The Women's Classical Caucus

an Affiliate of the American Philological Association

Ruth Scodel, Guest Editor
University of Michigan

In the spring of 2002, the graduate school at Michigan sponsored a program for graduate students who were concerned about when they should have children and how best to balance their plans for a family with their careers. The organizers expected about thirty or forty students, but at least twice that number came. Women were a strong majority, but it was clear that menwere worrying about this too. These issues have been in the air. The media gave much attention to Sylvia Ann Hewlett's Creating a Life: Professional Women and the Quest for Children (Talk Miramax Books, 2002), which argued that high-achieving women are less likely to have children than other women because career pressures cause them to delay marriage and childbearing. Anyone who reads the Chronicle of Higher Education has seen many discussions of the problems (just glance at the "Career Network" archive at http://chronicle.com/jobs/archive/topical/work_family.htm).

What I realized as a participant in that discussion is that my own experience is not likely to be very helpful to anybody. When already tenured, and single, I had a baby in December 1987. My colleagues were for the most part neither supportive nor hostile: "uneasy" or "bemused" might apply. I took no leave. At the time I was editor of TAPA (with no course relief), and unlikely to publish much anyway: one article in 1989, a bit more after my term as editor ended. I was on many committees, both departmental and outside. I was the graduate advisor through the fall of 1991, and I don't think anybody ever asked whether it was a problem that I regularly had come to the office on weekends to administer exams or read files. I did ask for the departmental meetings to be held at 3 rather than at 4, because the daycare center closed at 5:30. Several women who were students at the time have later remarked that they don't know how I did it, and I really don't know myself. The big surprise was that I thought motherhood would lower my professional ambition far more than it actually did. My particular talents were well-suited to this situation: I can jump from one desk to another easily, so that I could use available windows of time effectively; I sight-read well, and sometimes cheated on preparation for language classes; I have no perfectionist tendencies. And I have been very, very lucky, thus far. So I would tell these former students that I never felt that it was that hard, except for the various moments of crisis when it seemed impossible.

On the other hand, the moments when it seems impossible keep coming. My daughter is fifteen. She plays three instruments: piano, guitar, and trumpet, and works as a teacher's assistant at our synagogue's Hebrew school. Most of this requires that I drive. The problem arises with departmental lectures and meetings. I am endlessly rescheduling or canceling lessons. Sometimes, I just have to miss something; but because I have been so conscientious for so many years, my absences are noted and I worry that somebody is offended. Unlike Nita Krevans, I plan to swallow my anxiety and let Anna ferry herself the day she gets a driver's license. She'll probably be a better driver than I am anyway.

What follows is a selection of stories. They are reflections or personal testimonies about the experience of trying to be a classical scholar and a mother at the same time. They include a wide variety of experiences. The contributors vary in age. Some are married, some single; some adoptive parents. Susan Cole's account is almost a bohemian idyll of graduate student life with children — a fine corrective if we are to assume that things have always gotten better. Ann Michelini points out that having a husband who isn't an academic makes it easier to move, but reduces flexibility in everyday life. Kelly Olsen's unplanned motherhood is a reminder of the good aspects of the unpredictability of life (for which as classicists, we should all be prepared). Jennifer Sheridan gives a very different perspective on motherhood as a realm of uncertainty, for a child with disabilities brings even more complicated professional problems. Lillian Doherty thinks about the context of her decision to remain childless. I solicited contributions outside North America in hope of broadening the context. The story that is probably least like those familiar to us is Sandra Citroni Marchetti's account of the special burdens created by the Italian maternal ideology.

What becomes very clear as one reads these accounts is how difficult it is to give advice to those who confront these choices. Institutional help varies widely. Quite apart from official policies, the various stories in this issue show how much depends on very particular circumstances. Almost always, the system is under strain somewhere. We are all doing the best we can on all sides, and often it doesn't seem to be enough. It is never going to be easy, but it doesn't need to be as hard as it often is. Since I cannot advise people to be lucky, the only advice I usually give to students or colleagues considering whether and when to have children, or how to manage when they do, is to think about the kind of people whose abilities and inclinations are different from their own. But perhaps one can take some consolation from these stories: there are no simple happy endings, but one way or another, hard work, love, and courage seem to serve a lot of women pretty well.

Susan Cole
State University of New York at Buffalo

I not only had a baby in graduate school, I had the first one during exam week when I was a junior (I eventually attended four different undergraduate schools) — I have always had children — and now there are even grandchildren — I could write something but my experience is so old that nothing applies to the current generation — Joshua was born before paper diapers, day care, car seats, and wipes. We lived in a 3 room apartment with a bathroom in the hall and our typewriter wasn't even electric — we ate macaroni and cheese (no one had heard of cholesterol), washed the diapers at the Laudromat (for some reason we thought 2 dozen would be enough) and I recited Homer to the baby to entertain him while I learned to scan at sight.

Our kids lived through two serial Ph.D. dissertations, thought that it was natural for Dads to carry Wittgenstein's Investigations around on vacations and expected to find their own food if their mother was studying for class (a two year old can open the ice box). I forgot Toby's second birthday because I was taking prelims, but we all survived. We never had to go into debt because you could live on a TAship, a VW could drive all day on 10 gallons of gas (there was no gas gauge, remember?), and the state of Minnesota billed on $175 for student who had a baby at University of Minnesota Hospitals (that fee included pre-natal visits, delivery, a week (!) in the hospital, and post-natal visits for both mother and child; we did not have health insurance until Joshua was five years old).

It was all possible because there was a community of young families going through graduate school at the same time. This was important because our own families were a thousand miles away. People were generous with their time (we exchanged baby-sitting). Twelve of us started Minnesota's first licensed nursery school for toddlers in diapers — we had to convince the state inspectors that we could maintain sanitary standards and return each dirty diaper to its own child's parent at the end of the morning. I read Sophocles during the break (weworked one morning a week and those little school editions of Jebb fit into a pocket).

I think I had more energy then than now, and looking back, it was an exciting time. We went to the movies on campus every Friday night (it was the days of Goddard, Truffaut, the first Kurosawa and Al Milgrom brought all the newest films and the best of the old to campus). The Minnesota orchestra performed in Northrup, and in the same auditorium, I saw Martha Graham in what must have been one of her last appearances, as well as Glenn Gould (who hummed all through the Emperor Concerto). The Metropolitan Opera came to campus for a week every spring, and two hundred people turned out for the Classics Club one afternoon to hear visiting professors Douglas Young and John Hainsworth argue about the decipherment of Linear B. I was the one who set it up. In those days the department did not have to pay for a room for special events (we must do that here now), and people from other fields were willing to spend an hour watching two people arguem about ancient Greek.

It occurs to me as I write this that the big change between then and now (then being the sixties and early seventies) is that young people were not expected to go into debt for and education, and the campus provided a complete cultural life, night and day, not only for eighteen year olds, but for the whole community. Graduate students looked out for each other, families could manage because going to class and even teaching responsibilities still provided a chance for flexible scheduling. Brock and I used to trade kids between classes and I remember often having an extra one in the car. This meant there was always some other parent who expected to return the favor when I needed help. I did not do anything alone, there werw always friends to call on, and the result of living so close to my own children is that they have turned out to be my best friends now.

©Cloelia, Spring 2004 and the Women's Classical Caucus