Caveat Lector

“All I did was tell a mud-wrestling joke,” says a man, astonished that a woman has taken offense. “I just quoted Frank Miller, or noted the flaming hawtness of the chick on his latest cover. I just tossed off a reference to the megabytes of pr0n I supposedly (but not really) have on my hard drive.” (Real-life examples have been modified to protect the guilty. Not modified very much, mind you.) “I didn’t mean anything by it. What’s the big deal?”

The big deal is that however innocent this stuff may be on its own (and I would actually argue that it isn’t, but right now I’m not going to), it is commonly wielded as a weapon by open misogynists. Go read some Slashdot if you don’t believe me; or check out Bess Sadler’s dreadful but true tale. I guaran-damn-tee you the guys who straight-facedly argue that women are ruining IT, or get so defensive at the least objection to their behavior as to respond with pure white-hot hatred—these guys toss off blonde jokes, booth-babe jokes, and PMS jokes right and left.

The world has improved enough that professional women can sometimes avoid these creeps, and most creeps have gotten the message that open misogyny on the job will get them fired. This does not, I am told, stop them from exchanging misogyny where women—especially female bosses—can’t hear them. This points to another part of the problem: eliminating overt misogyny isn’t enough. Women aren’t stupid. We know it’s out there (doesn’t the Internet constantly shove it in our faces, after all?), and we know dumb jokes are its most common manifestation.

So when you crack such jokes, or when you argue that they’re no big deal, or when you react with belittling disbelief to someone objecting to them, you immediately lose my trust. I have to assume you’re a creep and you’ve been hiding it, because if I give you the benefit of the doubt and I’m wrong to, you can find all sorts of clever and interesting ways to poison my professional life, or even worse.

Leaving aside, of course, that creeps are creeps and who actually wants to be around them except other creeps? Sure, that’s guilt by association, but a bunch of creeps is many times nastier and more dangerous than an individual creep. Ask yourself about the men who emailed Bess; isn’t it hard to believe they weren’t egging each other on?

At the very least, the best of them, even if he said nothing whatever to Bess, was complicit in a community that turned viciously on a female member. The first sexist joke in a community, particularly the first unchallenged one, raises the possibility of just such another savage pile-on. The thought of that happening in a community of practice that I belong to sickens me.

When I was younger, I was dead easy to intimidate, and I had my antennae up looking for reason to be afraid. Although PubStruct’s unfailing decency gave me some confidence, I lost some when Neurotic Ex-Boss took against me, because part of the explanation for that was that I was a woman and Neurotic Ex-Boss lashed out at competent women. (Nor was that all he did, but that’s telling tales out of school; suffice to say that he was the archetypal sexist creep and I hope I never see him again.)

I don’t get scared as much now. I get angry, and these days I get out. To the man who’s said one stupid thing, doubtless that seems excessive. But, damn, I have had my fill and more of sexist attitudes, and I never wanted to believe men who thought and behaved like that existed in the first place! There’s no such thing any more as “just one joke,” just one instance of cluelessness, just one time being overlooked. As was pointed out in Karen’s comments, Ellen Spertus wrote about this fifteen years ago. Fifteen. Years. Ago. And none of what she wrote reads to me as outdated. So, yeah, explain to me why the hell I shouldn’t be angry?

Bess Sadler wrote the other half of this post for me. Driving women out of casual conversations about computer systems and systems librarianship means more than mere incourtesy. It cuts off a key source of learning. Some men I know could doubtless have solved last week’s CVS problems in ten minutes flat. I don’t trust those men (and I am not alone; I heard “I’d never [go to them] unless I was desperate” from another female systems librarian last week), so I didn’t ask them.

Sure, I figured it out myself. But consider the time-spent differential, and consider that I now look less effective than someone who can comfortably ask—even though I’ve no fewer wits, no less ability.

It matters. It matters a lot.

I recently added Feminist SF — The Blog! and Written World to my home blogroll. Also don’t miss Girl Wonder if you’re a comics geek, and perhaps even if you’re not.

Some of the discussions in these venues can sound frighteningly like the current libraryland dustup over sexism, the latest episode of which is Karen’s. (Oh, and y’all? Don’t make this about feminism. It isn’t about feminism. It’s about sexism. Let’s kindly remember that, and not get distracted by waving red capes. Er, so to speak.)

Take, for example, this thorough dissection of a brain-dead remark by Marvel’s Joe Quesada about female representation amongst comics creators. Section II in particular is highly relevant to Karen’s post’s comment section, and don’t miss the quote by Laura Q of Feminist-SF!

I honestly wonder if Dr. Miller (and it is Dr., and I apologize for not having used the title previously; I wasn’t aware he held it) understands how insulting an “I can’t find good women!” claim is in librarianship. This is a majority female profession, for those following along at home. Mostly-male panels, mostly-male conference-speaker rosters, mostly-male administrations—they proclaim “A minority of men is smarter and more able than the majority of women.”

There’s no acceptable way to make this claim in librarianship. Just no way. If you’re not finding capable women in this field, you’re not looking or you’re driving them off. Even in systems librarianship where the gender ratio is skewed masculine compared to the rest of the field, if you’re not finding, you’re not looking. Laura Q just told you why you’re not looking, and Karen explained clearly in her post’s comments why sitting back and waiting for female speakers to fall from the nearest tree is a losing strategy. So go look.

I recommend a very simple weak-ties technique, for starters: when a speaker turns you down, ask him or her to recommend other speakers. Make a point of following up with this question if the speaker who turned you down is likely to have a significantly different professional network from you. Asking best buds for recs, especially if your network’s demographics are pretty much like yours and one of your goals is to broaden your speakers’ demographic range, isn’t going to expand your horizons.

I won’t comment on Dr. Miller’s “I won’t beg,” because if I did, it’d get ugly. It does, however, lead me a long way past Dr. Miller to the beyond-the-pale phenomenon that sends my blood pressure into the stratosphere, the phenomenon I was dismayed and disheartened to find in my chosen field: forthrightly misogynistic jokes.

I understand how representation issues become invisible. I do. I don’t blame Dr. Miller for getting caught out; he’s far from the only one, and I do believe given the exchange in Karen’s comments that he’s going to put some real effort into diversifying his corner of the library world. So go him.

I also understand knee-jerk defensive reactions. I have to talk myself down from them too, generally around issues of race or class (where I’m privileged and I know it). I’ve been hard on Dr. Miller about his in this post, because knee-jerk defensiveness is not (she said sheepishly) an attitude that wins friends and influences people. In fact, in my experience (on both the offense-giving and offense-receiving end of things) it magnifies an original error a hundredfold. At least.

What I don’t understand is how anyone can think that a sexist joke is acceptable in company containing strangers (never mind professional colleagues). Sure, stuff gets said around people you know well that in any other context would be out of line. But… around people you don’t know all that well… why why why? And yet it happens. When I say “tech-boy locker room” and “Cro-1337non Man,” y’all, this is what I mean. Oh, and, um, don’t ask me to be specific in public unless you really, really mean it, because I can curl your toes with some of the stuff I’ve personally witnessed, and some of my friends have experiences that make my toes curl.

What makes a Cro-1337non? I won’t even speculate, though I’m fond of the “their folks didn’t raise ’em right” theory. It’s not that they’re single; I know married Cro-1337nons. It’s not that they’re youngsters; the ones I know are more than old enough to know better. I don’t know why they’re out there. I’ll just assert that they’re out there, and they’re a problem. Since libraryland’s Cro-1337nons are naturally concentrated in systems… I don’t need to finish this sentence, do I? Supply your own ending. Or three. Could Cro-1337nonist disrespect among library-software vendors be part of the problem libraries have getting what they want and need? I dunno. Could be.

I think part of the difficulty (and Mr. G-rm-n will have yet another reason to want my head on a pike after this) is that librarianship doesn’t have enough native-born techies. We find ourselves forced to import from the exterior, and the exterior is brim-full of the Slashdot demographic, prime examples of Cro-1337non Man.

Librarian techies don’t have to be female to fix the problem, though. If it accomplishes nothing else, sitting through an MLS will teach just about any guy the basic rules for coping with a roomful of women. A CS degree, not so much. And in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, guybrarians mostly aren’t the problem, though I’ve met one or two systems guybrarians I wouldn’t personally want to work with on this account, and other guybrarians I could name have been known to magnify existing problems with knee-jerk defensiveness.

Did I mention “Don’t do that?” with regard to defensiveness? Oh, good. “I acknowledge the problem,” “I’m sorry,” “I’ll fix it,” and “I’ll try not to do it again” are vastly more useful (and, of course, kinder and more courteous) reactions. A defensive reaction to a complaint makes the complainant, who was undoubtedly nervous and unhappy about complaining in the first place, feel many times more nervous, unhappy, and unwelcome. Been there, done that, left the T-shirt behind me.

And for heaven’s sake, if you want to avoid the Cro-1337non label, don’t whinge about how a given group was so much freer and nicer in the old days (before, you know, all those women started demanding some respect), how self-censorship is such a drag. (Yes, has happened.) That’s heinous. That’s saying that lousy sexist jokes are more important to you than the women around you. What self-respecting woman wouldn’t seek friendlier shores?

A particular pet peeve of mine is being asked to monitor a Cro-1337non Man, or a group that contains them, for faux pas. (Yep. Has also happened.) Often this is well-meant, but it still rankles. I don’t like to worry about other people’s behavior; I have enough trouble keeping tabs on my own! Never mind that I can’t relax and enjoy a social group if I’ve been cast as its den mother. Nor, I might add, can the other group members be entirely comfortable around me. How could they? I’ve been told to judge them!

The more fundamental problem, though, is that I’m being asked to solve a problem I didn’t create and bear zero responsibility for. I ain’t nobody’s mama, nor nobody’s nanny, nor nobody’s etiquette coach, and I decline to be nominated to these roles merely because someone else’s behavior shows a need for them. Cro-1337non Man needs to change his attitudes or at the least learn to self-monitor, and there’s plenty of reading material on and off the Web to help him. (I recommend the Women in Linux HOWTO, for starters.)

An awful lot of good work and good intent can be unraveled by one Cro-1337non. Maybe that’s unfair, but that’s how it is—any techie woman you name has been dealing with Cro-1337nons for ages, and she’s learned to vanish when they turn up. That’s especially dangerous in librarianship, because nothing gets done in a library without a woman involved somewhere. Frustrated library techies take note; if you want change in libraries, you need women, so don’t tick ’em off over something as stupid and pointless as sexist jokes.

Whether we hunt down the Cro-1337nons or just out-compete ’em till they go extinct, the sooner they’re gone, the more gender-representative systems librarianship will be compared to the rest of the field, and the more pleasant it will be to be a female systems librarian. Believe me, I’m all for that!

I had a post all ready to go in response to Rachel’s query about private reactions to public questioning of sexism in library technology. It was an outspoken philippic in the best CavLec tradition of unabashed, fiery candor.

After writing it and saving it as a draft, I got up, walked around the apartment a bit, hopped on the exercise bike and drove it the fastest mile I think I’ve ever driven it, walked around the apartment some more, did a stretch or two, ate some tortilla chips by way of comfort food, sat down again, opened a new post window, and started transplanting the least-inflammatory segments of that draft into this post.

For the record, Rachel, I noticed exactly the behavior you did. I’ve gotten email aplenty on this subject. What’s more, when I politely urged some of my correspondents to take their aptly-expressed concerns and experiences public (for mailing-list values of “public”), what I heard without exception was, “Oh, I can’t—I have to work with guys like that. It’ll play merry hell with my daily worklife.”

I talked last week with another library blogger who’s written on this subject. She’s leery of writing more, though she said she’s got more to say. She’s got plenty of work and personal crises on her plate; why should she sign up for one more crisis?

I explained in my own prior post on the matter that I’d kept another fine, fiery post in draft instead of publishing it. I explained why I did that. It’s worth noting, I think, that after the post I did have the cojones (thanks for the mot juste, Karen!) to publish, two #code4lib members, wholly independently of each other as far as I know, told me that my “airing dirty laundry in public” (direct quote) had angered a third member. Would I please smooth it over, asked one. Next time I ought to talk to the principals first, said the other.

Is it a coincidence that Rachel was the first to ask publicly about the public-private divide in women’s behavior around this? I don’t think so, not at all; Rachel doesn’t work in a library. I do. I surely do fear for my career if I stir up the kind of tornado that I was about to, the kind of storm that if you ask me, this problem deserves.

There’s a pattern here, I will make bold to assert. It’s not just that female systems librarians who have dealt with misogyny and sexism (and I’ve rarely met one who hasn’t) are leery of speaking up about it, though goodness knows that’s hideous enough. It’s that we are actively being silenced, even by extremely decent people who mean nothing but good.

That’s just ugly. Silence doesn’t fix this. Pluralistic ignorance (“oh, nobody else is complaining, so it must be just me”) doesn’t fix it. Fear doesn’t fix it—not fear of saying it, and definitely not fear of hearing it said.

And so now I’ve silenced myself, too. Twice now—quite a bit more than twice if you count the experiences I’ve shut up about, never mind the stories I’ve heard and would like to retell. I’m so frustrated and angry about all the things I want to talk about but don’t dare to—crazy ironies, jawdropping disrespect, absurd defensiveness, common and damaging pushback—that I’m ready to shed burning, acid tears. I want to talk; I want to be heard. I’m deathly tired of this knot of sorrow-laced wrath that wound itself up somewhere underneath my sternum months ago, churning destructively away ever since.

I’m lucky, though. This isn’t a workplace issue for me, thank goodness; it’s only come up in communities of practice. I think that’s what frees me to say as much as I’ve said, just as I noted that it frees Rachel. Sure, I worry about my future marketability, but at least I don’t have to worry about my present job!

I’m lucky to have gotten where I am at all, I now begin to understand. I’m so lucky that Allen and Jerry and Jon and Gene and James and the rest of the PSWG techies held to mannerly and honest standards of personal behavior. Their open respect for me led directly to what I now do, and I do, in spite of everything I’ve just said, love what I do.

Karen G. Schneider asks two provocative questions:

• Provocative questions #1: are women less willing to do what it takes to get to a conference, get recognized, get published? As a group, are we shy about being Shameless Hussies?
• Provocative questions #2: are they-what-does-the-pickin’ less likely to recognize women for their ability to contribute to current issues? Is the bar set higher for women? (Note how I didn’t single out one gender here.)

I tell y’all what, I never expected to apply these two CavLec categories to the same post. Going into a woman-dominated profession, woo-hoo! Surely that’s an escape from the tech-boy locker room!

Yeah. Not so much.

It doesn’t help to be in a profession with a deep-rooted distrust of technology, to begin with. Like it or not, this profession attracts a lot of technophobes, and they tend to be pretty shrill about it, and they’re not unlikely to be in positions of power (hello, Mr. G-rm-n). A friend of mine at JCDL who came to librarianship from IT had an appallingly hard time finding work. She’s smart, capable, and trained, so what happened? Distrust, if you ask me. Technogeeks aren’t real librarians, don’t you know; we’re there to be targets for the aggro that everyone else displaces from the machines on their desks.

I’ve seen the weirdest and silliest jealousy from professional colleagues (not all female, I should say). I told the thirty-second version of my career story (”crapped out of grad school, worked in e-publishing and typesetting for a while, went to library school, am a librarian”) to some professional colleagues some time ago. “Going to library school? Not your smartest decision ever,” said one frankly.

Maybe not. But I knew what I was getting into, and I chose it, and for me it was the right choice. I didn’t say that, because I didn’t feel right questioning what my colleague felt about the field. I just said “Too late now,” and shrugged off the idea advanced by another colleague that I could have had a much more lucrative career in IT. (The hell I could. Non-IT people have very strange notions about what it takes to have an IT career—beating things with rocks doesn’t cut it, folks—not to mention how much an IT career actually pays these days.)

So there isn’t just a glass ceiling in librarianship (and there is a well-documented glass ceiling; this profession is majority female, but its administrators are majority male). There’s a glass wall, between women and systems librarianship. Subtle and not-so-subtle peer pressure telling us that them geeks, they’re Not Us.

Yeah, and how ’bout those geek guys, huh? Huh?

I’m going to pick on #code4lib, because there’s some vague hope they’ll forgive me. I’m not picking on them because they’re bad people. I’m picking on them because I think the story is illustrative of some dark corners in tech librarianship. #code4lib is an IRC channel for people who do things with computer code in libraries. It isn’t all MLS-holding librarians; it includes some straight-up coders sans MLS. It isn’t all men, either, though I can count female regulars (on the channel, at any rate; the affiliated mailing list has more female participation) on one hand.

So the #code4libbers decided ’round about last November or December or thereabouts that they were going to whomp up a little ol’ conference for themselves. In February. It happened, and the organizers were all very proud of themselves. Approximate ratio of men to women attendees, last I heard, was eight or nine to one. For a tech conference, not so bad, believe it or not. For a librarian conference, abysmal.

It doesn’t take active malice to marginalize women; simple thoughtlessness is often enough. I hope and believe spur-of-the-moment con organization isn’t widespread practice, because it’s a practice that excludes women. Like it or not, women generally have more household responsibilities than men, and are significantly less able to drop everything for a spur-of-the-moment con. (I can, mind you, but I’m childfree. My husband is more than competent to take care of himself and the Goths.) Librarianship can’t fix what goes on in librarians’ homes, but librarianship can and should work around it. That means plenty of notice for cons.

But hey, it gets better. I have the chat transcript for the episode I’m about to recount, though I don’t mean to share it unless I am accused of lying. (Which has been known to happen to other bloggers in similar circumstances.)

In the course of conference planning, a thoughtlessly sexist joke headline went up on the conference web page. It was called to the attention of a male code4libber by his female boss. He came to the IRC channel to complain, and to do him credit, he was honestly unhappy for reasons other than having been embarrassed in front of her.

He was stonewalled. Pushed back at, hard. “So what, they aren’t letting you go anyway.” (I couldn’t make that one up if I tried.) “I think it’s in how you look at it.” (Um, yeah.) “I don’t think personally it is that extreme.” (Someone’s boss did. But she’s a woman, so, um, what, she doesn’t count?) “Umm, are you on drugs, dude?” (Again with the I couldn’t make this up.)

And I was there for the whole thing, and I spoke up briefly in support of the guy complaining, and nobody paid me two hoots’ worth of attention. The headline was, however, changed. Under protest.

So that’s what we deal with, you know what I’m saying? I left code4lib not long after that. I had a long, angry CavLec post all ready for the ether, but I held it until after the con because my loyalties were divided—hell yeah I am a feminist, and hell yeah I will say so; but I am also a library technologist, and I thought that con was an important step, and I wanted to see it succeed. I was torn.

My absence was noticed. People emailed me about it. I was pretty frank. Eventually, I was enticed back, and for the most part, people have cut out the crap (that being hardly the first instance of random sexist stupidity I’d witnessed there). So the post’s sat in my draft queue ever since. Trust me, this version? Is highly condensed and bowdlerized.

Yeah. So my answer to Karen’s question one is: hell yes we are unwilling to put up with this garbage if it’s the price of visibility. And that’s our problem? I think not. We need to move the focus off women’s behavior (which is generally damn logical and reasonable, you ask me) and onto the environments that women are not finding congenial.

I am not a shameless hussy. I damn well shouldn’t have to be, either.

Question two is a good one, and thanks to Karen for asking it and to Jane for seconding it louder than a whisper. Rather than answer it, I’d rather focus on what we can do about it. Call it a good old-fashioned consciousness-raising.

I’m on the programming committee for the next code4libcon. First thing on the to-do list was lining up potential keynoters. So what’d I do? I stacked the deck, hell yes I did—of thirteen candidates, seven are women. Did it work? Of the current top three vote-getters, one is a woman (and yeah, she was one of my nominees). We’re looking at two, maybe three keynotes, so the odds look good.

We can stack the odds. If we care, we have to, because damn straight these geek guys aren’t gonna do it for us. If you’re shy, you don’t even have to put yourself forward. We can talk each other up. We should. And we need to resist every temptation to cut each other down; “united we stand” and all that fun stuff.

The other thing we need to do is get over this “I’m not techie enough!” fixation that a lot of us have (and yeah, I’m prone to it too). One of my good friends won’t go anywhere near #code4lib—not because I’ve complained about the atmosphere, but because “I’m not techie enough.” C’mon. Techies are just people. Just librarians, some of ’em. If we don’t knock the rough edges off ’em, who’s going to? If we don’t learn from them, where will we learn? If we don’t join them, who will?

So. There’s my story, and there are my thoughts, and there are my recommendations. How about yours?

Apropos of yesterday’s snide hit at the exclusively-male makeup of the upcoming code4libcon’s planning committee, Kevin Clarke invited me to hang out on code4lib’s IRC channel.

O ye geeks, mark well: Kevin didn’t get mad, even though I was snide—he got even. It is a tactic worth considering, in the endless comp-sci gender wars.

So I did pop on for an hour or so last night. And I’ll be back. Often. And not just because there is much to be learned.

I caught just the tail-end of a spirited discussion about Evergreen, the open-source ILS, but I expect I’ll hear more; Evergreen’s developers hang out there.

And then, Kevin recognized my nick and welcomed me. Several other participants, very prominent people, also recognized me (which I found rather shocking—why do these people know who I am?) and were as gracious as gracious could be.

This shouldn’t be noteworthy. Truly, it shouldn’t. All the code4lib folks did was act like the friendly, courteous adults they are. Why should I have expected anything different?

(Well, because I’ve heard and read the horror stories, been in the backwash of one or two myself, and read a fair bit of the literature about women in academic comp sci. If you’re a woman, you dip your toe carefully into the waters of code-dom; Here There Bee Dragons. Nobody should be surprised that open-source software has fewer female developers than commercial. In a work context, even the most misogynistic and unsocialized have external compulsion not to act like Neanderthals. No such pressure exists in the open-source context, especially in the marquee projects with hordes of coders. Women who want to code OSS are in my opinion well-advised to work on small or niche projects.)

I should like to see some of the researchers who look into gender in computer science turn their lenses on systems librarianship. The results might be surprising—and encouraging. And as I said over at Meredith’s, one way librarianship could beef up its coder population quickly would be to recruit from the pipeline of women leaving the toxic swamp that is academic computer science in most places. I’m so convinced of this that I’m going to start working it into the conversation with folks I know in library education.

Anyway, I am happy to have tapped into the library-coder hivemind in this fashion, wholeheartedly recommend that library coders of all genders do likewise—and perhaps by the time code4libcon 2007 rolls around, I’ll have something meaningful to contribute. I was inspired enough by the conversation to start mapping out how an image-gallery plugin for DSpace would work today…

I grumbled to myself in the bathroom this morning, slapping a number of variously nasty artificial substances on my face in preparation for a brief talk I had to give this afternoon. Bah, it’s not as though any of this mess actually helps. They say “lipstick on a pig” for a reason, you know. But people I don’t know will expect it. Dunno why they can’t just act like my coworkers, who all know I’m ugly and have learned not to care.

And then my glass-half-full device driver kicked in (I boot up slowly on Monday mornings) and I realized that being allowed to be ugly on the job, even just most of the time, is a major privilege that I should clutch lovingly to my unfashionably-oversized chest and never, ever lose sight of.

Yeah, you just think I’m kidding.

Back in the day, I did plenty of time as a temp clerical worker. I was young, skinny, and (just barely) conventionally attractive enough then to get plenty of work—and let’s not kid each other, in that business, young and skinny matters. So does being white. (If you think I’m wrong, I recommend Jackie Krasas Rogers’s book Temps for a reality check.)

Clothing and makeup matter too. I duly slathered my face with noisome gunk every bloody day. The least I could get away with, to be sure, but nonetheless—Susan “Realité” Shwartz had it right. It’s part of the uniform. An expensive, unhealthy, weird and rather clownish part.

And I don’t have to do it any more, except on special occasions. Oh, it’s marvelous!

Class issue? Major class issue, you betcha. If you’re a non-librarian working in a library, your appearance is probably up for scrutiny, and you may well be condescended to or spoken badly of if you don’t cut the appearance and uniform mustard, no matter what your work is like. And the lion’s share of the condescension comes from women, too. Never let it be said that we can’t oppress with the best of ’em.

(Have personally witnessed this, several places. For self-protection, am not naming names, not even names of places.)

Control, too. I mean, really, if a woman can’t call her face and body her own… I’m not saying that librarianship doesn’t have control issues—jargon is a locus of control I’ve seen my colleagues complain about, and technology is another. However, a left-handed benefit of the frump stereotype is that we don’t have “high standards” about pulchritude in our profession, which is all to the good in my book.

I’m smart and competent. Obviously. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t be allowed to be ugly. Hell of a way to find out you’ve arrived, but all in all, I’ll take it.

David and I went up to the library so we’d have somewhere to sit that wasn’t the floor. I picked up a book from the new-book shelves that I didn’t quite get to finish and am going to pick up again at my earliest opportunity.

I also recommend that all of you do the same. All of you. And if you do, and you have a blog, please post your reactions to it therein. This book sheds enough light on some of our more tendentious blogsphere debates that I think it needs to be widely read.

The book is by Anna Fels, and is called Necessary Dreams: Ambition in Women’s Changing Lives. (Random WorldCat question: why don’t new books seem to be fast-tracked onto Open WorldCat? We’re missing a trick here, librarians. I shouldn’t have had to use a Powell’s link.)

If you’re female and went “eewwww” when you saw the word “ambition,” join the club. I resisted this book something awful. It just kept right on jabbing me in tender spots with behaviors and phenomena I recognized—female distaste for the word “ambition” being a case in point, of course.

Thesis, in brief and probably misstated: Ambition consists of desired mastery of a domain plus recognition of that mastery. While women have made great strides in actually mastering domains, we’re still frozen out of the recognition business for many and varied reasons, and it hurts us.

Oh, did I resist that thesis. Bitterly and hard. Mastery is supposed to be enough, don’t you know (and that’s another one Fels takes apart at the seams). But doesn’t this begin to explain why the women-blog-too arguments get so acrimonious? Why the Ivan Tribbles and Michael Gormans and Blaise Cronins of this world single out blogs for derision? (My read on Fels’s read: because blogging offers a decentralized recognition and validation system that the Ivan Tribbles et cetera of this world don’t control.)

That said, I skipped ahead to Fels’s conclusions, and thought they were weak. If there’s another edition of this book (and I want there to be!), I hope she rewrites the final chapter. For one thing, Fels joins the chorus of people pointing out that women’s unequal share of the unrecognized work of childrearing is a serious psychological and economic burden. Her fix, however, lies purely in making sure mothers get their fair share and fathers do their fair share. This is fine, as far as it goes, but I do wish we could expand the concept to “reducing the burden of childrearing on women,” which most definitely includes “eliminating the tremendous social pressure on women to have children in the first place.” Hello? Dr. Fels? We’re here, we’re childfree, and we’re not going away!

In that same concluding chapter, Fels claims to have no advice for women navigating the uncertain shoals of ambition. She missed the cryingly obvious: if recognition is so important, offer it to women, don’t just seek it! We can all do that. We should. (If you think this post is partly motivated by getting Fels some of her due, gold star for you. It is.) I’m convinced enough by Fels’s argument and the evidence she marshals for it (some of which I do think is weak, but much of which is quite strong) to start making extra effort to get women some recognition.

I hope others will do likewise.

The commonest question I am asked when someone hears about the new job is, “So what’s David going to do?”

Innocent enough, on the face of it, but what assumptions lurk behind that question! Which, I don’t doubt, hardly anyone would ask of him were our situations reversed. Women are supposed to be the trailing spouses, don’t you know.

The question has an easy, facile answer. He’s got a dissertation to write, so he’ll write it. That’s the answer I’ve used. It seems to satisfy.

I resent the question, though, resent it a little bit more every time I hear it. Some of these people could just ask David. Even more, though, I resent the way it’s typically asked, as though I couldn’t possibly move without a definite track available to him. “Does David know what he’ll be doing?” is one question, but they never ask that question. It’s always “What’ll he be doing?” and they always assume I know. Do they think I’ve arranged something for him? Maybe they do. How many men feel pressure to arrange jobs for trailing wives, I wonder?

I’m sure I wouldn’t feel such exasperation if the question didn’t hit me where I live. It does. I started this job search hoping to stay in Madison, mostly for David’s sake. Then David expressed a wish to try for a career in academia, and I tried like all hell to revise my own aspirations to fit—and utterly hit a brick wall. Could not see, even a little bit, why I had to put myself on the shelf indefinitely for the sake of a distant maybe.

We’re still picking up the pieces from that fight, which happened six months ago. It was and is a serious marriage-strain; I have said the word “divorce” louder than a whisper and more than once. I haven’t said it today, haven’t felt the need to. I think we’ll get through this. I think it’s two parts job-search stress, two parts dissertation stress, one part move stress, one part graduation stress, and three parts thoughtlessness on both sides. Most of this is going (or has gone) away, sooner or later, and recognizing it is one step toward defusing it.

These people blithely assuming I daren’t take a single step without ensuring his continued comfort and employment? Are so very not helping, though. The anger I should be reflecting straight back at them somehow gets deflected unjustly toward David.

You know what? Enough. I have had enough of that question, enough of the guilt it tries to engender, enough of the spurious responsibility.

What David does is fundamentally not my problem. I did my bit. I explained the realities of the library job market; I discussed the possibilities until my ears and teeth bled; I consulted with him when Rohan and Perdóndaris seemed likely to come up with offers. Likewise, I’m willing to deal with whatever he decides to do—write his dissertation or not, write another book or not, get a job or not, full-time or not, hell, sit around all day on the Internet or not—I don’t plan to put any skin in that game. It’s not my life; it’s not my problem.

I have a job, a worthwhile job, a job that will support us both in the modest style to which we are accustomed. What will David do in Perdóndaris?

Whatever he wants.

On the bus to class the day I left for Ruritania, I ran into the guy from the Department from Hell who still recognizes me.

He said hi and asked “So are you teaching now?”

I didn’t hit him. I swear I didn’t. Not least because I do teach, now and then, and at Rohan I’d be teaching part of their library-studies undergraduate minor—which minor, by the way, I think is a remarkably cool idea that should be emulated elsewhere. I don’t know too many people whose lives wouldn’t be improved by fifteen or so credits of library studies.

Anyway, I told him about being close to library-school graduation, and about interviewing in Ruritania, and about digital librarianship. He gave me that face that lifetime academics give you when abruptly confronted with the notion that the world is larger than academia. (You know that face, right? The confused, slightly repulsed, but secretly somehow attracted face? That face. I had that face once. Haven’t used it in years.)

I will admit to wanting to smack him, though. It’s precisely that insularity that annoys non-academics about academia—and despite their noble cries about working toward an understanding of the entirety of humanity, humanities and social-science scholars are the likeliest to exhibit it, in my experience. My dad had it in spades, and (to my shame be it spoken) before I washed out of grad school, so did I.

Really, it’s no wonder people who leave academia at whatever stage get lost. When a fair plurality of those supposed to be their mentors and guides look at the profession with a clueless “What else is there?” well, what else is there? And who’s going to tell the apprentices they need to prepare for it? And who’s going to help them do that?

And who’s going to say the hard things? Things like: if you wash out here (which you very well may) you will start at the bottom of whatever profession you choose next; people with BAs and the years of experience you’re foregoing by being here will win over you every time. Things like: you can’t be monomaniacal about the academy, because it isn’t monomaniacal about you back. Things like: a professional degree or some other sort of professional or trade certification is a good defensive move.

Nobody. Nobody’s going to say these things, that’s who. Because, really, what else is there besides the professoriate, if the professoriate can see nothing but itself?

Seems to be a gender issue lurking, too. A couple of months ago, when David and I hit a rough spot over his (non-)plans to join the academic rat race, I got a lot of sympathy and excellent advice from women—female academics, wives and significant others of academics or proto-academics, others.

They sensibly told me that I was being silly. I’ve done the work and put in the time for the career I want; he hasn’t. It’s not just silly, it’s insane to put myself back in the service-sector mill, giving up everything I’ve worked for, on the off-chance his number will come up in the academic lottery. There’s sacrifice and then there’s martyrdom, they said, and we don’t recommend door number two.

What’d I get from the guys? One email. “Of course he wants an academic job,” it read (more or less; I haven’t gone looking for it). “What else does anybody get a Ph.D for?”

Insularity. Insularity. Insularity. And gender expectations. It is not coincidence that the advice I got diverged by gender.

I, you see, am simply expected by people such as the correspondent above to sacrifice whatever I have to in order that my husband realize academic ambitions (even when they are nebulous at best and entirely unrealistic at worst, an unfortunately common outlook that academia does nothing whatever to discourage in its apprentices). What does he have to sacrifice to enable me? Nothing. Nothing at all. Because hey, I’m only a girl and a librarian. He’s the Man and the Scholar.

Of course it’s not working out that way, fortunately for our marriage, our finances, and my sanity. I was about to go to the wall on that, to tell the truth. I’ve played Proto-Faculty Wife (and earned my Ph.T—Putting Hubby Through—degree in spades) for some years now and enough is bloody well enough. And after things between us blew up such that he couldn’t avoid thinking about it any longer, David decided he more or less agreed with me. And now things are better.

For us, at least. I can’t speak to the larger academic world; all I can do is shake my head at the brief glimpses I’ve been getting of it lately.

Frank Paynter has written up our random meeting in such terms as to make me remind people that appearances are deceiving. Nice? Ha-bloody-ha.

The hair, yes, the hair… the hair actually looked dreadful yesterday, because it was desperately in need of a wash and the wind had been playing with it. Ah, well. He’s right about 30-year-olds cutting it, though. We’re told to. After 30, long hair ages a woman, they say, and the only thing worse than a fat woman is an old fat woman.

Well, fine. Whatever. I can take a little age. And even when I’m 80 (I should live so long) I’ll be able to take a little age. And I give all and sundry full and free permission to shoot me dead the day I get a perm.

If Frank stops you on the street, though, I can attest that it’s safe to say hi. Besides, how often are you recognized by name by a stranger on the street? That’s reserved for celebrities, that is.