Overview

Mentorship continues to loom large in stories about women's work and personal lives— sometimes for the better, but often for the worse. If mentors can nurture and support, they can also bitterly disappoint, reproducing the hardships they once suffered and reinforcing the same old hierarchies and inequities. The stories gathered in Feminists Reclaim Mentorship challenge our fundamental assumptions about mentorship, illuminating the obstacles that make it difficult to connect meaningfully and ethically while reimagining the possibilities for reciprocity. Does mentorship require sameness? Might we find more inventive, collaborative ways to bond than the traditional top-down model of mentoring? Drawing on their experiences in academia, creative writing, publishing, and journalism, the volume's editors, Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman, and their twenty-six contributors collectively strive for relationships that acknowledge differences alongside the importance of common bonds. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship will resonate across workspaces and arrives at a moment when the need to form feminist connections within and between generations couldn't feel more urgent.

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9781438491844

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The editors of Reclaiming Feminist Mentorship span a remarkable reach, crossing, intermixing-intergenerational, interracial, interdisciplinary, LGBTQ, inter-media-platform. Towering above this expanse of views, voices, positions, sweet and bitter sentiments, light and darkling, are the individual stories, like Scheherazade's, irresistible, each a teaching moment, their collective brilliance resetting for the twenty-first century the classic male hierarchy of binary patronage. You turn the pages, mesmerized by insights, gripes, confessions, undercover tales, the entirety composed by the marvelous writers who have trodden their own version of the mentoring cycle. - Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among the White Moon Faces We need pioneers. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship is a revelatory, pioneering text. A rich diversity of voices tells us how women with power and authority can support other women in the future. These voices also warn us about the failures to have done so. Their essays are angry, sorrowful, poignant, loving, and hopeful. In a cruel, callous, and predatory world, women-and men-need to help each other out with common sense, care for our differences, imagination, and grace. I am grateful to Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman for being our mentors in marking out paths toward a better future. - Catharine R. Stimpson, Professor and Dean Emerita, New York University An excellent collection-diverse in style, voice, perspective, and context. While many contributors come from academia and the literary world, their writing touches on a range of experiences (mothering, therapy, military service) and fields (disability studies, Aboriginal studies) and are full of evocative formulations (horizontal mentorship, collaborative mentorship) that will resonate more broadly. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship makes clear both the persistence of old professional hierarchies and the potential for new, more equitable relationships across generations. - Nan Bauer-Maglin, coeditor of Staging Women's Lives in Academia: Gendered Life Stages in Language and Literature Workplaces

The editors of Reclaiming Feminist Mentorship span a remarkable reach, crossing, intermixing-intergenerational, interracial, interdisciplinary, LGBTQ, inter-media-platform. Towering above this expanse of views, voices, positions, sweet and bitter sentiments, light and darkling, are the individual stories, like Scheherazade's, irresistible, each a teaching moment, their collective brilliance resetting for the twenty-first century the classic male hierarchy of binary patronage. You turn the pages, mesmerized by insights, gripes, confessions, undercover tales, the entirety composed by the marvelous writers who have trodden their own version of the mentoring cycle. - Shirley Geok-lin Lim, author of Among the White Moon Faces We need pioneers. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship is a revelatory, pioneering text. A rich diversity of voices tells us how women with power and authority can support other women in the future. These voices also warn us about the failures to have done so. Their essays are angry, sorrowful, poignant, loving, and hopeful. In a cruel, callous, and predatory world, women-and men-need to help each other out with common sense, care for our differences, imagination, and grace. I am grateful to Nancy K. Miller and Tahneer Oksman for being our mentors in marking out paths toward a better future. - Catharine R. Stimpson, Professor and Dean Emerita, New York University An excellent collection-diverse in style, voice, perspective, and context. While many contributors come from academia and the literary world, their writing touches on a range of experiences (mothering, therapy, military service) and fields (disability studies, Aboriginal studies) and are full of evocative formulations (horizontal mentorship, collaborative mentorship) that will resonate more broadly. Feminists Reclaim Mentorship makes clear both the persistence of old professional hierarchies and the potential for new, more equitable relationships across generations. - Nan Bauer-Maglin, coeditor of Staging Women's Lives in Academia: Gendered Life Stages in Language and Literature Workplaces The generation of feminist scholars who created the field of Women's Studies were marked by the experience of having intellectually come of age 'when men were the only models we had,' as Carolyn Heilbrun put it in her book of that name. Many of these scholars later dedicated themselves to providing feminist mentorship for their own students, creating a mode of apprenticeship that has now served as a thread connecting several generations of women in and beyond the academy. In this richly engaging collection of essays, scholars and writers share their experiences of mentoring and being mentored-intellectually foundational, sometimes fractious, often deeply felt. -Ari M. Brostoff, culture editor at Jewish Currents and author of Missing Time: Essays

Author Information

Nancy K. Miller is Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her many books include My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism; Breathless: An American Girl in Paris; What They Saved: Pieces of a Jewish Past; and But Enough About Me: Why We Read Other People's Lives. Tahneer Oksman is Associate Professor of Academic Writing at Marymount Manhattan College. She is the author of ""How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?"": Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs and coeditor (with Seamus O'Malley) of The Comics of Julie Doucet and Gabrielle Bell: A Place Inside Yourself.

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