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Rockets' red glare
The author of "Dog Soldiers" picks five great contemporary war novels.
By Robert Stone
[10/11/99]

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"The Remains of River Names" by Matt Briggs
A beautifully sensitive novel looks at hippie-generation parents and the kids they weren't prepared to raise.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[10/11/99]

Thin gruel for Vonnegut fans
The film "Breakfast of Champions" misses the point: What "Bokononists" love is Father Kurt's smart anti-intellectualism.
By Alissa Lara Quart
[10/08/99]

Reviews
"Assuming the Position" by Rick Whitaker
A onetime hustler takes a long, hard look at the Life.
By Dennis Drabelle
[10/08/99]

Interview
The Salon Interview: Kurt Vonnegut
The author of "Slaughterhouse-Five" and "Breakfast of Champions" talks about Capote and Kerouac, Hillary and Rudy, television and, of course, the end of the world.
By Frank Houston
[10/08/99]

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My dedication served to make me oblivious to the obstacles that faced me. It was a double bind: If I fully assessed the forces arrayed against me, how could I continue? If I didn't assess them, how would I know where I was going or how to get there? As a woman in a male world, I needed armor. Inspiration afforded the strongest kind, but armor is nonetheless an anaesthetic, even a form of blindness.

In 1970, I turned down a tenure-track job at Harvard. My fascination with peak male intellect remained, but, thanks to the feminist movement just under way, I was now aware of the gender-restricted privileges that safeguard its preeminence, and the dangers of questioning them. The Harvard professors I loved who had praised me as a student might react differently once I was a colleague. After all, no one likes finding a critic where he expected a fan. I accepted a post at Princeton, which was then aggressively recruiting women scholars. There, I assumed it would be less risky to be my adult self, whoever that might turn out to be.

In fact, Princeton proved to be my first experience with the out-in-the-open backlash against women scholars. Long an exceptionally well-to-do bastion of gentlemanly values, the university had admitted a handful of women undergraduates in 1969. When I became one of only 13 female professors on its faculty, and the first woman ever in its English department, many of my colleagues expressed their open displeasure. "Some of us wanted to be in an all-male school," one colleague pointedly told me, explaining why he'd rejected a Harvard offer.

To make matters worse, despite my junior status, I was quickly given a series of coveted and prestigious committee appointments. While this seemed to be a privilege, it also fueled the resentment of my male colleagues. Inevitably, token women are overexposed and overworked -- even today, the Ivy League looks like a cheap Hollywood production in which a dozen female extras run repeatedly past the camera to create the illusion of a mob scene. Meanwhile I was kept constantly aware of my status as an interloper. Colleagues warned students not to take my courses in women's literature and history. My chairman called me into his office to tell me my work was faddish, "a luxury, intellectually speaking, which Princeton simply can't afford." In 1974, I resigned to take a job at Columbia, where I have been ever since.

Today the attitudes and behavior I encountered in the early stages of my career should seem part of a prehistoric past. Women outnumber men in college. Roughly 30 percent of the students at the nation's leading business schools are women; the figure is over 40 percent in medical and law schools. In many fields in the social sciences and humanities, more women than men get Ph.D.s. The nation's female faculty has grown 114 percent since 1976, almost six times as fast as its male faculty.

Yet such figures are misleading. Despite the increase in their numbers, on several significant fronts, women are losing ground in the academy, and the more prestigious the institution, the greater the discrimination. There may be more female than male undergraduates nationwide, but most of the top private colleges, including Harvard, MIT, Chicago, Yale, Johns Hopkins and Princeton, maintain a slim male majority. Although over 50 percent of the faculty at junior colleges are women, the figure is only 36 percent at four-year institutions.

Most disturbingly, the gap between available female Ph.D.s and women in tenure-track appointments has actually widened in the last 10 years. While more women are qualified for such jobs, a smaller percentage are getting them. This imbalance is evident in promotion patterns as well. More full-time male faculty (72 percent) have tenured jobs now than did in 1975 (64 percent), but the number of tenured full-time women remains the same (46 percent). Women are disproportionately represented in the proliferating part-time, non-tenure-track jobs that now make up about 40 percent of all academic posts. The multiplication of ill-paid and often benefits-free, part-time jobs, which enrich the institution at the expense of its most vulnerable members, coincided precisely with the moment when women began to earn Ph.D.s in record numbers. The gender gap in academic salaries, after narrowing in the early '90s, has increased in the last few years, and it is greatest at the top.

Yet gender parity within the academy is no longer seen as a pressing issue. As Jean E. Howard, an English professor at Columbia and currently the president of the Shakespeare Association of America, told me, "Feminism is no longer foregrounded in progressive politics in the academy, especially in the elite institutions. The assumption is, we've done that." Howard is quick to add, "We haven't -- it's just not being talked about."

Next page | The feminization of the academy: more women, less prestige