ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the authors share their own stories as a three-generation mentoring lineage spanning more than a decade and representing various career stages. Through these experiences, they present strategies for women particularly to mentor one another so that they may thrive and lead as underrepresented faculty. The authors also offer advice for making mentorship sustainable and living, including recognizing it as scholarly and vital service work, fostering reciprocal relationships, naming shared goals for mentoring, and adopting feminist but not gendered models for mentoring. While the personal, specialized, and very human feminist model of mentorship the authors present here recognizes the uniqueness, complexity, and depth of relationships rooted in personal connection and genuine reciprocity, the lack of formal structure does, however, have a downside. Feminist mentorship, with a focus on organic relationships growing in informal but important ways, may offer alternatives to more prevalent systemic mentoring.
