They’re everywhere in the academy. Young, bright women mentored by older scholars, usually men, who attempt to mold them into their own masculine ideals. Janice Hocker Rushing’s study of over 200
This is a wonderful book, full of insights about academic life, written with energy, wit, and passion. Intensely readable, entertaining and sharp, it will make you laugh and make you cry. Janice Rushing’s original take on women in the academy, higher education, and the predominantly male world it enshrines unfolds like a post-modern novel. Her use of classical myth is brilliant and alluring, and the real-world stories she tells will strike a chord in every academic woman’s heart.
—Jane Tompkins, University of Illinois, Chicago, author of A Life in School
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women and their life transformations is the subject of this eloquent book. Using the tropes of mythology and Jungian psychology, the author characterizes the many paths these women’s academic lives
take: as Muse for a faltering older scholar, as Mistress or wife, as the dutiful academic daughter. Their resistance to this power differential also takes many forms: as a Veiled Woman, silent in
public but active in private, or the Siren, using her sexuality to beat the system. Ultimately, Rushing arrives at the myth of Eros and Psyche, where women’s self understanding and personal
development turns her erotic mentoring into an autonomous, whole, and free life, unfettered by any man. These women’s stories, and Rushing’s literary and literate framing of their lives, will ring
true to many in the university.
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