Through extensive interviews, investigates how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university. No index. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Women Writing the Academy is based on an extensive interview study by Gesa E. Kirsch that investigates how women in different academic disciplines perceive and describe their experiences as writers in the university. Kirsch’s study focuses on the writing strategies of successful women writers, their ways of establishing authority, and the kinds of audiences they address in different disciplinary settings. Based on multiple interviews with thirty-five women from five different disciplines (anthropology, education, history, nursing, and psychology) and four academic ranks (seniors, graduate students, and faculty before and after tenure), this is the first book to systematically explore the academic context in which women write and publish. While there are many studies in literary criticism on women as writers of fiction, there has not been parallel scholarship on women as writers of professional discourse, be it inside or outside the academy. Through her research, for example, Kirsch found that women were less likely than their male counterparts to think of their work as sufficiently significant to write up and submit for publication, tended to hold on to their work longer than men before sending it out, and were less likely than men to revise and resubmit manuscripts that had been initially rejected. This book is significant in that it investigates a new area of research— gender and writing—and in doing so brings together findings on audience, authority, and gender.

Essays examine the impact of women's studies on scholarship in fields, includ American history, political science, economics, literary criticism, and psychology.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD In 1960, Harvard’s sister college, Radcliffe, announced the founding of an Institute for Independent Study, a “messy experiment” in women’s education that offered paid fellowships to those with a PhD or “the equivalent” in artistic achievement. Five of the women who received fellowships—poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda, and writer Tillie Olsen—quickly formed deep bonds with one another that would inspire and sustain their most ambitious work. They called themselves “the Equivalents.” Drawing from notebooks, letters, recordings, journals, poetry, and prose, Maggie Doherty weaves a moving narrative of friendship and ambition, art and activism, love and heartbreak, and shows how the institute spoke to the condition of women on the cusp of liberation. “Rich and powerful. . . . A love story about art and female friendship.” —Harper’s Magazine “Reads like a novel, and an intense one at that. . . . The Equivalents is an observant, thoughtful and energetic account.” —Margaret Atwood, The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

My mother still wants me to get a 'real' job. My father, who is retired after 44 years in the merchant marine, has never read my work. When I visited recently, the only book in his house was the telephone book.

Royalist Women Writers aims to put women back on the map of seventeenth-century royalist literature from which they have habitually been marginalised. Looking in detail at the work of Margaret Cavendish, Katherine Philips, and Aphra Behn, it argues that their writings inaugurate a more assertive model of the Englishwoman as literary author, which is crucially enabled by their royalist affiliations. Chalmers reveals new political sub-texts in the three writers' work and shows how these inflect their representations of gender. In this way both their texts and manner of presenting themselves as authors emerges as freshly pertinent to their male and female royalist contemporaries for whom supporting them could be an act of political self-definition.