Academic Women

Library Journal

Although both books conclude that the progress of college educated women in the professions and within academe has been marginal and largely cosmetic in recent decades, their approaches to such a dismal finding are different. Using mini-biographies of nine remarkable women, such as Florence Sabin, Dorothy Reed Mendenall, and Mary Jarrett, pioneers in the professions of medicine, scientific research, and psychiatric social work, Glazer and Slater discuss the discrimination encountered by early women professionals and analyze the differing patterns of women's responses. They conclude with a look at the status of professional women today. Simeone's work updates Jessie Bernard's landmark study, Academic Women (1964). She surveys the institutional and individual discrimination faced by women faculty and administrators in higher education over the last 20 years. The book is filled with statistics and research studies, intermingled with candid interviews with 20 female faculty members at a prominent research university. Glazer and Slater's work is the more readable of the two titles; Simeone's charts and references will be invaluable to anyone doing further research in the area of academic women, but it is heavy reading. Both books belong in women's studies and/or higher education collections. Patricia Smith Butcher, Trenton State College Library, N.J.