Reflections on the No-Uterus Rule: Pregnancy, Academia, and Feminist Pedagogy

by Janet Ihnson Shope

As a graduate student I remember reading an article in a seminar on women and work that described the informal rules governing women's behavior in the workplace: women were accepted in the increasing "diverse" workplace as long as they behaved as men, as long as they abided by the no-uterus rule. Institutions benefited from their so-called diversity without the "mess and disruptions of women's issues" (Wolf 22) or for that matter women's bodies. As more women enter the ranks of academia—in 2000–01 women comprised 36 percent of the faculty—one wonders where women in academia fit into the binary between the embodied and the disembodied? How does one make space for an expanding uterus within the walls of an ivory tower that has historically privileged the "life of the mind"? Alicia Ostriker points out the double bind for mothers in academia: "For the maternal is what the life of the mind exists to escape—to ignore, most of the time, and the rest of the time to sentimentalize or demonize" (5). My own experience suggests the subtle and not so subtle messages women receive when they explicitly violate the no-uterus rule.