Review by Choice Review
Whittaker (emer., Univ. of British Columbia) has assembled a collection of essays that consider the workplace identities and stresses that women experience within universities. Focusing on small, medium, and large Canadian liberal arts universities, the authors write about a range of women's experiences in academic life with students, support staff, contract workers, professors, and a university president. Looking beyond the experience of only administrators and faculty, the collection takes a much broader view than earlier writings about Canadian women in the academy. Nonetheless, some familiar jobs are absent: librarians, museum staff, university press editors, campus security, food service workers, and custodial staff. The theme of solitude recurs in each essay--solitude structured either by the nature of the workplace, or solitude structured by enduring biases in the academy about gender or age. The perspective of most of the contributors is from the field of anthropology, and they focus on contemporary experience. Although the work is relatively broad in terms of the range of women's university experiences, the readership for this text is academic. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --Brendan F. R. Edwards, Royal Ontario Museum
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
