Mama, PhD: a companion for mothers and scholars.

Finding community isn't easy for scholars who are also mothers. Most tenured faculty are men; most women faculty don't have children; most other working moms envy academics their flexible schedules. Isolation makes a hard time even harder.

Hence the importance of Mama, PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, edited by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant (Rutgers University Press, 2008). Neither a guidebook nor a critique (though tips and criticism appear in its pages), this set of 35 personal narratives has the feel of thoughtful, reflective friends sitting at the kitchen table comparing notes.

They probe their successes and failures, fears and desires, frustration and ambivalence. They're open about the messiness of trying to combine motherhood with an academic career. Their stories are diverse. Some rose to academic prominence, some chose lower-prestige or part-time positions and some left higher education. Some are still mid-journey or torn about whether to start a family.

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Mind-body problem

Higher education, supposedly progressive, lags behind the corporate world in support for procreation. Several of the writers suggest it's rooted in the mind-body problem. In keeping with Descartes' maxim, "I think, therefore I am," people on campus are supposed to be disembodied brains--or as Elisabeth Rose Bruner writes, "a head on a stick."

Pregnancy unmistakably involves the body. That makes it an embarrassment. One common response is to stare at the belly and forget that the head can still carry an intelligent thought. Jessica Smartt Gullion describes being marginalized in grad school as her pregnancy progressed. Her department chair retracted her teaching assistantship, claiming a maternity break would disrupt the class.