ABSTRACT
Adrienne Rich has a wonderful phrase to describe the failed nurturance ofwomen under patriarchy: she says we are "wildly unmothered" (1986: 225). This is very much how I once felt, not only in my own family, but also in the larger institutional family of academia. It was feminism, I was initially convinced, that would save me from this dual dilemma. Filled with seventies' idealism, I believed that we feminists in academia would repair our mutual orphanhood through sisterly understanding and co-operation. I thought that we really could transform the academy if only we put our minds to it: from a place of patriarchal rivalry to one modeled on an ethic of empathy and care.1 In time, we would be the "good enough" mothers to our successors which we had so craved in our own childhoods and careers.2 Needless to say, this goal has proved elusive, if not downright foolish in its failure to acknowledge the very real differences (of class, race, sexual preference) that distinguish and often divide us.
