ThePhdMom

How motherhood makes women smarter and more mentally agile.

According to the website "Psychology Today" the mental dexterity that mothers gain from raising their kids may translate permanently into greater empathy and assertiveness.... A combination of motivation, practice and hormones gives mothers intellectual strengths they may have never had before."

All I have to say is HMMMMMMMMMM.....I need some of the intellectual strength to come through for me RIGHT NOW!

Thephdmom

After passing over one milestone in my adult life in January of 2009 (passing my quals), I came across another "life" altering benchmark in 2010. I found out I was expecting my second child!

Looking back (my son is three months now) I know it would have been extremely helpful to blog throughout the entire pregnancy process. However, I know you will all understand me when I say, "I was extremely busy juggling the rest of my life around." :) Between work, home-life, doctor's appointments, and research here and there, I was completely fettered. Now that I am somewhat settled in a routine, I have found the time and wherewithal to begin blogging...and I couldn't think of a more fitting topic than Pregnancy and Graduate School.

In June of 2010 I received an email from a graduate student discussion list I subscribe to titled "Pregnancy and Graduate School." Let me start by saying the email could not have come at a more opportune time. The day before I received the email, I had just accepted the Smith College Mendenhall Fellowship for the 2010/2011 academic year. I had also recently found out I was very very pregnant. Seeing as my condition had drastically changed since applying for the fellowship, I was a little apprehensive about accepting the fellowship, after all when I started graduate school all those years ago, my eldest son was at least somewhat self-sufficient.

Anyway the email raised several important questions, that I am sure I will ask and answer throughout my process, and it also offered some practical advice for dealing with pregnancy during the graduate school process. To say the least it helped me feel comfortable about accepting the fellowship at Smith College.

The following questions were asked and some where answered quite thoroughly by other follows of the list. Because I deem them highly important to all PhD moms everywhere they will be the subject of next couple of blogs over the upcoming weeks/months. As I navigate through the process myself I will keep you all updated! Please feel free to comment on any of these questions yourself if you have any experience relating to them-until we chat again...

1. What was like being pregnant then having a very young baby while trying to write your dissertation?
2. How soon after birth is it practical to think about resuming research and writing? How many hours a day?
3. How supportive and accommodating were your fellow classmates, faculty and department?
   
4. Is it possible to balance staying on track academically (close to it, anyway) with
   doing what is right for the baby, and for yourself as a parent?
5. What do you think of accepting funding, whether teaching assistantships, research fellowships, internal to the university, or from external sources, if you already know you are pregnant?

So it official I now I have a very rough and very crude outline/chapter subjects for my dissertation. I have also a rough timeline for completion of each chapter. Now lets see if it works! I guess I should start at the beginning and let you all know exactly what it is I am researching.

My Research Questions:

1. What role did African American women play in the history of morality campaigns, vice control, and the problem of vice itself in the West?
2. How did the ideology of respectability factor into the discourse of twentieth century vice in the West?

I choose this subject because I am extremely interested in the ways that "womanhood" is redefined over space, time, class and racial differences. I actually became interested in this subject as an undergraduate when I did research on the stereotypes of African American women in films. It was interesting because here I found that actresses actually assigned a different meaning to the roles they were portraying on the silver screen. For example Hattie McDaniel once said it was better to play a maid in a movie and make $8,000 than to actually be a maid in real life making $8.00 a day. My reading of this statement lead me to conclude that McDaniel was referring to the "economic necessity/ incentive" for accepting and in many redefining acceptable notions of womanhood. For most African American woman living during the 1930s and 30s, they were circumscribed to menial economic, social and political niches in society. Many adapted to this by creating and re-creating new notions of "traditional" social expectations. This includes traditional notions of womanhood and femininity. Women adapted new identities for various reasons. Sometimes,like in the instance of McDaniel, the economic viability outweighed the future social implications of the image she portrayed on the silver screen. McDaniel was living in a time when African Americans, male or female, where accorded limited social mobility.

Fast forward to graduate school. While reading Confessions of A Video Vixen one winter break about 3 years ago, I again began to questions definitions of womanhood, such as why do women accept roles in the media and even in their everyday lives that seem to run counter to "traditional" definitions of womanhood? Why has a new definition of womanhood emerged? When did this emergence take place? What of the Girls Gone Wild and the Video Vixens or the countless reality shows that show women willing to bare all because they are "embracing" their "womanhood." How did we get to this point? Why are acts that would have been considered disreputable less than a century ago, today seen as exercising agency and autonomy or embracing our womanhood? How and why has the definition of womanhood changed? I know that McDaniel's case is not explicitly related to the phenom of "buck wild reality show woman" but her statement about the economic viability stuck with me and in short was very interesting.

So ultimately my questions surrounding the emergence of 21st century femininties led me to question the historic development of such ideas amongst African American women in the West-prior to the 21st century. I largely choose this parameters around my research because African American women in the west is largely an understudied area.

Ok Ok So as I mentioned earlier in the post, I have my chapter subjects figured out and even a timeline for writing each one. Roughly it looks like this:

1. Introduction (obviously I cannot fully complete this until the end)
   
2. Chapter 1: Fall 2010: What is a Train Ride? Gender and Respectability in San Francisco's Streetcars
3. Chapter 2: Winter 2011: Undermining, Redefining, and Performing the Politics of Respectability
   
4. Chapter 3: Spring 2011: The Dialectic of Disgrace and Respectability
   
5. Chapter 4: Summer 2011: Renegotiating Respectability through the 1920s and 30s
   
6. Conclusion: Summer 2011

Each chapter is broken down into 3-5 subcategories. I have alloted 2 months for each chapter and a month each for the introduction and conclusion. Based on the amount of research I have done and my argument, I have estimated (but of course you never know) that each chapter will be anywhere from 40-60 pages and my introduction and conclusion anywhere from 10-30 pages. Because I have researched and briefly outlined each chapter, I do not have to work in any particular order and it breaks up the monotony...I am however going to try to work from the beginning to the end...I will use the free write techniques suggested in the Bolker book, but I do modify them.

Thephdmom

"Nobody objects to a woman being a good writer or sculptor or geneticist if at the same time she manages to be a good wife, a good mother, good-looking, good-tempered, well-dressed, well-groomed, and unaggressive."

Ok...

So here you will find out how I am doing with my writing process. Sometimes I will have a lot to report, other days I will just ramble. Hopefully most of it will be productive! If these postings are not coherent, it is because I am taking some advice found in Joan Bolker's Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. One of her first suggestions on getting started writing is; "When you sit down to begin a peice of writing, your first aim ought to be to make a mess-to say anything that comes to your mind, on the subject or off it, not to worry at all about whether your stuff is connected logically, to play with your subject the way you used to build mud pies, to do no fine detail work, to spell poorly if that's your natural inclination, and to generally forget about standards altogether. The idea behind this suggestion (which is similar to chaos theory) is that "you will be able to produce stronger, more imaginative writing that you'll feel proud to own." Will this work? It doesn't hurt to try....so here goes!

Thephdmom

This blog serves as clearinghouse and springboard for critical discussions of Women in Higher Education. Specifically, issues concerning the perils of writing a dissertation while raising a family will be discussed. In addition, from time to time I will comment on “Mama Phd’s” place in the Academy post PhD, but I will mostly focus on how motherhood, and gender in general, shapes the Phd experience.

Gender theory demonstrates that all aspects of human interaction are gendered. Indeed in virtually all societies, gender serves as a broad social construction informing and limiting the concepts of difference, exclusion, and inclusion in the civic and moral ethos of a community. The academic community is no different! On this blog I hope to provide insight, support and encouragement to hundreds of Phd Moms out there looking for the light at the end of the tunnel (or the signatures on that final draft). We need an outlet!!!!!

Thephdmom