ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, we have focused on strategies for succeeding in your career, gleaned from our survey data, the profile interviews, and the literature. But, as our opening anecdote reveals, it was the color-coded closet of a famous feminist scholar that prompted us to ask the question, “How do successful women organize their lives?” It was not just this woman’s productivity as a scholar that intrigued us-it was also her strategies for living. Like many women in higher education, we struggle to find a balance among work, family/ love, and leisure/play. And we are not alone. When we asked participants in our national survey to name the most difficult challenge they have faced as women faculty in rhetoric and composition, they overwhelmingly responded that it was how to “have a life” while pursuing a career. These women put their difficulty in remarkably similar terms. One responded, “balancing career, community, and home.” Another wrote, “balancing family life and professional life and balancing my own academic work with my administrative work have been the greatest challenges.” Still another explained, “balancing both my life as a single parent of a needy child and my intellectual and scholarly pursuits against the demands placed on me as a tenured faculty member.” Another wrote, “Managing my time among several important career and
personal demands.” Of course, the participants in this study voice a problem that is common among women faculty in general. But among women faculty in rhetoric and composition, who often shoulder more administrative duties and additional student mentoring, time constraints are magnified even more. As one respondent put it, “Teaching [writing] is a psychically draining profession. You have to be present for your students and colleagues in so many ways through the workday. Many times I have headed home feeling so emotionally empty that I just wanted to go to bed when I got home and have no further human contact that day.”
