Nostalgia for the Belief in a Female-Friendly Academic World to Come

Abstract

Abstract In the academic novel of the 1980s, which Elaine Showalter dubs the feminist towers, women characters are not limited to beautiful and seductive students or faculty wives, whose husbands’ academic career appears to be also their own goal. Although the very presence of women in academia is often interpreted as a threat to the male reign over the ‘small world,’ female scholars are determined to expose and fight against gender inequity and inequality in order to be perceived and valued as fully-fledged scholars. Paradoxically, even if women are considered serious candidates for different university positions, they cannot indulge in the same intense pleasures of academic life as their male counterparts due to the overpowering feeling of being the other. An analysis of female scholar characters and their diverse attitudes towards feminism is based on two academic mystery novels written in the 1980s, Death in a Tenured Position by Amanda Cross and Graves in Academe by Susan Kenney. It is followed by an investigation of the reasons making academics feel nostalgia for the university of the 1980’s, i.e. the milieu before the emergence of the protective power of the Me Too movement and reports on sexual harassment of women in academia published by the NASEM.