The power to change the frightful imbalance of the sexes in the faculties of our institutions of higher education rests, I believe, with the two groups least likely, at first blush, to offer hope for that change: men over and women under 40. Inspiring these two groups to action is certainly uphill work. I am reminded of the Vermont farmer who, asked for directions, replied: If I wanted to get where you’re going, I wouldn’t start here. Here, nonetheless, we are.
Why these two groups? Why not, for example, the group to which I belong: academic women, mostly tenured, 40 and over?
I can only state bluntly that this group of older women of achievement must be counted out. While there are marked exceptions, as in every characterization of groups, older academic women appear to exist in an irreversible state of fear in the presence of their male colleagues.
Women now under 40, however complacent about enjoying what has been won for them, did not grow up as slaves. Doris Lessing has told us that slaves set free, “are marked by the habits of submission; and slaves imagining freedom see it through the eyes of slaves.” There are many explanations for older women’s failure of courage, and I hope one day to identify and describe them, but this much is clear: Established academic women will not offend the male club which has initiated them.
As to men under 40, if they can discover ways to survive in the shrinking academic world, and to live with women without dehumanizing themselves, that is all that can be asked of them, and it is enough.
Men over 40, in whose hands all power lies, are the conservatives of the academic world. A conservative is one who, in defense of principles he considered imperative, can bear with equanimity the suffering of others. We are all in some ways conservative, but complete conservatism and absolute power are a dangerous combination. I suspect that, for many reasons, older academic men are now subtly aware of this, and that awareness can be encouraged. (I remind myself that the harshest penalty for naïveté is to look a fool.)
There is another characteristic of this group, little noticed and less commented upon, which they share with the other successful men of their age: They are at that point in life when the self grows restless and asks, is this all there is? Freud had his work cut out for him exploring the unconscious of infancy, and his followers have paid little attention to the crises (or, as Gail Sheehy calls them, the “passages”) of middle age. Colleges and universities are being run by men as unconsciously sick of power as women are of powerlessness. It is, moreover, being continually affirmed that the feminine selves in males (like the masculine selves in women) become, in middle age, adamant and persistent in their demand for expression. Of course, the average head of a department (think of one!) would sooner admit to plagiarism than to a feminine self. Nonetheless, that powerful male in crisis, although he appears as arrogant as ever, may, given a face-saving way to change, be tempted toward uncharacteristic actions if these can be shown to be sternly practical.
What might these practical actions be?
First, those prestigious institutions that set the style for the profession might stop trading back and forth the few “acceptable” women professors and administrators. There is one woman professor who must have had more offers of alliance in the last decade than Elizabeth I had in her whole lifetime. Male professors and administrators appear to have one criterion of achievement: Would Harvard hire him/her?
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By the time those in search for tenured women have eliminated women who will not move, and those who are suspected of feminism (such a woman is often called a “women’s libber”), they are ready to declare that, of course they haven’t enough tenured women, but suitable candidates (sad to admit) just aren’t available. Every study tells us where these women are: in the less prestigious institutions, where they are usually being marvelously competent and gaining valuable experience. Since the less prestigious the institution, the more women it has, the source of trained women is obvious. Think of farm clubs, think of the minor leagues. As to the feminism of these women, is it really that dangerous? In fact, the few frankly feminist women with tenure, in or out of prestigious intuitions, are so endangered a species as to interest a zoo.
Second, so-called women’s or gender studies are the fastest, perhaps the only, growing academic pursuit in a dreary world. Even some men are teaching these courses, or trying to. Instead of treating this whole subject as a duchess would treat a dog who not only got into the drawing room but made a mess on the hearth rug, why not recognize it for it sheer money-making, scholarly, growth possibilities? No academic field, outside of those sciences whose chief characteristic is their purity, cannot be seen in a new way if every aspect of femininity, or what has hitherto been defined or ignored as femininity, is explored. The whole question of human cognition is now being challenged; Piaget, for example, considered only logical rationality in his pioneering work. Was this too limited? Male administrators, scrounging for funds, must not ignore his source simply because they find it not quite nice.
Third, the largest group of potential students is no longer the 18- to 22-year-olds. Many of the snootiest universities have more non-matriculated than matriculated students, although they are careful not to tell their alumni. This group consists of women and men wearied of stereotyped male pursuits. Courses must be geared to their needs: not made simpler, but less rigid and less authoritarian. Women are those most likely to possess the skills for devising centers and programs for people who wish to study after adolescence or even middle age.
Fourth, chairmen might stop telling every man who is not hired that affirmative action forced the hiring of a woman instead. It is a lie, and if it soothes the disappointed male applicant, it is no less evil or harmful for that. Even with all the unemployment around, one rarely meets, these days, a man turned down for any other reason.
Finally, male administrators must allow themselves to recognize that large numbers of their students, graduate and undergraduate, are women. Can men in power be absolutely confident that women students will continue to pay high fees to be taught exclusively (with only a few token exceptions) by men?
Which brings us to my second group, women under 40 — often way under, since I include students as well as faculty members. The Chronicle reported in April that a woman student at Brown had said: “Activism is considered a male thing. Most women don’t run for office. A lot of women are afraid to be labeled feminist.”
How does one counter the fear of being labeled feminist? I have recently thrown out a collection of clippings from The New York Times (it had grown so large that either it or I had to go) of accounts of women who had made the greatest advances in centuries. They had entered the military academics, taken jobs down mines and up mountains, joined Papa in father-daughter firms, started businesses, deserted tired marriages, and joined formerly all-male boards. One and all, they announced that, of course, they were not feminist. They just wanted to live their own lives.
Everything in a female’s life encourages her to believe that any struggle for self-assertion will result in her abandonment, her isolation from male approval. This fear has been avoided by only a few exceptional women, most of them now assistant professors, little more than a decade older than the students they must now encourage. Often teaching women’s or gender studies, they risk losing possible promotion in being frankly feminist. My faith in these assistant professors is great, for they were formed in the 60’s, that decade which, to be sure, promised more than it gave, but which did teach us that powerful conservatism can be overturned by the persistent efforts of the apparently powerless.
Yet this generation of women assistant professors will find itself an isolated event in history, like their suffragette forbears, if they cannot cultivate their natural constituency: the women students in coed or formerly male institutions. They must remind the women students in institutions formerly all male that no special privilege has been conferred upon them in giving them admittance to these hallowed halls. They were taken in because the pools of academically qualified applicants could not be enlarged without them and because they were needed to attract the best male applicants.
These students need not be humbly grateful. On the contrary, they should demand that, if the institutions cannot survive without women students, neither can those students survive without the role models provided by numerous women faculty members.
The same is now true at the graduate level, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. Enrollments in those departments would be disastrously low were it not for the large numbers of women students. These brilliant women are at least half — and, in many departments, the better half — of graduate students, yet there are few women professors in their departments, and those few are underpaid. Women students must learn their own political and economic power, and stop acting like charity children at a Christmas party.
I like to imagine the male chairman and the woman student in dialogue. He, his feet on the desk, cigar in mouth, patronizes her, eager for her money and brains so long as she will let him pontificate and not ask to be his equal, his colleague; she, afraid someone will tell her she is not feminine if she expresses what Virginia Woolf called the manliness of her girlish heart. I like to imagine that suddenly, to him, she is the self he never developed, that self that might have talked without its feet on the desk. And to her, he is the possibility of real selfhood, without, of course, the pomposity.
Can I really be fool enough to hope for change from these two? Remember Matthew Arnold, who spoke of two worlds — one dead, the other powerless to be born? I think he was wrong then, and I think he’s wrong now.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun was a professor of English at Columbia University when she wrote this essay. She retired from Columbia in 1992 and died in 2003, at age 77.
