Chapter 1: Surviving While Dismantling One’s Professional Culture: The Honor/Struggle for the Feminist Academic

How does one evolve and find ways to buttress and interweave activism with an academic life? This chapter describes the clash of educational institutions and my personal realities, to my eventually finding and creating bodies of knowledge, collaborators and validation. Experiencing firsthand the underside of sexual politics of education and the professoriate, in order to live with my realities and survive, I had to challenge the dominant discourse. A bit of initial illustration: First, as pregnant teenager in the 1960s, I was kicked out of 11th grade. Later, as a teacher engaged in the women’s movement, I was frustrated with educators’ lack of attention to gender equity; as a graduate student I squirmed within the gendered hierarchy of educational administration. Then, as a junior faculty member, and the only woman in an educational leadership department, I faced the sickening realization that I was seen not as a serious scholar but as a sex object when I was sexually harassed by my dean.