Unknown Speaker  00:00
For people who want to be scholars outside of academia, to that extent, you self defined an interest, which seems very, very easily stated. But I spent some time going over the list of persons who were pre registered for the workshop, and trying to make some guesses from statements of affiliation in such, what kind of group we are today. And I'll give you feedback based on the sample of 33, which are the names I have, though, clearly, some of you already disappeared, which is not hard things being what they are the conception of the workshop. And the reason for putting me into the facilitator position is that my own experience has been as an academic, as an unemployed academic, as a scholar, monkey, which is to say, I didn't do too well with the boys. As a somewhat spotty publisher, since I have no longer been in the bosom of an English department, an activist organizer, have done a wide range of things, sometimes for money, and sometimes the glory and sometimes for not much of anything. And that after about seven years of this life, I'm still fairly cheerful, I haven't committed suicide, and I again, have a very good job. So with, I think, a very reasonable sense of the occasion, they gave you a success story to start with. But I will say for those of you who probably need other points of identification, besides success stories, I have spent a total out of the last seven academic years, I spent one year on a leave I chose to take from the department I couldn't stand working with the Feminist Press in Baltimore when it was still down there. And with adult education project for women out of AAUW, and with various community groups, I then later in the course of events, I think have been fired several times, though, in academic language, it's hard to know when you've been fired, I had been let go terminated, found inappropriate, what have you. And I have a very good feeling of what it is to stand in unemployment lines, to be nine years in the training to be able to handle the English a certain amount of finesse, and knowing that I will never again be paid to do that. Though I may continue to do it in various settings. I have organized the workshop today in the mode of a workshop, I will talk at the beginning, as I've been instructed to for maybe 20 minutes, then I'm simply going to give you a project to be performed individually and then in small groups. And then I want to come back into a kind of larger group setting. And I'm doing that because it has been my experience since I started moving in and out of academia, that the most important thing you can do at a conference is to meet other women have similar interests and needs, and begin to work on that network, which is ultimately what sustains us all through the fat in the lean years. So that one of my agendas for this meeting is that you should walk away knowing three or four people well enough to call them on the telephone, the next time you're feeling blue. I've y'all got that. So make sure that you get a couple of telephone numbers. So I will make a list of everybody participating and send that along to you afterwards. Building a network of supportive informed somewhat contiguous individuals is important. And probably I think, the single most important skill, if you're going to be a scholar outside of academia, you have got to have points of contact with other persons who take scholarship seriously. And you got to have somebody who can take seriously your need for scholarship during the periods when you're emotionally depressed, for whatever reasons. And you got to learn to say to people help, I mean, you can call them from the library doesn't matter where you call them from. But you've got to learn to ask each other for help. And I say that at the beginning, because as scholars, we have been trained to work alone, most of us. And as research scientists which least one or two of you are, you've been trained to work on teams very competitively against other teams. So I think our socialization has not led us particularly in the direction of asking for help. Often it's led us into a kind of proud independence and you know, pleasure in our own ideas. Part of what I'm going to ask you to do is talk about the scholarly work you want to accomplish in the next five years, and to talk about your identity. And again, those will be the two things about which you should have some information when you walk out of this room, what you take your identity to be, and what kind of scholarly work and I'm assuming the word research under scholarly work you wish to perform in the next five calendar years. This is a modification of the kind of career and life planning that many of you have done in other settings. And I'm certainly have found over the last three or four years in my job, which is a job working with academic women, that long range planning is a very useful skill. Resource resources are scarce and if you know what resources you're going to set out to corner, you can usually do it, but you have to know what you're out to get.

Unknown Speaker  04:57
Now, I thought I might begin by simply by giving you a sense of my identity, at least as I proceed me. My name is Cynthia Seacor. I'm from Colorado, a long time on the East Coast. I came from Chicago to the East Coast took a degree in political science as an undergraduate. Fascinated by politics. This was 1960, I had no sense of what a woman with an interest in politics did with it. Very few people in my class even went on to law school. The majority, even though they had been trained at Bryn Mawr, to be scholars and wives, took the white part of the message more seriously than they would know. And I spent a decade of my life sort of hanging out around Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania first as a graduate student, then as a part time instructor, then as an instructor, then as an assistant professor. And finally, is what I began to call, you know, teaching assistant Emeritus, part time instructor Emeritus, I hung on to each of those rather well, we stages because there was nowhere to go. In all graduate school, I'd had one woman instructor, she drank a little bit too much, and also did not get her contract renewed. She fortunately has since gone on to tenure at a good institution, so I'm happy. But in those days, it seemed bleak. And my experience of scholarship was that year by year, more and more of my creative friends dropped by the wayside. And I was not being productive though I was being very creative in the classroom. I did not qualify as a scholar by anybody's measure, including my own. I could not get interested in chasing white whales I tried. You know, it just wasn't my book. I tried to ride on Virginia Woolf for my master's essay, and my marvelous mentor, and he was my mentor, in the best sense of the word said, well, instead, she has a Kentucky and well, she has a very feminine sensibility. He said, I thought about it. And I thought, yeah. And I'd mold that over for about four years before I got really angry. And by then the women's movement was coming along. And there were other people who were getting angry for the same good reasons. I did a PhD thesis finally on George Eliot. And by then I was strong enough to say, I'm going to write on George Eliot, because reading her books makes me happy. And if I have to read something for four more years, it's going to be somebody who makes me happy. I was in a department, the university Cornell, which is a big graduate department, at that point, considered one of the top five in the country, there was no one qualified to direct a dissertation on George Eliot. This was the beginning of my serious career as a scholar, putting together a committee of people in John Stuart Mill Dickens, and Wordsworth, and hoping that they could read with some sympathy what I wanted to write about George Eliot, they were a gentleman, they were a pleasure to work with, they were not in my field. I proceeded to write a dissertation. And then I sent it to three female friends who were by now teaching assistants, assistant professors, etc, at other institutions, and I said, read it, and blue pencil out everything that won't pass. By now I'm just becoming politically savvy about scholarship. So my three well trusted pretty male peers, took out everything that had any possible one of them had worked closely with my chairman, again, a very, very nice man, but she'd worked closely with him. And she cut more than the rest cut. And I handed in my dissertation, and I defended it. And I was a PhD, with a well blue pencil dissertation that I had no particular desire of publishing, because I wasn't too interested in the critical apparatus. And the meat of the introduction, which was now all blue penciled in the original draft could not be published. And it was at that point that I began my serious career as an assistant professor. And it was not a good place to start from. I was also carrying what I thought at the time was the added burden of being a very self conscious lesbian, in a world that didn't even have women, or women that I could perceive and identify with. And so I marched into the feminist age, with credentials that might have made me almost anything, but they certainly made me unemployable. And that was proved fairly quickly and soon. In retrospect, what I know it gave me was a sense that risk taking was inevitable and paid off. You know, and again, that's simply a message that I take back with me to everywhere I go, you will not get anything without taking risks. And you have to be prepared to analyze which risks you can take now, which ones you'll take later. And to calculate what the payoffs are.

Unknown Speaker  09:11
I moved out into the feminist community out of a sincere interest in the issues that were being raised and acknowledge that I was highly skilled. That wasn't entirely clear to me how an undergraduate degree in Political Theory and a graduate degree in the English novel were going to combine to make a dynamite item. What it gave me however, was a sensitivity to how people think, nine years of studying literature and 15 years of freshman English papers give you an incredible insight into how people think and articulate. So the training again turned out to be useful. And the message of that is, no matter how abstruse your field, if it's Philology, if it's linguistics, if it's Russian history, you know, if its behavior patterns and zebras, there's going to be an application for it if you think about its applications. One of the most interesting black woman I know has a degree in animal biology. And she's a killer in a meeting. And she says she learned a great deal taking a PhD in animal biology. So lesson number two after risk taking is you've already are highly skilled people. Now the question is how do those skills translate into some way that will help you to survive comfortably with a peer group and with economic security. And believe me, those skills will translate. But you have to start from the headset that I already know a great deal. And all I have to do is to figure out how to reify it. So my identity, I have a name, I have a PhD, I have a six year location at the University of Pennsylvania, I have the opportunity of really starting women's studies because during my period of tenure, or non 10 years, it was we were really getting started. And I had the opportunity of working in places like the Feminist Press, which were really working to see how you could combine scholarly and intellectual interests with community service, and organizing and outreach. I moved into a period, a holding period really trying to deal with my own anger, with my sense of inadequacy, just plain rage that I had a PhD I couldn't use, I love to teach, I had taken that degree and spent all that time because I liked being in a classroom, the process of helping something someone to grow an idea person, that's still one of the you know, the real kicks I get. So that I had a great deal of just plain anger that I wasn't being allowed to do what I wanted to do and have taken the time to learn how to do well. I also did not have an institutional identity. And that's maybe point three, examined very carefully, the degree to which your identity is institutional and start making alternative arrangements quick, because as long as you need them in the form of an institutional support, they got you by what we would call the balls, except we don't have I think anything that morphologically a little bit left. But anyhow, you have got to know who you are apart from the institution before you can make deals with the institution and work with them in any possible way. I will lose track of my numbers because I'm a Gertrude Stein specialist at this point in my life. And if you've read much Stein, you know that by the time you get to point three, you go back to chapter two. And I think it's a mode of rhetoric that I'm beginning to love and want to participate in. So I have a degree I have a job, I lose the job several times, I spend a period as a gay activist along with a women's studies person, I take every risk, I think I know how to take not because I want to, but they just keep happening to me, I end up with a very nice friend who supports me through a period I go through unemployment rapidly, because by then there still wasn't a lot of extensions. It was seeing early period of unemployment, first generation unemployment. But I learned and I kept learning and I finally came to terms with like what I could not come to terms with while I worked within the university, and was on a presumed tenure line. And that was a joke that we all knew was a joke. I learned that I really cared about scholarship in the way that I cared about it when as a senior writing my honors paper, I chose to go to graduate school. And I think that my senior year in college was the last time that I could use the word scholar without a sense of irony. And working in the streets, on the barricades, you know, etc. Behind the mimeograph machine, I got back to knowing I wanted to be a scholar. And I now make room to get at least one paper out a year. And I've quite like hell to get at least one course, a year out of somebody's Women's Studies program. And that is what I owe to me a chance to be in the classroom and a chance to get my ideas out in good, elegant prose. So that my peer group as I define them can read those ideas thrown back at me, enjoy them.

Unknown Speaker  13:35
I say that, in the sense that I hope you take it, I fight to get a course and I fight to get a paper out I used two weeks of my suppose and four week vacation to write a paper last month. And it may not be everybody's idea of a vacation. But I found it enormously pleasing, to just sit down with a lot of Virginia Woolf and a lot of Gertrude Stein and make comparisons that a lot of people wouldn't think we're relevant. But it gave me a kind of sense of just pleasure and space that will keep me going for months. And I have learned how to take that couple of weeks and say To hell with the rest of it. This is my time for closure. And I could not as a graduate student or as a young professor have said that closure was what I would get from two weeks by myself with a pile of books. The anxiety, in other words is finally dissipated. And it's dissipated, because I knew that when I got that paper written, it would be read by peers, or read it at a symposium on Virginia Woolf out at Bucknell that had been put together by Katherine Smith. And the people that had come were for the most part women who were fascinated by Virginia Woolf. And I had for the first time or not the first time and now it's beginning to be an experience. I work with being heard and judged by peers. You know, and I say that to you, because probably for most of you, the existing institution is not your peer group. And seeking out and making contacts with your peer group, risking your scholarship with them. That's probably where the game is going to be. For us in our adult lives. I did my gay thing, you know, my lover went off to be a dean. So we couldn't live together. I mean, I lost, you know, work and love everything voices matters down the tubes. And at that point, it all turned out that the world was not exactly as they had told me it would be, I did everything they told me not to do. And I got a beautiful job on a project, working with higher education administrators in the middle Atlantic region, funded by the Ford Foundation to the tune of $85,000, I happily worked along writing gay papers on one hand and doing my project on the other in two years, I doubled it to 150, grand, you know, and routes, several, you know, 1000 $100,000 of other stuff on the side. Now, I have learned from that, that if you know where you're going, you want to do it, you have a minimum of intelligence and you have discipline work habits, there's a lot more space than there is. If you can do a PhD in French Philology, there isn't very much you can't do. And that's really matters to know the, the, by the time you finish the research degree of any kind, you have a highly trained mind, and you are very disciplined. And what it requires is that you figure out a problem in your own self interest and solve that problem. And I had to defeat years of baby bibliography, anybody who can find, you know, the 1872 edition of the forged manuscripts of somebody's poem, you know, chances are, they're going to figure out how to write a grant. It doesn't take any more intelligence, it doesn't take any more skill, it simply takes the willingness to sit down, we're in a different set of skills as carefully and as competently as you learned the last set. And that, again, is one of those points, like now we're back to point to a B or something you already have what you need to succeed, the moment you're willing to accept the responsibility of learning a slightly different set of skills to implement the ones you already have.

Unknown Speaker  16:57
I'm again making the assumption of the people in this room that your change oriented and that you're feminists, and if any of you aren't, you know, you will be. So what I'm saying is that basically, we're all in the same boat of figuring out how to develop a professional lifestyle that does not necessarily rest on the pmla, or pianos, the American Academy of political science, or University of Syracuse, or whatever it happens to be, we're talking about a professional style, a professional network, and finally, a canon and a body of research, which is likely to be our own. I'm not a separatist, by choice. I'm a separatist, I think, because I'm a realist. And I think that in the foreseeable future, our best work is not going to be done dialectically with the editors, you know, of modern Philology, it's going to be done dialectical with the other women who are both out on the streets and in the libraries. So that I'm very concerned that we develop alternative structures that meet our needs as scholars. I also take as my working assumption, because in my working day, I work mostly with unemployed people or people who are underemployed, locked into shitty job situations, I take the assumption that there are a huge number of us very well skilled who are already doing feminist scholarship. And that our basic problem is to put together states of mind so that we can work together and institutions so that we can begin to cluster resources in a way that is more than individual. And most of my comments, and the exercises that I'm asking you to do today are designed really, in that end, you're working on a self identity that will allow you to function collegially with other feminist scholars, and on the forms that we've not yet figured out, that will allow us to get our share of the goodies so we can do our work. And there is government money, there is foundation money, sooner or later, there's going to be university money available to us. And there are already a lot of tricks that are emerging of the women who are continuing to do their work, despite the fact that they get terminated or whatever. But I think it takes knowing yourself very well. Having a long range goal and knowing how to work with other women, and the few really serious men that there are around to accomplish your own goals. So I come back to something today that is a little bit like negotiation and assertiveness training, and you know, value clarification and lifelong learning. You know, you name it there a lot of catch words. But what you have got to figure out is not what you're willing to pay for your scholarship, but how to get somebody else to pay for it. And I have found I gain nothing by thinking about the scarcity of resources. I've gained everything by figuring it's out there and going ahead and defining the work I want to do. Because my experience again has been that for all of the fears that I've had to work through when I'm doing scholarship I care about my energy level is so high that it gets done and the energy level that comes to you as you try to write for the pmla I don't know you're always working with one half of your brain against the other half and it shows there's an energy loss that is tremendous. Is there, I'm not counseling that you shouldn't if you still have a job, and one of the things that interests me about this workshop is that at least half of you seem to still be employed. But I suspect see the writing on the wall in some form, it's probably very wise to continue to turn out what I call modified feminist scholarship that the boys will recognize. But don't confuse it with your real work. You know, and share your real work with the people who seem to be able to see what it is. There's nothing unfair or thinking about having double agendas. Staying comfortably employed is a great gift. Because the longer you're employed, the more likely you are to sit on search committees, the more likely you are to sit on the committee that allocates some research funds to the rest of the university, the more likely you are to be there to counsel graduates and undergraduates. So don't get conflicted about still being you know, on board, try to figure out how to do that comfortably to help other people.

Unknown Speaker  20:59
Back to my identity. The part that I'm mostly leaving out but but I think you'll want to write in as you as you think about your own and the rest of this workshop, I have found it absolutely necessary to deepen my personal relationships. You know, everything in the last seven years has taught me that the deeper my friendships, the more likely I am to be productive and creative. And I spend a great amount of time. Still some of it in psychotherapy. Interestingly enough, I've gone back into therapy, but most importantly, simply talking in depth with other women and getting to know them. And I think that if there is a style of female or feminist or feminine administration, or behavior, it does involve more intense relations, and therefore potentially a certain kind of trust, then at the moment is exhibited in the universities and colleges with their predominantly masculine styles. But I do know that when you're really down and out, a woman or a man who can help you is probably your most valuable resource, or the ability simply to be alone for a period of time and like yourself, while you're alone. Those again, are what I would put over kind of on the part of the identity, which is like TSLA, it's third name for the cat, you know, that's the name that only you know. But you've got to have all of those names. And you've got to be fairly clear on what they are. Institutionally, and I'll move away from identity I now think of myself basically, as someone who's well loved, and at the moment well paid. And I'll stick with those two things. And I've gotten back to calling a lot of what I do volunteer ism, as well as organizing, because I found it useful to collapse those two terms. I spend an enormous amount of time on unpaid labor. And I spend very enormous amounts of time on paid labor. So I think of myself as loving and working again, and feeling part of a community of scholars and the feminists. I think what was said earlier today is really true, we are much more open about our communities. And I'm involved I think in trying to produce structures that will be of use to the rest of us. My job is with hers, Mid Atlantic, which is a small office located in Philadelphia, our charge is to work with women in higher education. And that has meant over the past three years, or coming into three years, referring women's names to physicians not getting in place because nobody but God can do that. And she's not really I think too concerned yet. But getting women's names out there circulating getting women into interview situations, giving professional and career advising, serving as a kind of hotline for people who get themselves into scrapes like getting a job offer and not knowing what salary to ask for. We do the gamut. We don't do abortion counseling, but that just because we refer them somewhere else in town, I mean, we get a lot of stuff. We do that. We spend a lot of time in what we call liaison. But what that really means is I travel all the time, up and down trying to find out who has money, who's doing what kind of service in what city in a particular city, maybe a group of historians are now meeting once a month and providing a support group. So I tried to find out what level of formalization. That's New York group is now really incorporated. Other places you find other kinds of forms, developing among women scholars, sometimes in conjunction with minority groups or with radical men. My job then is to sort of move around and try to hear a lot and know how to share that in ways that is useful. And finally, we are developing a series of training opportunities workshops, conferences, a month long training event, which predominantly give women skills and administrative areas, because we've targeted moving women into policy and decision making positions as important. We've also started to move on professional development for faculty women, which is our code word for assertiveness training and networking. But it works. If you ask somebody to send people in his department to a professional development conference, which is being funded by the the Heinz Foundation, he's not too nervous, and you talk about Deville I'll be going effect the faculty member. He's still not too nervous. I mean, what does he got to lose it's but once the women are working together all kinds of other things, of course happen. So again, I think of us as having mastered the double agenda that we're quite overt with, with those who can hear what the double agenda is. And I try always to be honest in my work, and I try always to know what I'm doing that maybe isn't so obvious. And my guess my hope is that we will have developed the alternative culture by the time we're strong enough to really use it. But I do see a still is in the building stages. Now, what I would like to do with the group in the remaining time is threefold. I would like you as individuals, to take a period of time about 15 minutes to answer in writing on a piece of paper, a set of questions.

Unknown Speaker  25:51
Then to break down into smaller groups, I think triads are going to work easiest, because of the time limitations. And within those groups to share the information that you have gathered about yourself and put down on paper, that period of time, about a half an hour, I'm hoping will lead you as a group a triad to being able to raise for the group as a whole, when we come back together a set of problems, which are few real existential problems right now, today, not down the road, but right now. And put those forward either with tentative solutions, or put forward so that the group can brainstorm a little bit on tentative solutions. Now, I don't think we're going to come out of this with three or four groups that are running off to, you know, to organize research institutes. But I think we should come out with the awareness that there are people in this country right now that are doing that, and that it's not an impossibility. And then most projects start with one or two people talking about doing it. I mean, that's where things really start, one or two people have an idea and they start drawing in other people. So I'm hoping that by the end of the, the remaining hour and a half or so, you'll have a sense of more options than you had when you came in, you'll have slightly more focused on what you're afraid of. And therefore, what you can therefore do, knowing what that fear is, and that you will have met a couple of people you like. And from my point of view, that's my agenda. And my my criterion for it having been a good workshop. I'll give a couple of examples of, of basically what I mean. And then ask you simply to choose a couple of people in the room that you don't know, I had initially thought to break you down by types of what I presumed to be occupation, or lack of occupation, and what have you. I'll merely state for those of you that have come in to the group since we started that, as nearly as I can figure out of the original group of 33, whose names were given approximately 17 seem to be faculty persons, or at least they were giving full academic affiliations, which suggests to me anticipatory anxiety, the writing on the wall, some kind of realism, okay, but they still have salaries coming in another group of two, a subset, appeared to be undergraduate students who were looking on to what they would do next. Seven persons list, no affiliation, no nothing, which says to me that they are probably at the moment not affiliated with an institution, probably unemployed. So at least a fourth of you are probably simply really in trouble at the moment or appear to be in trouble. Another seven are doing everything from working for the state to working for educational associations to working for business, so that your people a little more like myself, who probably have strong interest in research and a 60 hour, week job on the side. And that's another whole problem. So I'm hoping that as you break down into your triads, you'll be sensitive to the fact that there are peculiarly different sets of problems, and therefore different solutions within this room, that some of your solutions may transcend the boundaries of those problems. Because if we're talking about getting together a research group, or reading group, or some kind of support group, an unemployed person, somebody who's expecting not to get tenure, and someone who works for Procter and Gamble, or whatever, might have a great deal in common, and might bring somewhat different experiences to bear on solving the common problems. When I talk about solutions, I'm really talking about the creation of personal relations that will stand the test of the coming years, and about the creation of new forms. It seems to me that the emergence of journals such as signs or quest, both of which are well represented at this conference, the Feminist Press, some of the other smaller presses. These are certainly attempts and I think probably quite successful ones by women to provide new vehicles for our information. Having spent a lot of my professional time in and around caucuses of the Modern Language Association, and the gay academic union. I'm convinced that the caucus is becoming a very important vehicle and learning to use your professional association so as to to sponge off of it to get your dues back however you want to think about it, to use your professional group as a vehicle for feminist activities, very creative ways that's being done. The annual symposiums such as this at Barnard are such as the one that Catherine Smith had at Bucknell learning how to gather the resources of your institution. So as you can put on to do that other people can come to, again, I think the creative solution as to how to create our own forums, how to secure our own space, research collectives, such as one that has been incorporated here in this city for historians, allowing them a base from which to go out to get grants a place to share collegial ideas, a support group and identity group call it what you will, again, the emergence of networks in some of the regions of the country that are more sparsely populated.

Unknown Speaker  30:55
These, from my point of view are practical and low cost, ways of meeting the original problem, which is how to get our workout, how to have fellowship with the people who are also working in thinking. So I think back over it, as I was taking notes for today, I came out with what I think is the only important idea I have that isn't part of the kind of exercises we'll be doing. And that is that we were all of us brought up to get our status from our profession, to get our status from the institution, all of which were hierarchically ranked, so that we knew within a fourth or a fifth, whether ours was top or not in terms of departments, we were socialized into a kind of hierarchical setting, and status was assigned by virtue of whether you got into the research groups, your paper was presented at a certain division, you had been hired by one of the better, etc schools, most of us have rejected that socialization to some extent, or we wouldn't be here. But I think the idea that we have to learn to use very, very efficiently and on mass is to say that we give status to those things which we choose to use, or we choose to create. In other words, at some level, stop worrying about whether your journal is going to be signs or whether it's going to be MLS publication, stop worrying about whether quest is really, you know quite where it's at. Realize that if you sign something and put it in there, within time, that journal is going to have status. And if you can do that with your head, if you can suddenly realize that an article or a piece of research going out over your name, confer status on that vehicle that symposium, that conference, you really made the jump that I think is finally existentially necessary, when you know that your name is a status name. And that if you put it together with several other feminists in one place, you got a high powered vehicle or a high powered event. At that point, we will have done a good deal of what we can do collectively. And I think in terms of identification of ourselves as powerful as powerful people. Okay, that's my sort of point. Even even Gertrude Stein gives you a point, about halfway through, if you know how to hang in on it, you could always underline it, just speak with. So that's mine, your name should be able to personally and whatever you choose to give it to. Okay, the game, the exercise is as follows. I would like you to take 15 minutes, go get a cigarette, whatever your way of working is. And sit down and do something which may seem a bit arbitrary, or a little bit distant. If your problem right now is paying the babysitter when you get home. Sit down and think about what scholarship what research you intend. I do mean that verb intend to get out over the next five years. Define it for yourself, take the risk of writing it down. Lay it out on a timeline. In terms of a sequence of tasks, if you're writing a book, what are the series of necessary stages if it's a set of articles out of your dissertation, if it's something entirely new, if it's putting together a Virginia Woolf society or a particular small journal, figure out what it is that you're going to contribute over five years and just write down realistically what you think the timeline is in the sequence. Okay, that's exercise, one subset one subset to what resources institutional and personal will be necessary. intimate personal resources institutional. At that point, pause a moment, you know, take a swig on the cigarette or breathe deeply and try to figure out what your feelings are now that you put that down on paper. And I don't mean that academically. Try to get in touch with what you feel like. Does it seem easy? Does it seem invigorating? Do you think Oh Christ, not again. There's no way in other words, try to really just label identify name feeling if you can't get any feeling record that you feelings that are stage three, stage four subset for whatever, which of these resources are secure. That is, which do you anticipate will be forthcoming, you may be in a very happy relationship, marriage, whatever it happens to be, you think that's gonna continue you know, you'll have personal no affection or loving support, put that down as a positive. If you finally gotten tenure, even though it's a bad department, but you know, you got an income coming in for five years, and you've got at least some kind of a name to publish over, put that down tenure for at least five years, it's likely to be good in most places. Figure out what in other words is secure. And then number five, what problems do you foresee in gaining the other resources that will be necessary?

Unknown Speaker  35:48
Be honest with yourself. Because a lot of these are things you think about him all around and brood about, but just get down? What do you see the problems as being? Okay, that's roughly right there 15 minutes, at that point, I would simply like you. Three then you got to half an hour, you think that was hard the half an hour is when you sit down with two other women that you have pretty randomly chosen, just because for whatever reason, you want to sit with them for the next half hour. And the three of you fairly quickly explain to each other, what you have just gone through personally, and make sure you know each other's names, telephone numbers you can get later. But make sure that you least know who the two other women are. So that when you walk away, you don't think gee, that woman in the brown shirt, I really liked what she said, you know, and three years later, with luck, you run into her at the ladies room at another conference. But you know, try to know by name the two people you're with. Okay, that's about a half an hour, it really seems to need a few minutes longer. You know, I'll take the sense of the meeting and say a few more minutes, then I would like us to come back into full group and simply try to deal in sequence with a number of the problems that have been so identified. And think about possible solutions, in terms of resources that we already know about groups that we have know, that are functioning in these areas, persons that we know that have successfully surmounted something, and might be willing to talk to the person who raises the problem. Now, this really should be about five hours at that point, you know, I mean, we should just take each person where she's at and look at what what she's facing, but a few of them at least will give us you know, some kind of shared experience a sense of each other. That will end the formal, two and a half hours, short 10 minutes, which was getting together time, then we all have a chit as I understand it for a free drink, you know, presumably they'll let us pay for the second or third. And at that point, just try to talk to as many more people who were in this room as possible. And just see what what you have in common with different people. And again, go away knowing as many people as you can. Because it's always the person you meet by chance, who turns out to have the solution to your problem? Nine times out of 10 because your friends and you have talked it over so long that there's nothing happening. It's your problem. Now it's their problem, your problem. Your identity has become your problem in certain settings. Okay. I have now made Barnard happy I have talked to you a period of time so that you've heard me talk. And I think that if you'll just dive into it, good things will start to happen. I'm going to be here if anybody wants to talk with me one