on all its members, she calls for the academy's transformation. Part one explores the chilly research climate for feminist scholars, the academic traps of essentialism and aerial distance, and the education gap in the feminist text. In part two, Martin likens the behavior of present-day feminist scholars to nineteenth-century immigrants to the United States and examines their assimilation into the world of work, politics and the professions. She finds that when you look at higher education, you see what a brutal filter of women it is. Part three highlights the academy's brain drain and its containment of women and then proposes actions both great and small that aim at fundamental change. In this rousing call to action, Martin concludes that the dissociation from women that the academy demands--its entrance fee--can only be stopped by radically reforming the gendered system on which the academy is based.