Start-up Kit for Women’s Lives in the Profession Project (Word Document)
The “Women’s Lives in the Profession Project” builds on the work of feminist scholars Theresa Enos Gender Roles and Faculty Lives (1996) and Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition (Mountford, Ballif, and Davis). The Project is intended to cast a wide net to capture the diversity and true spectrum of women’s lives in the profession: the working lives of women teaching at a variety of institutions and in a variety of different work arrangements; tenure track, non-tenure-track/contingent, administrative appointments, online teaching, TAships, and more. The Women’s Lives in the Profession subcommittee of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession invites women teaching in the field of rhetoric and composition to help us demonstrate the diversity of our work in the field.
Our goals for collecting this information are two-fold:
- As per the AAUP call, we want to counter the stereotypical images of professors, in particular the perceptions of the masculine heroic quest narrative that linger despite our field’s critique and attention to it (Brannon, “M[other]: Lives on the Outside”).
- Moreover, we want to highlight the different options and choices that are available to women and to ask these women themselves–ourselves–to narrate the possibilities and pitfalls of these choices. Future scholars can find paths to research and learn about here in these narratives, but also learn about patterns of work and productivity from a wide range of institutions. This work will also give us a clearer picture of the range and variety of women’s work lives in our profession.
