This revealing volume examines the current role and status of women in higher education -- and suggests a direction for the future. Judith Glazer-Raymo and other distinguished scholars and administrators assess the progress of women in academe using three lenses: the feminist agenda as a work in progress, growing internal and external challenges to women's advancement, and the need for active engagement with the challenges at hand.

Drawing on the latest research, the contributors explore issues faced by women as newly minted Ph.D.s, as faculty members, as administrators, and as academic leaders. They describe women's struggles with the multiple and often conflicting demands of productivity, accountability, family-work responsibility, and the subconscious "dance of identities" within a variety of cultural contexts.

Shedding light on the past, present, and future of women in higher education, this authoritative book concludes with recommendations for meeting new and ongoing gender challenges in the next decade.

Contributors: Ana M. MartA-nez AlemAn, Boston College; Rita Bornstein, Rollins College; M. Kate Callahan, Temple University; Judith Glazer-Raymo, Teachers College, Columbia University; Steven Hubbard, New York University; Kimberley LeChasseur, Temple University; Amy Scott Metcalfe, University of British Columbia; Anna Neumann, Teachers College, Columbia University; Tamsyn Phifer, Teachers College, Columbia University; Becky Ropers-Huilman, University of Minnesota; Kathleen M. Shaw, Pennsylvania Department of Education; Sheila Slaughter, University of Georgia; Frances K. Stage, New York University; Aimee LaPointe Terosky, Teachers College, Columbia University; CarolineSotello Viernes Turner, Arizona State University; Kelly Ward, Washington State University; Lisa Wolf-Wendel, University of Kansas

In "Shattering the Myths, " Judith Glazer-Raymo uses a critical feminist perspective to examine women's progress in higher education since 1970. She contrasts the activism of the 1970s, the passivity of the 1980s, and the ambivalence and antipathy demonstrated toward feminism in the 1990s. These waves of change, she explains, were brought about by external forces, by generational differences among women, and by intellectual and ideological struggles within the women's movement and the larger academic culture. In tracing three decades of women's progress in the academy, the author provides data from a variety of sources on women's rank, salary, employment status, and education. The book also draws on the experience of women faculty and administrators as they articulate and reflect on the social, economic, political, and ideological contexts in which they work and the multiple influences on their professional and personal lives.