Last spring, when I was visiting Libby in Richmond, I had the chance to sit down with Elrena and Libby’s colleague Terry Dolson for a long talk about mothering, graduate work, and the different paths that brought Elrena and me together to create Mama, PhD. Somehow, Terry managed to whittle the conversation down to a readable couple pages, and the result is at LiteraryMama today.

Terry starts by talking about her experience as a pregnant woman in a graduate program in English, and comments:

Was it naiveté that convinced me then that the complex path to combining motherhood and academia were mapped already? No one told me it was; no one talked about it at all. Not talking about it allows for assumptions about “how it’s always been” to go unquestioned. In a comment on a recent InsideHigherEd.com article, one male academic seriously described academia as “a gentlemanly profession.” Thank goodness that Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant’s book, Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life, begins to outline a new path. This collection of essays by women trying to navigate the “gentlemanly field” of academia may be the first step toward addressing the “ivory ceiling.” I spoke with Caroline and Elrena at a coffee shop near my campus to learn what inspired this essay collection.

Click on over to LiteraryMama to read the rest!