Feminist Faculty Negotiate the Land of Both/and (Part I: Now) (Essay‪)‬

Christine speaks: In moments when I am feeling particularly hopeful, I like to think of myself as someone who is committed to social justice. I make modest attempts to engage in scholarship that I trust might inspire reflection on the value of community and pedagogy that seeks to enact the principles that I write about. Amidst these desires, there are admittedly mornings when I wake up and wish I were going to an office where my work carries less philosophical weight, where I could expect to see the mark of my labor by five p.m. and then return home to tell my friends and family members who do not work in academia what I did that day. In these moments of doubt, I take comfort in identifying with the frustration that Virginia Woolf articulates in A Room of One's Own: "Why did men drink wine and women water? Why was one sex so prosperous and the other so poor? What effect has poverty on fiction? What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?--a thousand questions at once suggested themselves. But one needed answers, not questions" (627).