Mothers in the Academy: How to Do It All*

Heather Cox Richardson

Well, first you need a good household staff.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA….

OK, now that we’ve got the hilarity out of the way, how really can mothers take on teaching, research and writing, and children—three incredibly labor-intensive jobs—at the same time?

Let’s start with teaching. Here are a few things I picked up along the way, largely by the seat of my pants as I jumped into a job when my first child (of three) was just shy of three months old. Nothing I learned was intentional, but some of it has stood me in good stead.

The key concept for enabling mothers to survive in the academy is efficiency. And here are some things that helped me to achieve it:

Teach big courses with a wide scope. That sounds counterintuitive, I know. Most people think it takes less energy for junior scholars—and most people with small children will be junior scholars—to teach smaller classes in their specialty. The problem with such specific classes is that they tend to be under enrolled, which means you will constantly have to come up with new courses to keep your numbers up. Repeatedly writing courses from scratch is a huge time-sink.

Mothers in the Academy

Heather Cox Richardson

A recent study shows that having children hurts women in academia at every stage of the profession. This will not be news to any woman who has had to sneak out of a meeting to pick up a child before the daycare fine system kicks in, who has had to explain to an older male colleague that his insistence on scheduling his pet seminar from 4 to 6 guarantees she can never attend no matter how angry it makes him, who has worked all night in the office because search files could not leave the premises and there was no time during the day to get enough time to read them all, and who has heard those chilling words: “You can have tenure or children, but not both.”

There is a push to change the mechanics of university life to address this problem, offering maternity leave to graduate students, for example, and extending tenure clocks for mothers. (More first-floor bathrooms wouldn’t come amiss either, by the way; two flights to a bathroom when you’re eight months pregnant is no picnic.) These steps are important, to be sure. But for historians, even more important to remember is that, by cutting more than half the population from the study of humanity, we are skewing our scholarship so badly it threatens to lose all meaning.

This is not a theoretical argument; it has real-world meaning for the study of history. Having a family—and nurturing it—is crucial for historians. (And this does not seem to me to have to be birth or adopted children, by the way. Investing in community does not require youngsters who actually live in your home.)