Often when I meet older, male academics for the first time, they want to know who mentored me, imagining that knowing my provenance will illuminate—or maybe validate—me.
That is the convention in the academy, which, for all its promise of social mobility, ultimately remains both dynastic and as stratified as Downton Abbey. So-and-so studied with so-and-so and begat so-and-so. So-and-so teaches at such-and-such a place, which produced blah blah blah.
That is how mentorship works for many men anyway. But, like a lot of women of my generation, I am an intellectual and creative orphan. So generally I answer these guys by saying “No one,” which I can tell rubs up against their idea of the meritocracy.
I don’t care. It’s been a quarter century since I was in graduate school. Although I no longer cry (in private) about my mentorlessness, I have the right to occasionally gnash my teeth.
By “mentor” I mean someone who gives you advice, reads your pieces, nominates you for prizes, pushes you forward for jobs, and is in your corner. Someone who pours his or her energy into your well-being. Not a parent, although some parents are temperamentally disposed to be mentors.
My ex-husband was something of a mentor, exemplary in his conviction that my work deserved to be read. But since we got divorced shortly after I sold my first book, I can only give him partial credit in this story. I also had imaginary mentors: writers. By which I mean the books I loved instructed me.
In the 1980s, when I was in college, there weren’t that many women professors around. I went to school just a decade after the Ivies finished going co-ed. (Yale turned in 1969; Harvard held out until 1977.) It was only a decade after the apex of the women’s movement and after the first generation of feminist scholars beat their way into elite institutions.
In college, the one female professor in my department (Near Eastern languages) always looked sad and stern, her face a map of private sorrow. If she realized that it might be difficult for a young Jewish woman to survive on her own in North Africa for a year, she didn’t share that information with me. No one did. (Though if anyone had, I might not have listened anyway.)
In graduate school, in some ways the mentor drought was worse. Or maybe the need was greater. Female professors were still outliers. In general, male professors mentored both male and female students, whom they sometimes slept with. (Why else would you mentor anyone?) But in the classroom, some of those professors seemed to prefer gay female students, perhaps because doing so made them feel virtuous, priests as opposed to Don Juans.
The worst rejections I suffered were from women. In my third (and final) year, the school hired a tough broad and brilliant writer whom we all admired. She never answered my request for a letter of reference. But the most devastating strike came a few years later, when I was writing my dissertation and we learned that a female scholar that everyone respected was joining the faculty. At the time, I was working on what would become the book Striptease, which no men in my Chekhov-loving program really wanted to read. But when I wrote to this woman, hoping that she would nurture the project, she rebuffed me. I forget what reasons she gave or if she bothered with any.
Years later, I still think about that dismissal. But I also wonder whether being left alone was all bad. The rage I felt when confronted with institutional indifference drove me, forced me to be inventive, and made me fight for everything, even when there were no fights to be had.
Now, when I am of the age when I am supposed to be mentoring others, I feel conflicted. First of all, I got by OK without one. And what is mentoring now anyway? As a friend of mine pointed out, the university’s reliance on adjuncts can lead to a kind of fraudulent mentoring: Adjuncts advise students that they are brilliant when they actually need to be shuttled off to the writing center. What the adjuncts get out of this exchange is five-star evaluations, which ensures that they will be rehired.
But wait a sec! I don’t want to be one of those mean-spirited crones yammering about how youngsters should pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Students who are mentored do better. My mentored male friends are in plum academic positions at elite institutions with generous research-leave policies. Many of the mentorless women I know dropped out, did not get tenure, switched professions, married, or retired early. They didn’t win prizes. They languished in the hinterlands.
Everyone deserves to be mentored, if only to even the score.
Except that my good intention collides with a feminist objection. Mentoring is the kind of unpaid work that men historically have exploited. Also, to be a mentor, you have to feel largess. Today that largess still is in short supply. In my professors’ generation, the women, exhausted by the struggle of getting ahead, had little energy left for disciples. It’s dismaying to see how little has changed.
I do not see many female mandarins these days. I’ve heard they exist. I do see female ghosts. I see 55-pluses with advanced degrees doing what is basically office work. I see women stuck at the associate level, living paycheck to paycheck, renting, without savings, condemned to octogenarian poverty. Gender equity in salaries and rank has not been achieved.
Pay is just a piece of the problem. There is also the dismaying tenacity of other kinds of discrimination against women. A recent study showed that students evaluate women more harshly, and yet no university that I’ve read about takes that into account when dealing with promotions.
And here is one scene from my files from this century: About 10 years ago, I was a finalist for a job in the theater department at an elite institution. My first book is about women and popular theater, so I spoke on that subject. When I had finished, the then-dean of the institution, who had installed his wife as department chair, said sharply from the back of the room: “I guess you have no interest in Shakespeare.”
In a subsequent interview up the ladder, the provost said to me, and this was not a compliment, “You seem like someone who has always done what you wanted.”
I don’t think those administrators would have talked that way to a man.
The other candidate for the job was hired. Maybe he had not always done what he wanted.
I adore many of the students I’ve taught over the years. But as I cling to what is left of the life of the mind, I think of my female professors a quarter-century ago, as they looked toward some bright future that they hoped would soon exist.
Rachel Shteir is a literary critic and the author, most recently, of The Steal: A Cultural History of Shoplifting (Penguin, 2011).
