Gender, Work and Organization.

Vol. 15 No. 3 May 2008

Helpful Men and Feminist Support: More than Double Strangeness

Joan Acker*
arbara Czarniawska and Guje Sevn tell us the fascinating stories of four women pioneers in academia, their struggles and victories as the rst women to become professors in a number of disciplines and in a number of countries. As the rst, they were certainly the thin edge of the wedge, as the 19th century and early 20th century womens movements campaigned for the rights of women to higher education and to professional positions in academia. But were these uncomfortable and difcult achievements, at least partly because they were double strangers, both women and foreigners? Czarniawska and Sevn make clear that their arguments do not imply causality. Any individual biography is constructed through many inuences, occurrences and chance events. In addition, the authors explain why they could not establish causality or even association between success and gender/foreignness through statistical means. The issue is, then, does double strangeness make a unique and signicant contribution to the successes of these four particular women? Are we convinced that this gave them advantages over similar, but native, women in pursuing academic careers? I am not entirely persuaded. Here, I will outline why, looking rst at the metaphor of the stranger and its appropriateness for describing women invading male academic settings. Then I examine the idea that two deviant characteristics could somehow cancel each other out, using the concept of intersectionality and arguing that being a foreigner may have helped to reduce the negative effects of being a woman, but in a somewhat different way than that proposed by the authors. I then look at other explanations for their success; factors that may have helped to overcome the disabilities of gender and foreignness. My comments are based on research and my own experience in both the USA and Sweden. Inferences drawn from research on the USA may not hold for European situations, but I believe that similarities between the experiences of European and American academic women are sufcient to provide a basis for these comments.

Address for correspondence: *Department of Sociology, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403, USA, e-mail: jacker@uoregon.edu
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The metaphor of the stranger

The metaphor of the wedge seems very apt for representing women who were the rst as female university professors, but how useful is the metaphor of the stranger for understanding the situations of early women intruders into male academia, or for present women intruders in many male-controlled work places? The characteristics of the stranger, as discussed by Simmel and Schtz, are those of a particularly independent, probably white, man. The stranger as a man is the opposite of a typical woman. If a woman in academia is seen as a stranger, she must have the characteristics of a stranger, that is, the characteristics of a man or at least a genderless, neutered creature. This sort of perception by male colleagues is hinted at occasionally in the stories, but on the whole, these women were seen as women and saw themselves as women, even though they lacked the stereotypical characteristics of femininity. Such a non-conformist woman is a different kind of a stranger, as the authors concede. If she is different, what is she? The difculty with the metaphor is not only that the woman in academia is a different kind of stranger. A more profound difculty is that academic institutions were and still are organized on masculine assumptions: power, competition and participation are embedded in expectations that the participants are men who are able to devote themselves more than full time to scholarly or scientic work (Benschop and Brouns, 2003). In addition, the gure of the professor, particularly a European professor, is stereotypically masculine. He is authoritative, domineering, a bit condescending, unconcerned and even unaware of the trivia of keeping daily life going. He is focused on the big questions, the scientic puzzles, the deeply signicant human (male) dilemmas: the messy work of caring for bodies and trash is invisible to him. An almost invisible corollary is that other and different people, women (or feminized men) are doing the necessary work that keeps the institution and its participants functioning. This might be the work of producing everyday life food, clothing, a place to relax, a clean house and a nice garden, to say nothing of children, or it might be the administrative and clerical work that is necessary for academic enterprises. I am arguing that universities with their departments and research centres are gendered institutions, as are many others (Acker, 1990), organized for gendered male professionals who are able to participate in them because they do not have certain essential human responsibilities. This is a gendered freedom from responsibility that is unproblematic for those who benet from it. When women entered academia as scholars and potential professors, they attempted to become part of a world that was premised on their subordination and submissiveness. This was the case even for those who did not have stereotypical womanly characteristics. They were not strangers in Simmels sense, because the implicit presence of people (women) like them was essential for the existence of academia. Yet, although they did not provide
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those essential services, they also could not be appropriate men. As the life stories presented here show, they were still seen as women; their womanness does not seem to have been overlooked or mitigated because they were some sort of stranger. And they faced many barriers to success because they were women, including the most obvious gender-based exclusions from education and prestigious positions.

Double strangeness or intersectionality

Being a foreigner is the other side of the double strangeness. Is foreignness a disadvantage that is somehow cancelled or neutralized when combined with the disadvantageous of being a woman in the male academic establishment? An analysis of the intersections of gender and foreignness might show different ways in which these designations of status and identity were mutually reproduced, with what effects and under what conditions. Soa Kovalevskaya was a foreigner who became a professor in Sweden, but this was only after repeated failures in other countries because of gender discrimination. In this case, gender discrimination forced her to nd other work that then transformed her into a foreigner. Tsarist Russia seems to have been particularly severe in excluding women, and this policy affected the careers of three of the four women pioneers in this article. Maria Sklodowska-Curies status as a foreigner seems to have been troubling primarily when her private life became the subject of a scandal. In that scandal gender and foreignness were constructed by her opponents to paint the picture of an immoral outsider. Thus, reading these accounts of four womens academic careers, I am not convinced that their statuses as foreigners were serious impediments, at least not as serious as gender. Certainly, their male colleagues, friends, husbands and lovers who were also foreigners did not seem to face particular difculties, although more detailed examination of their experiences might show otherwise. Another plausible interpretation of these cases of intersectionality is, I believe, that the negative effects of being a woman were counteracted by the effects of foreignness. While the intersections of gender and foreignness did not cancel each other, one tended to mitigate the negatives of the other. It is important when assessing this possibility to distinguish between the consciousness of the women academics their own self-perceptions, the perceptions of male colleagues, their perceptions of their own difculties, and the attitudes and evaluations emanating from academia and male professors. It is possible that being a foreigner, having the distance of the stranger, made it easier for these women to ignore the negative messages they often received from the bastions of male academic power and privilege, as they continued to refuse to act like proper, self-effacing women who resign gracefully from the competitive battle. The attitudes and evaluations of the male establishment
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may not have been reformed by the efforts of these women, but the women persisted nonetheless. It is the tremendous persistence of these women in pursuit of their goals that must be explained. It took more than determination and the insulation that being a foreigner provided. There are two additional factors of great importance that the authors mention but do not elaborate upon: one is the existence of a womens movement and the other is the support of their male mentors and sponsors.

Other supports for success

The 19th and early 20th century womens movements campaigned for womens rights and womens education (Bernard, 1966). The movement, which was international in scope, provided a subculture, even a deviant subculture, which dened this unwomanly striving as correct and admirable. The feminist and radical subculture could bestow a feeling of legitimacy and a measure of approval that was not forthcoming from the larger society that dened women in a much more traditional and restricted way. In addition, the woman who stuck to her decision to have a professional career could see herself as striking a blow for the rights of all women. Thus, this period was supportive to women of a certain class who wanted to move out of traditional domain of women. Soa Kovalevskaya was greatly inuenced by such movements. Maria Sklodowska-Curie probably had such support, as the account of her difcult attempts to achieve recognition suggests. Alma Sderhjelm came along as the womens movement was slowing down, but there was still some momentum. Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay was even later in achieving her professorship, but she still may have had feminist support. I base my emphasis on the importance of a feminist social movement as a source of support on the US experience. The 19th and early 20th centuries womens movement in the US was a major factor in the increasing presence of women in higher education. When the movement went into decline, womens representation on faculties of higher education also declined. Census data indicate that as a proportion of college and university faculty the numbers of women began to increase by about 1910, reaching a peak in 1930 and then declining, particularly after World War II, so that by 1970 it was approximately where it had been in 1910 (Acker, 1971; Bernard, 1966). What happened? One process was the slow retreat of the womens movement after 1920 when women got the right to vote. Another was the erasure of the attractive career woman as a cultural model, the redenition of the feminist as an unattractive complainer and the creation of the happy housewife as the model post-war woman/consumer. But, when a new womens movement erupted at the end of the 1960s, the return of the independent and courageous career woman followed quickly and a new generation of rsts came into being (Robinson, 1973). When I was hired in 1967 in the Sociology Department at the University
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of Oregon, I was the rst full-time woman faculty member they had ever had. Only 2.9 per cent of full professors in that university were women, and all but one were in education and health, physical education, and recreation, all womens elds. There was one woman professor in the College of Arts and Sciences. This short history, it seems to me, shows the importance, at least in the USA, of the existence of a feminist movement in securing the efforts of women to enter higher academic ranks. The very existence of the movement can help to create a receptive climate; its absence had and still has the opposite effect. Mentorship is another important factor in strengthening the determination of the four women whose stories we have read. The authors discount this, saying that everyone who succeeds in academia has mentors and sponsors. That is true. What they fail to note is that women generally have had more difculty than men in nding and enlisting the help of mentors. Established academics, still most often men, are more likely to choose men than women as protgs. Some recent research shows that, in the USA, men receive much more support through colleague networks in strategizing career success than do women (Krefting, 2003). While this is contemporary research, I think that it is reasonable to infer that such processes existed in late 19th and early 20th century Europe. So how did these four women come to have such dedicated and enthusiastic male supporters? I can only speculate. First, they all came from families that were part of the intelligentsia and from childhood were surrounded by people who appreciated their potential. They were all brilliant. Soa, for example, was recognized as extremely gifted from the time she was a child. Had she been male, her academic career would have been much less difcult. Some were fortunate to have either marriages or very close relationships with men with similar scientic or intellectual interests. The existence of rich sponsors who established university chairs meant for them was another unusual and critical source of support. These brilliant women beneted from the lucky combination of heroic determination, superior self-condence, supportive friends, lovers, colleagues and sponsors, and easy access to intellectual circles, plus the context of feminist and other radical movements that gave them some broader social support. I close with the following speculation: in the USA and, perhaps in Europe, when these movements and their social support for deviant women disappeared some time before World War II, male power in academia closed ranks and the grudging acceptance of women almost disappeared. The Second Wave of feminism, coming along 20 years after the end of the war, in addition to many other social changes, made it possible for larger numbers of women to demand institutional change and to enter academia. But parity is still far off. In the USA only about 15 per cent of full professors are women, as the authors tell us. At my university, women constitute 25 per cent of full professors compared with 2.9 per cent in 1970. Some of these full professors are
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foreigners. They are part of the thick edge of the wedge: I believe that if they had been excluded, their gender would have been a far more serious barrier than their foreignness. To conclude these stories of women rsts are fascinating. The stories stimulate speculation about the uses of metaphor as well as about the extremely slow dismantling of the insidious tentacles of the processes of male institutionalized power.

References
Acker, Joan (1971) Discrimination and institutional sexism. Northwest College Personnel Journal, 7,1, 713. Acker, Joan (1990) Hierarchies, jobs, bodies: a theory of gendered organizations. Gender & Society, 4,2, 13958. Benschop, Yvonne and Margo Brouns (2003) Crumbling ivory towers: academic organizing and its gender effects. Gender, Work & Organization, 10,2, 194212. Bernard, Jessie (1966) Academic Women. Cleveland and New York: World Publishing Company. Krefting, L.A. (2003) Intertwined discourses of merit and gender: evidence from academic employment in the USA. Gender, Work & Organization, 10,2, 26078. Robinson, Lora H. (1973) Institutional variation in the status of academic women. In Rossi, Alice S. and Calderwood, Ann (eds.) Academic Women on the Move, pp. 199238. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.

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