The Family Track

by Coiner, Constance; George, Diana Hume

• ISBN13: 9780252066948
• ISBN10: 0252066944
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-04-01
• Publisher: Univ of Illinois Pr

Summary

At a time when the academy is an ever more demanding arbiter and shaper of the lives of those it employs, The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties while You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve discusses the challenges and benefits of balancing a rewarding professional life with the competing needs to nurture children, care for aging parents, and engage in other personal relationships. Here academic women and men explore issues that include biological and tenure clocks, child care and eldercare, surrogate parenting of students, and increasing job demands. In telling stories about the quality of their lives, they express their hopes, anxieties, difficulties, and personal strategies for maintaining a delicate but achievable balance.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Preface: Working with Constance
When They Sleep All the Time
Introduction
Your First Two Steps
The Maternal Mind	p. 3
Nine-Syllable Riddle	p. 7
Harvard in the Sixties: (Un)Speakable Memories	p. 14
Plus Ca Change ...?	p. 19
Around 1971	p. 24
Single Parent Maneuvers in Academia	p. 27
Today I Couldn't Get Here from There: A Latina Mother's Journey	p. 32
Motherhood Is Not an Entry-Level Job	p. 40
Paul Lauter Interview	p. 44
Carolyn Forche Interview	p. 53
Out of the Mouths of Babes; or, A Sophist's Choice	p. 59
Not the Feminism I Want My Daughter to Know	p. 66
Mentoring, Mothering, and Mayhem: Costs of the Superwoman Syndrome	p. 75
Lavender Labors or Activist Mothering	p. 80
When Mother Is a Four-Letter Word	p. 86
The Discursive Production of Student-Parents: Theory, Class, and Coalition Politics	p. 91
Beware the Silence: The Risks of a Commuter Marriage	p. 98
Maneuvering through the Cultural Borders of Parenting: Egypt and the United States	p. 103
Reading around the Kids	p. 109
Vampires in the Classroom	p. 114
Invisible Babies	p. 121
How I Got Married, Had a Kid, and Lived to Tell	p. 130
Recollections of a Tenured Mom	p. 137
Juggling on an Uneven Playing Field	p. 139
Letter on Silences	p. 145
Adventures of a Single Father in Academe	p. 151
Sitting on the Fence: Balancing Heart and Mind	p. 157
A Weaning	p. 163
Silver Linings: Forging a Link between Mothering a Child with Autism and Teaching/Scholarship	p. 167
Disabling Facts, Enabling Conditions: Motherhood and Teaching in India and the United States	p. 173
Care and Career in an Aging Society	p. 185
Eldercare and Multicultural Values	p. 193
The Nurture Sandwich: Between Child Care and Eldercare	p. 198
Faculty Wives: Lesbian Family Values	p. 205
Be Fruitful but Don't Multiply; Institutional Denial of Gay and Lesbian Families	p. 211
The Arrogant Academy, Activism, and the Transracial Family	p. 215
Mommy and Me	p. 222
The Fourth Generation of Women Facing the Question	p. 225
And Now the Fifth	p. 231
Silent Parenting in the Academy	p. 237
Family Care in the Profession	p. 250
Of Parents Born: Changing the Family Care System in Academe	p. 255
Domestic Partnership Benefits at the University of Minnesota	p. 261
Teaching, Research, Service: The Impact of Adoption	p. 267
On Learning Not to Love the Oedipus Complex	p. 272
Staying Whole	p. 277
Creating the Family-Friendly Campus	p. 284
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.