"Maid of All Work or Departmental Sister-in-Law?"
Excerpt from Hughes, Helen MacGill, “Maid of All Work or Departmental Sister-in-Law? The Faculty Wife Employed on Campus,” American Journal of Sociology 78:4. pp. 767-772.
Excerpted by Aimee-Marie Dorsten
The account given here of 17 years’ service on the American Journal of Sociology, anomalous as my role was and antedating, as it did, consciousness-raising and the repudiation of nepotism rules, aims at something more significant than personal reminiscence. While the current lively discussion of women in campus jobs focuses mainly on the incumbent and the built-in disabilities under which they suffer,1 this microcosmic case study interprets a small-scale constitutional change in terms of working standards and practices, on one hand, and the relationships between role players, on the other, ascribing the change to a situation which today is called sexist.
In August 1944, the Journal’s editor, Herbert Blumer, asked me to be an editorial assistant, replacing a graduate student in sociology who was leaving on very short notice. There were two editorial assistants then: a typist who was not a sociologist and the student assistant, who got out the Journal between classes and on Saturday forenoons, at token pay. The student was usually a women, for this was one of the few jobs open to the then rare female graduate students; male students had real jobs for real money […]
But there was no student available for the vacancy on the Journal. Our youngest child was in nursery school, and I was very glad to accept the offer. I had my Ph.D. (Chicago), and the job was one fitted to the circumstances of a graduate student who would work in spare time for modest emolument […]
To anticipate the objection that all of this is unrepresentative of the position of the faculty wife employed in a campus job: certainly it was not the situation now being brought to light in some of even the most respected universities, in which an exploited woman is given remuneration which is not competitive, and consigned to the residual work of the department and to such unpopular tasks as teaching unchallenging classes or classes at awkward hours. Yet it was typical insofar as the salary was unrealistic and the position was a blind alley... In any case, 17 years’ experience led to nothing further on campus […]
There must be many faculty wives in this dilemma today, and there will continue to be until spouses are dealt with as autonomous professionals […]
The editors [of the Journal] had put themselves in the position of having to deal with a nonstudent in a student’s role. In this anomaly may lie a tentative explanation of the situation of the faculty wife employed, typically part time, on campus. For, who were my colleagues? Who set my model for my role?... Were the assistant’s colleagues, then, the editors themselves? It was clear from the first that I enjoyed more autonomy, in part assigned, in part arrogated, than the student predecessors in the editorial office. But I was a graduate of the department and a fellow student, though junior to them, of three of the editors, Blumer, Wirth, and Hughes; a student of a fourth, Burgess; and as if all of that were not enough to upset the customary relationships in the office, the wife of one of them […]
That this was the outcome of sexism is perfectly clear. The position of editorial assistant of the American Journal of Sociology would certainly never have been offered to a male Ph.D., or even to a male doctoral student2 whose mentor3 would be watching paternally for an opening in which he could set his disciple’s feet on the path to a career like his own. But a female Ph.D., in 1944 and perhaps even in 1972, would find herself in this position, although in 1972 she would probably be better able to negotiate it.
In the spate of reports on the position of academic women, slightly relevant are The Status of Women in the Profession of the American Sociological Association (in press) and similar reports of the American Historical Association (1971) and the American Political Science Association (1969-71). However, I know of no study specifically of the faculty wife employed on campus. ↩
After 1942, all editorial assistants were women. ↩
For discussion of sponsorship in professional education, see Hall (1948, pp. 334, 336) and other articles by him. Epstein (1970) has shown how sponsorship works in the case of the female graduate student. ↩