Professor/Mother: The Uneasy Partnership, Femspec v. 8

As I entered my thirties and soon realized, in spite of career uncertainty, that the time may have arrived for me to consider motherhood, which I had delayed until completion of the doctorate. One year later, in 1992, I had given birth to a son and had taken a one-year maternity leave, which thereby extended the Post-doctoral Fellowship over three years rather than the usual two. This essay charts a circuitous route toward a tenure-stream position, a route made arduous by a harsh economy and the demands of motherhood experienced for the first time and outside the relative security of tenured academe.