"Through the voices of those who have weathered the storm, Mama, PhD provides invaluable lessons for young scholars-both men and women-striving to navigate family and academic careers."-Robert Drago, author of Striking a Balance: Work, Family, Life "All those sleepless nights and dirty diapers and baby food in your hair-where's the discursive construction of motherhood when you need it? It's here, in these smart, funny, poignant essays that struggle to balance mind and body, to balance body and soul."-Catherine Newman, PhD, author of Waiting for Birdy: A Year of Frantic Tedium, Neurotic Angst, and the Wild Magic of Growing a Family "I wish I had this book in the late 1970s when I was a young untenured professor trying to teach five sections of composition and raise a new (adopted) baby. The tales in Mama, PhD could have served as a virtual consciousness raising group for me as I toiled away in academia. Happily the book is available today for women trying to balance the pulls of motherhood and career."-Nan Bauer-Maglin, author of Cut Loose: (Mostly) Older Women Talk about the End of (Mostly) Long-Term Relationships Every year, American universities publish glowing reports stating their commitment to diversity, often showing statistics of female hires as proof of success. Yet, academic life remains overwhelmingly a man's world and the presence of women, specifically those with children, in the ranks of tenured faculty has not increased in a generation. This anthology explores the continued inequality of the sexes in higher education and suggests changes that could make universities more family-friendly workplaces. Candid, provocative, and sometimes with a wry sense of humor, the essays speak to and offer support for any woman attempting to combine work and family. Elrena Evans received her MFA in creative writing from The Pennsylvania State University. Her work appears in such journals as Literary Mama, Brain, Child, Hip Mama, and the anthology Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers. Caroline Grant is an editor and columnist for Literary Mama. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley.

Miriam Peskowitz offers a dramatic revision to our understanding of early rabbinic Judaism. Using a wide range of sources - archaeology, legal texts, grave goods, technology, art, and writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin - she challenges traditional assumptions regarding Judaism's historical development. Following the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple by Roman armies in 70 C.E., new incarnations of Judaism emerged. Of these, rabbinic Judaism was the most successful, becoming the classical form of the religion. Through ancient stories involving Jewish spinners and weavers, Peskowitz re-examines this critical moment in Jewish history and presents a feminist interpretation in which gender takes center stage. She shows how notions of female and male were developed by the rabbis of Roman Palestine and why the distinctions were so important in the formation of their religious and legal tradition. Rabbinic attention to women, men, sexuality, and gender took place within the 'ordinary tedium of everyday life, in acts that were both familiar and mundane'. While spinners and weavers performed what seemed like ordinary tasks, their craft was in fact symbolic of larger gender and sexual issues, which Peskowitz deftly explicates. Her study of ancient spinning and her abundant source material will set new standards in the fields of gender studies, Jewish studies, and cultural studies.