ABSTRACT
Faculty wives may well represent the most highly educated and underutilized source of womanpower in the country. As "captive" residents of their academic communities, they have long been ignored or exploited by the institutions at which their husbands are employed. While no statistics on the educational level of faculty wives as a group are available, it is safe to assume that the average faculty wife has, at a minimum, a bachelor's degree. In large universities the opportunities may be greater, but so will the competition, and there are simply too few jobs to accommodate the number of qualified faculty wives. In many cases the dissatisfaction engendered by such rules rebounds against the institution itself. Faculty wives may count on being prominent among those such institutions actively recruit. Utilizing the talents of faculty wives more fully would benefit not only the wives but academe and society also.
