Teacher, Scholar, Mother: Re-Envisioning Motherhood in the Academy. Ed. Anna M. Young. Lanham, MD (Review)

Abstract

Teacher, Scholar, Mother: Re-Envisioning Motherhood in the Academy offers a rich collection of perspectives that bring the everyday experiences of the 21st-century ‘mother-scholar’ into striking relief. As a whole, the volume deploys academic motherhood as a critical category of analysis and positions it as a nexus point through which individual stories of adversity and resilience coalesce. Its chapters collectively reveal the enduring hegemony of heteropatriarchal norms, policies, and structures within the interpersonal and institutional spaces of academia. Organized thematically into three sections, eighteen individual chapters unfold around a question editor Anna Young poses in the introduction: “why is the academy, so full of such accomplished and smart and curious people, such a difficult place for mothers?”(x).