While I was growing up, I loved school. I was passionate about a variety of subjects including English, Math, and Science. When I got to BYU I decided to major in the Social Sciences, because I have always been really interested in how people think and why they do the things they do. However, I was really afraid that I would meet someone and God would tell me to get married and drop out of school. This thought broke my heart, and so I kept my head down and into my studies. As a woman, I wasn’t supposed to be actively seeking someone to marry, right? I felt like I wasn’t technically doing anything wrong, but I did have the sense that I was flying under the radar, that I was getting away with something that nobody else was on to. I found a great adviser and got involved in research in his lab. My adviser was amazing. He helped me complete an honors project and helped me pick which schools to apply to. He read through all my application materials and helped me edit them. I applied to Ph.D. programs, but still tried to fit this plan within the expected Mormon narrative. I would think to myself, “If I meet someone then I can drop out of my program. I can leave with just a master’s degree.” Even though I told myself these things, I knew that I was fooling myself. I knew that that is not what I really wanted. Leaving what I was passionate about would break my heart.
I met my husband during my first year of grad school and we got married during my second year. He was also in grad school and we talked about school and career issues while we were dating. He was really supportive of what I wanted to do, but we struggled with the idea of putting our future children in full-time daycare. We weren’t sure how all the pieces would fit together, but there was no question that we would both finish our programs. We thought we would wait to have children after we graduated and found jobs. However, after a failed job search we realized that it might take a while until we were able to get jobs. We both felt inspired to start our family. I was pregnant while I was writing my dissertation, and our son was born a month after I defended.
We both continued to apply for jobs with the idea that we would move wherever the best job was. The plan was that whoever didn’t get a job would stay home with our son for a while and then try to find a job in the same geographical area. It meant a lot to me that in our marriage, my husband’s job didn’t necessarily come first. My husband ended up getting a job offer so I stayed home full-time for a year and then started looking for part-time teaching positions. I was extremely lucky that there were a number of small colleges in the area so I was able to start teaching again. My son was in childcare while I was in class, but I was home with him during most of the day. I was very nervous about putting my son in childcare at first, but we found a great provider and he really seemed to thrive in that environment. I was happy with teaching part-time for a while. However, I really wanted to do research again and to become a tenure-track professor. I kept working on writing and started looking at the universities in the area for a professor with whom I could do research. I emailed a lot of people with no luck for quite some time, but was very lucky to find a professor who was excited about my research ideas and willing to help me write a grant for postdoc funding.
I am unsure of what the future will bring. I really hope that I am able to continue with research and eventually reach my dream of becoming a tenure-track professor. If I could do it all over again, there are definitely things I would do differently. For example, my desire to work has always focused on my passion for what I was doing. I assumed that I would have a spouse that would earn enough money for the family and that I would only work if I wanted to. This has turned out to be the case, but I now see many problems with this approach. It wasn’t until graduate school that I started thinking about my marketability, the availability of jobs in my field, typical pay rates for my chosen profession, etc. I wish I had thought about these things from the beginning of my undergraduate days as all of these factors impact my work and life choices. I also wish that I had explored a wider variety of professions and majors as an undergraduate. I am extremely passionate about what I do, but my career choices are limited based on my chosen field. In school I was good at and passionate about a variety of things including math and the hard sciences. I wish I had looked more seriously into these areas as often they pay better and in some cases require less schooling then the area I chose.
Overall, I wish that I had felt less guilty about the choices that I was making. I now believe that there is nothing wrong with women wanting to work. It doesn’t mean that they are selfish. It doesn’t mean that they don’t care about their families. Being in grad school at the same time as my husband really brought this home to me. What I was doing was just as valuable as what my husband was doing. Our schooling and professions mean just as much to both of us, just as taking care of our son is important to both of us. This continues to be the way we approach things as we look toward the future.
–Submitted by Beatrice
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Thank you for sharing your story, anonymous. The delicate balance between choosing what you want to do and how you do that with children and child care is so difficult. I have similar guilt and it holds me back in many ways.
Thank you for sharing your story, anonymous. The delicate balance between choosing what you want to do and how you do that with children and child care is so difficult. I have similar guilt and it holds me back in many ways.
Love this. Thank you!
Great post, Beatrice. You explain the difficulty of fitting into Church expectations so well. I particularly like this:
As a man, I haven’t felt this, but this is such a good way of putting it that I think it gives me a taste. Flying under the radar–what a great way of putting it. It’s sad that that’s what you had to do to get all the education you wanted. I’m glad you’ve been able to make so many things work out, though! I hope your continued pursuit of a tenure-track position is successful!
Thanks so much for the comments everyone. It would have meant so much to me as an undergrad to hear from LDS professional women about how they approached family/career etc. I hope this series will be one step toward getting women to talk to each other more about these issues.
How different would this story be if you had not married? Would you feel differently about yourself or be percieved differently?
Good questions, Geoff. I don’t think the undergrad stuff would have been different. Obviously I wasn’t married during undergrad, but I still felt a sense of struggle between what I was *supposed* to be doing and what I wanted to do. In my experience, women struggle the mother-career dilemma long before they are married or have children. They think about all kinds of questions such as: Would this career fit with working part-time? What if I did get married in the next year or two, would I drop out of school? Etc. Etc. Sheryl Sandberg suggests that this struggle is what often leads women to lose out on opportunities and promotions long before they are married or have children http://www.ted.com/talks/sheryl_sandberg_why_we_have_too_few_women_leaders.html.
I think the graduate school stuff would have been different to a degree. If you are in graduate school and later get a job as a single woman, some people think that the reason you are not married is because you don’t want to be or because you are too “career-oriented.” So even though it is technically “ok” for you to be career-oriented as a single woman-you can still be perceived as not doing what you are supposed to be doing. So in many ways the social pressures are the same regardless of whether you are married or single. With regards to feeling differently about myself….it is hard to say. For a long time I have wanted to excel in academia, but I have also wanted to be married and have a child. So if I was single, I would be disappointed that I wasn’t married, but I don’t think I would necessarily feel differently about myself and what I was doing in academia.