This past summer, my husband and I traveled to visit my family in France.
As we arrived at the house, everyone was out in the front yard under the beautiful thick
trees waiting to greet us with the usual French kisses on the cheek, for which my American
husband had had to practice in advance.
Sporting our favorite floral apron, my great aunt came forward to welcome us and completely
unexpectedly went straight towards my stomach, grabbed it with both hands and exclaimed,
Oh mon dieu, but you have great news to share.
When is this little one due?
Now, this would have been a very sweet moment if I in fact had been pregnant and not in
need of a better diet and more exercise.
My aunt's faux pas was only the most explicit of many other more tactful attempts by our
family and friends to ask us about kids that summer.
We'd gotten married, bought a house, returning 29 and 32 respectively this year.
Of course, we must be thinking about kids, right?
Now, I'm a millennial and a feminist, so I'm not going to listen to anyone telling
me what to do with my body, but we do happen to want kids.
So ever since this trip, I've been thinking about this nonstop.
Not should we or should we not have kids, but could we?
Like if we wanted to and were lucky enough to, could we have kids right now?
As a current PhD student, I never even thought this could be a possibility.
I've always thought after kids will happen after the PhD.
But the more I'm learning about academia and tenure track jobs, the more I'm realizing
that the after might actually not be the best time to have kids either.
Heavy teaching loads, constant publishing, frequent relocations, uncertain benefits situation,
these communicatory work environments would now be a better time.
Hi, I'm Mathilde Souquet.
I'm a PhD student at Princeton University in the Department of Art and Archaeology.
And this is Hurting Cats, a podcast about women in academia.
With me today are my co-hosts.
I'm Tori Hoover.
I'm a dual PhD candidate in English and comparative media at Vanderbilt University.
Hey, I'm Maya Delmond.
I'm a PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Kansas.
Hi, I'm Saruna Baysboor.
I'm a PhD candidate in public history at North Carolina State University, as well as the
executive director of the Duke Center for Jewish Studies.
These questions about kids in academia are something my co-host Tori is also thinking
about.
Right?
Yeah, absolutely.
I don't have kids and I'm not sure if or when I will.
Maya has a 20-month-old baby and Saruna has a 10-year-old.
And I've been debating children myself.
Right.
So questions of motherhood within academia are pertinent for all of us, especially because
both Maya and Saruna have daughters.
And so we thought it'd be interesting to hear from this wide range of perspectives.
Right.
And so the very first thing I asked about actually was, you know, what were your thoughts
about this issue more broadly?
Because I thought it was so great to be able to discuss it with a small group of women.
And that actually led to a discussion of the importance of community.
Yeah, I think it's probably not as hard as I think.
But also, that doesn't mean it's easy by any stretch.
I think it's doable is the way that I see it.
And I didn't know that it was.
And of course, it's so dependent on whether your partner is able to help you with this
or not and whether the institution itself is really supportive.
Like I know, Maya, you said that you had maternity leave as a graduate student, which is something
I didn't even know existed.
Yeah, I had six weeks of leave as a GTA and six weeks of leave as a, I mean, concurrent
as a student.
And I actually didn't know that either until after I had my baby.
And I was emailing with the graduate advisor in our program who's a staff person.
And she mentioned to me that I had this leave.
And luckily, the chair of our department also at that time was a mother.
And the two of them were so encouraging receiving my frantic emails, sleepless emails that I'm
sure made no sense.
But they just took care of it all for me.
All I had to say was, yes, I want to do this.
And then I had six more weeks with my kid without having to worry too much about school.
And I've definitely throughout my career relied on the support of female community.
Women who are able to give the space for me to fail and then help me and then make that
better.
Or women who are able to understand that something might not get done in a specific time period.
Or women who really value what I do and are willing to give me a voice.
Sometimes those opportunities don't always seem to materialize in the patriarchal world.
For me, having friends who are not in academia and staying in touch with a variety of moms
has helped me keep perspective because everybody's career, everybody's body, everybody's family
is impacting their experience so much.
And so to zoom out of the particular issues that I'm having as a grad student and just
feel solidarity with women in various ways has helped me lessen my doom.
This is a shout out not just to other moms out there, but also dads and non-traditional
families as well.
The one thing I've noticed in academia is people are super supportive of your family.
The people who your colleagues, when you go abroad or whatever, they want to know what
they can do.
Can they bring toys?
Can they help you out?
There might be a grandma who can actually watch somebody while you're giving your conference
paper.
I mean, people are just pretty encouraging in that way, I think, because a lot of them
went through it.
And especially the women, I think, really want to hold up other women knowing how difficult
this can really be.
I think I've always considered kids as something where there's never really a good time or
a bad time for it.
There's better times and worse times and things you can do for others to support them.
We also spoke at length about the difficulty of timing, both in terms of kids and in terms
of career milestones and expectations.
One of the things that is just implicitly difficult is the biological clock.
Right?
I mean, you're always fighting against that and you're always fighting against tenure
clock.
There's this book called Mothers in Academia.
It's by Marie Castaneda and Kirsten Isgro.
And one of the things that they say is that over 50% of the people getting PhDs are women,
but 38% of tenured faculty are female.
Especially when you have doom around the job market or around just encountering a problem
in my project and feeling low about it and kind of like, what am I doing?
And then you're like, oh, is it worth it what I'm doing to my daughter or is it worth it
what I'm putting my family through if this might not even work out?
I do remember one moment of running a postdoc search in the middle of my maternity leave
and I had Gabrielle on my hip and I'm on the phone and I'm trying to coordinate this call
to Germany for an interview and I just lost it entirely.
My research requires a lot of travel abroad.
I can be gone for months at a time.
Most people in my program, the expectation is you're going to be abroad for a year, for
two years, for three years.
And this is what I've done so far in the last three years.
You know, I've been gone for sometimes three or four months at a time.
This is not something I could do if I had a child now.
Do I get all my travel out of the way now?
Or you know, do I just wait until you know, this is all over and the dissertation is submitted?
This is definitely something that's like a big question mark for me.
I mean, the experience of traveling with a especially infant or a toddler, I mean, you
have to think about the pack and play where they're going to sleep.
You have to think about where they're going to eat.
You know, you can't really bring a high chair with you.
And then, you know, you have to think about, well, how many diapers do I bring until, you
know, when's the first opportunity I'm going to have to get to the store to buy more diapers
for when I'm there.
So there's a lot more to pay attention to when you're packing.
And then, and it gave me a little bit more excitement about my time in the archive too,
because it was the first time that I had really been away from my daughter all day long.
And certainly for days in a row, that was the first time that we were really apart.
And it just woke up that nerdy side of me again in a way that I hadn't been able to
do because I had been spending, you know, maybe I would get half an hour of work in
here, and, you know, 45 minutes of grading in on the Canvas app on my phone while she's
napping or holding her breastfeeding or whatever.
But to have that whole day where I was deep in my project and deep in my research, it
was awesome.
Do we think there is a way to institutionalize this?
You know, these resources of this support coming from the institution, you know, especially
when it comes to traveling, you know, if it's, I don't know, extra funding to have a babysitter
on site or extra funding for an extra plane ticket, you know, extra funding for a bigger
accommodation once we get wherever you're going or, you know, anything like this, if
it means your child stays behind with your partner, you know, but needs longer hours
at daycare, you know, this, I mean, all comes down to money a lot of the time, not always.
I wonder if there is a way for our institutions, you know, our fields, our whatever to take
on this burden a little bit.
Yeah, I actually, I applied for a grant, like one of the kinds of grants where you have
to detail your expenses and then it goes through whatever office at the university.
And I actually asked like, is childcare, you know, where's the spot for childcare?
Do I put that in other?
And I was told, no, that doesn't, you can't include that.
We actually convene a monthly seminar in Jewish studies for works in progress.
And we do offer babysitting for anyone who needs it to come to the seminar.
And also if they want to attend the dinner afterwards, just because people need to be
able to attend those things and have time off.
And even that's not enough, right?
Like the person who's having to give the paper and things like that, you know, probably needed
more time to prepare.
And obviously I can't do anything about that.
But institutionalizing those things are super, super important.
I also think it's an argument for having more, more just like lump sum grants where you don't
have to specify exactly what it's for because we all have different needs and we all need
more money, you know, for whatever it is.
And those kind of like refund models just leave you broke for a long time.
But yeah, I was told, no, the university won't consider childcare as an expense.
There are probably a lot fewer men who are agonizing about like, what if I'm a dad while
I'm like, you know, researching stuff.
Which again, just kind of goes back to that, like to that idea of like the inequities of
caregiving and everything.
Like there was a study at Georgia Tech of 10,445, like academics worldwide.
And women academics were eight times as likely to say that they were the primary caregivers
in their family, like 30 percent to less than 4 percent.
It also became clear that issues of reproductive rights were really impacting the way we were
thinking about motherhood within the academy.
You know, all these issues are interconnected between, between like your state legislature
to your institution, to your own like dynamic with your partner.
You know, right at the beginning of my pregnancy is when the six week ban went into effect
in Texas and then I remember I was 15 weeks pregnant when the DAWBS oral arguments were
happening and there was this whole line of questioning in there about 15, 16 weeks gestation
and I was just listening to it like, wow.
So I think especially in terms of as a teacher, it was important to me to not be pregnant,
not be out about my pregnancy until I needed to be because I really value the conversations
that I'm able to have with my students about the issues that are affecting their day to
day life politically, historically.
And some of those conversations are about abortion and I just didn't want to bring my
own pregnancy into the scene on that.
So it was a really weird time too.
I was, I felt really uncomfortable about people, you know, using language like baby just with
everything going around.
It's so interesting that the state that we're in, right, the physical state that we're in
in the US is going to have such an impact on our experience.
And then beyond that, you know, how much the institution we're at is also going to have
an impact and what the benefits you can get through your own university and free healthcare
countries.
So of course, you know, this enrages me and this is what I think about all the time.
Should I go back to France to have my kids and then come back?
Because here, no matter what, I mean, it's going to be an unknown.
I'm in a state where it's not possible to obtain an abortion.
And so if something were to go wrong, it would be really difficult to manage this, especially
in terms of like, oh, you need to be on campus as many days for your teaching and something
like that.
The day of the Dab's decision was the day that I had scheduled to get off of my birth
control because I was like not enjoying the side effects and I went into the health center
and she was like, you need to get an IUD today because it's going to be like, it's going
to be a really, really crowded in here for the next couple of weeks.
And if we can't even be sure that our university is going to take our side or is going to be
able to take that step to protect us, like this puts us at tremendous physical health
risk, that other companies are now stepping up to the task and protecting their employees.
And so I wonder if we should have the same expectations of our institutions.
I think it's really incumbent on institutions to really support the women who are in their
spaces.
I actually in 2014 traveled to Oregon and I had a miscarriage.
And because of the type of insurance that I carry at Duke, when I went to the emergency
room, because I wasn't admitted, it was not considered an emergency and they didn't want
to pay for it.
So female bodies are being circumscribed both physically in terms of Dab's, but then are
also being circumscribed through cash flow and lack of access to health care.
And obviously I am a ridiculously privileged individual, but even me, it was, you know,
these are things that are inequitable, especially for women in academia.
We've heard a little bit about what it's like to be a mother in academia, but what's it like
to have a mom in academia?
To find out, Serena sat down with her daughter, Gabriella.
Hi, I'm Gabriella Basemore.
This is my mom, Serena Basemore.
Wait, how old are you, Gabriella?
I'm 10 years old.
My birthday is October 12th and I was born in 2013.
And can you tell us what grade you're in?
I am in fourth grade, but next year I'm going to be in fifth.
So can you tell us a little bit, tell our listeners about what do you think I do?
You work at Duke in Jewish studies and I think you write a lot of papers and you bring in
people to speak for, well, bringing people like the prime minister, well, the old prime
minister of Israel.
And you brought in that one author from a book about talking whale, about talking whales.
And don't you?
And I have students.
Oh yeah, you have students.
And aren't you a student yourself?
I am a student now.
You're absolutely right.
I have gone back for a PhD in public history.
That's good of you to remember.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Do you know yet?
Have you thought about it?
I've thought about it a lot.
So first one is astronaut because I want to go to the International Space Station with
one of my best friends.
Wow.
Discover life on Mars.
Okay.
And the second one is being a paleontologist and finding a whole new different dinosaur
as a different species.
Yeah.
And or I'll be engineer.
Yeah.
I'm guessing.
Definitely need to go to graduate school to be an astronaut or a paleontologist.
There's some places where you can get an engineering degree from undergrad, which is pretty cool.
That's cool.
Yeah.
But graduate school is a lot more work, right?
Do you ever want to be a mama someday?
I do.
I exactly want.
But if I get more or less, I'm fine with that.
I want to have two children and I'm hoping for a boy and a girl.
But if it's a girl and a girl or a boy and a boy, I'm perfectly fine.
What do you think? Do you think it would be hard to be like traveling at the International
Space Station, but also trying to be a mama?
I think it would be hard.
But if I'm not an astronaut and I'm a paleontologist, don't they do paleontology around the world?
I could take my kids sometime if it's in like summer, I could take my kids on summer break
and bring them to, let's say Asia.
And why do you think that's possible?
Have you done that with me?
I haven't done that with you yet.
We have not gone to Asia, but we have gone to Europe and...
Isn't Israel technically in Asia?
Oh.
And we've gone to Europe during the summer.
What's something cool that you've been able to do with mama during when she's working?
Has there been anything that you're glad about that I work where I do?
Did you enjoy Israel?
Yes, I loved it.
What did you do there?
I got to see the Dead Sea Scrolls with Professor Breitler.
Professor Breitler and we also got to go to this museum.
So do you think you want to go into academia?
Do you think you want to teach?
I mean, if you had your PhD in paleontology, would you want to teach other people or what
would you want to do?
I mean, you want to go out and be discovering things.
Yeah, but if that doesn't work out and I should be more of a staying in place person, but
we can also go and travel.
I'm thinking if I get a PhD in one of those, I could be a teacher for one of those because
I sometimes play like these fun little games while I'm taking, okay, no personal information
while I'm taking a bath.
Okay.
And I play these games that I'm teaching.
Yeah, so I might want to be a teacher.
Do you think it's hard to be a mama in academics?
You know, I spend a lot of nights away and I have a lot of weekends where I have to go
to school.
Seminars that I, yeah, and I have school and classes.
So do you think it's harder to be a mama since I, you know, it's hard to be away from you
a lot of times, but.
I think it's a little, I think it's hard, but you get to go around like you're at least
like an hour away.
You can, you usually get back home before my bedtime.
I do try to get home.
Yeah.
So I love you, Dawn, you come in, give me a kissy.
So you think it's okay, even though mamas work hard?
I think you are doing really good and I think that you're okay.
Definitely.
Well, Gabriella, thank you so much for agreeing to be on this podcast and we look forward
to your great discoveries either in space or somewhere in a dig.
Yeah.
Somewhere around the world looking for dinosaurs.
Okay.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
There's a fine balance, right?
Like this, I'm an over planner and I'm always anticipating the million steps and the logistics
and the, you know, I'm like counting backwards, like if I have a kid, you know, X year, it
means that you're before I need to do this and then you're before I need to do this,
my research, my travel.
But at the end of the day, like if I were to have a kid now, I would figure it out,
you know, if we want to have them right now.
So yeah, I think maybe this is important for us, for our listeners to remember as well
as our capacity as people, but especially as women, I think to adapt and to make things
work and to step up to the plate, you know, and if our institutions and our, you know,
circumstances or legislatures, you know, can support us as we do this year, this is what
we want and to have those systems in place.
But we're, you know, our most resourceful entity, I think, in this equation.
I will tell you, Mathilde, if you are waiting for the perfect time to have baby, it's never
going to happen.
And children are extremely unpredictable.
That's it for today's episode of Herding Cats.
Our deepest thanks go to the National Humanities Center, specifically to its amazing staff
that helped facilitate this week, and to our fellow Winter 2024 participants.
Thank you for making this episode possible.
Thank you also to everyone who helped contribute testimonies when we asked for them.
And thanks to you for tuning in.
No, no, I know.
Yeah, I know we are.
I just I didn't mean anything by that.
No, no, I just was trying to make it sound that way in the verbiage.
No, no, I wasn't worried about that.
Yeah, I did not mean to dig it more at all.
I just more of a staging the story.
This is such a women in academia conversation too, because a man would be like, and these
are my guests.
I'm in charge of the episode.