Mothers in Academia

Advocating for Mothers’ Research and Service Needs

Gilda Baeza Ortego

ACADEMIC LIBRARIES have often been referred to as the heart of the university. This designation has been attributed to Charles William Eliot, a nineteenth-century president of Harvard University (Brophy 2005, 1). During that era, academic libraries served principally as the central depository for collections that supported the intellectual pursuits primarily of male faculty and students. The predominance of men in higher education was a phenomenon of social norms that prevailed early in the history of higher education. As Dale Gyure has noted, colleges in colonial America were established for “training ministers and gentlemen” (2008, 110). Although colleges’ mission gradually diversified to include a broader audience, men continued to be the prevalent beneficiaries of higher education for nearly two hundred years. As a consequence, academic libraries have traditionally been focused on men’s scholarly information needs. This chapter examines how feminization of higher education has impacted academic libraries by making traditional library practices and policies obsolete. In particular, I focus on the importance of advocating for student and faculty mothers’ library research and service needs in the context of male domination in higher education. Serving as my inspiration is the groundbreaking work of Nancy E. Dowd (2010), who explores masculinities analysis and feminist theory in critical legal scholarship.

Dowd asserts that one must consider “the man question”—that is cultural and social constructs that define “manliness”—as well as the impact of the “man question” on male power and the subordination process and how masculinities analysis can further feminist theory. She also argues that “when one sex is dominant, sometimes gender issues are rendered invisible” (2010, 416). If one accepts this notion, one can see why gendered practices and policies characterized male-oriented academic libraries of yesteryear and how these practices and policies continue to be sustained despite their dubious relevance in a more feminized academic culture.

The heart of scholarly endeavors, academic libraries, did change dramatically in the last three decades of the twentieth century, however. The most obvious change was the introduction of technology into library services. Driven by the need to serve students and faculty in distance-education programs, innovative technologies are now being used to design library services in a virtual environment. Richard Bazillion and Connie Braun note, “Electronic publication, full-text databases, worldwide interactive interlibrary loan, hypertext, and broadband networking now define the world of academic libraries” (2001, 1). The contemporary academic library is no longer identified as a facility stocked with printed materials. Furthermore, the execution of library services has ceased to rely on the physical proximity of patron and library staff member, an accidental boon to women engaging in scholarly research from afar. In my years in library administration, I have witnessed how this accidental boon has changed how women, especially mothers, have been able to avail themselves of library collections and services.

As I know full well, women, many of whom must juggle research time with family time, have greater access to information than at any other time in the history of higher education. Mothers, like all library patrons, are now able to take advantage of many library services from their homes and at more convenient hours. They can locate full-text journal articles, complete supplemental reading assignments through e-reserves, use online features to renew books and request interlibrary loan materials, ask reference questions via e-chat and social media, and access thousands of digitized books and government documents via computer or mobile devices such as smart phones and iPads.

However, the availability of library services and resources does not relieve women of “second-shift work” (i.e., household duties and child care), described by Arlie Russell Hochschild in 1989 (see Hochschild and Machung [1989] 2003). Technological innovations have certainly eased the burden of physical access to library collections and services, but at the same time they have done little to modify gender-specific social responsibilities. O’Reilly poignantly illustrates this point with an anecdotal account of when participants of a national conference on motherhood empowerment were asked to submit postconference images of their households in disarray. She posed the questions: “Why should the mothers come home and find their house in such a state after a two-day conference? Should fathers not be expected to competently run a household in their absence? And why was their ‘incompetence’ to do this considered funny?” (2010b, 26).

Indeed, I ask: Is this situation an extended manifestation of Dowd’s core propositions that the definition of masculinity is “not to be like a woman” and “devaluing of things associated with women,” such as housekeeping (2010, 418)? Are women partially responsible for their subordination by not demanding that men contribute to household chores when the women cannot, as O’Reilly asks?

Like many in my middle-aged generation, I confess that I am a “digital immigrant,” a person who has adapted to technological innovations as they developed and were introduced (sometimes forcibly) into my work responsibilities. With much pain and consternation, academic libraries’ acceptance of innovations in information technology was slow to evolve. In fact, technology posed a serious threat to libraries. Lyndon Pugh (2005) eloquently discusses how centuries-old library management theory was forced by necessity to formulate a new identity. For example, collection-development policies of a by-gone era reflected a “just in case” perspective in which libraries collected relevant resources “just in case” they would be needed by a library user. The escalating costs of printed materials forced library decision makers to abandon this policy in favor of the “just in time” policy in collection development. Pugh postulates that academic libraries are now entering the “just for you” era that is made possible by distributed information resources. Not only have I accepted my digital immigrant status and its limitations, but I have come to see that the “just for you” approach has exciting possibilities for women library users and researchers, especially mothers within academia. I doubt that my male counterparts in library administration even realize that mothers as library users are a historically underserved population group, but they cannot embrace what they cannot see. To adapt Dowd’s (2010) comments to my librarian perspective, mothers as library users have been “rendered invisible”—that is, until now.

More subtle than the technological transformation is the fact that academic libraries are experiencing a gender shift in its dominant user group. According to the U.S. Department of Education, women currently constitute the majority of university students and will grow another 16 percent in the next decade (Bailey and Hussar 2009, 9). Women are also more present among the professoriate (Wolf-Wendel and Ward 2006, 487) and at the higher-education administrative level (Skandera-Trombley 2003). Progressive campuses are finally awakening to this reality and are beginning to develop policies that are more compatible with women’s service needs and research interests and by extension their families’ needs (Patterson 2008).

Research suggests that women have paradoxically been both enriched and penalized by the growing opportunities for education attainment and career achievement. As Elizabeth Hayes describes the situation, “The tensions experienced by women between their family roles and learning in higher education provides a particularly prominent example of the gendered nature of these conflicts” (2000, 47). The expectation is not only that they can “have it all,” but that they can do it all in an academic cultural context that favors men’s lifestyles, reproductive abilities, and behavioral patterns. For years, academic libraries continued to fit themselves to their parent institutions’ gendered mold.

Therefore, it is by default, not by design, that library technical innovations benefit mothers’ research and library service needs. Men who did not acknowledge gender differences developed these innovations. Studies in information-seeking behavior suggest that women often seek information more frequently than men and usually use more resources than men in their information quests. Lori Ricigliano and Renee Houston (2003) were among the first researchers to explore how library technologies impacted social relations and dynamics in library settings. They conclude that, contrary to improved expectations, technology in academic libraries has contributed to wage disparities among male and female employees and has given rise to gender segregation in the academic library workplace. The integration of library technologies sprouted another male-dominant enclave, the information technology staff. Aloha Record and Ravonne Green (2008) report that men still dominate as library administrators and managers. These two studies provide evidence that even though academic librarianship consists of more women than men, men still have the power in decision making and in designing and managing technical innovation. This phenomenon can be explained in terms of Dowd’s masculinities analysis. She includes work segregation and income inequality as among the consequences of male privilege and female subordination (2010, 420).

Although the mode of information delivery has been transformed, academic libraries have not taken into account that women seek and use information differently from men. The professional literature addressed this issue with the publication of “Gender Issues in Information Needs and Services,” a special issue of Library Trends (Ingold and Searing 2007). This special issue explores gender-related considerations in frequency of library visits, politics of information, and topics of interests to women. However, it is directed primarily to the social milieu of public libraries rather than of research or college libraries, where academic mothers most abound. Nevertheless, my experience as library administrator and researcher make me believe that the gender-related considerations it discusses apply to the academic environment as well.

Perhaps the male-dominated decision making in academic libraries has been tolerated because higher education as a whole is slow to change. Anne Stockdell-Giesler and Rebecca Ingalls note that despite the support of female scholars by the American Association of University Professors and other professional groups in academia, “the ethos of the scholar in the modern university remains that of a solitary male thinker who, upon producing enough intellectual work on a strict schedule, is rewarded with a lifetime position” (2007, 38). Indeed, the “Rodin Perplex model” (my name for the solitary male thinker) has guided library policies, services, and use of space. Interestingly, Dowd (2010) has identified the gendered use of space as one of her core propositions in masculinities analysis, which includes the presence of children in those spaces.

Academic libraries have historically gained notoriety for issuing policies that prohibit or discourage children in their facilities. Library administrators justify antichildren policies by referring to liability concerns, the traditional paradigm about the need to maintain a quiet environment, and the need not to have to deal with issues such as Internet filtering. Because not all library services and information resources are accessible through technology, student mothers with library needs are thus stymied with the challenge of finding child care simply in order to use the library. Women professors face the same dilemma. They, too, have research obligations that cannot be met in light of library policies toward children and noise.