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Feminizing the university: the mobilities, careers, and contributions of early female academics in the University of Cambridge, 1926-1955

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posted on 2017-01-05, 11:16 authored by Heike JonsHeike Jons
This article examines the role of early female academics at the University of Cambridge in the production and dissemination of knowledge between 1926 and 1955. A statistical comparison of women’s use of academic leave of absence with that of their male colleagues reveals that, across disciplines, women were less integrated into (inter)national knowledge networks and thus less visible in their epistemic communities than men because women focused their academic leaves more on research, rarely attended conferences, travelled overseas less often than men, and went more frequently to destinations within Europe than the United States as the new economic hegemon. Biographical case studies of these early female academics demonstrate the importance, variously, of their upper middle class background, academic excellence, and familial and non-familial patronage in developing their careers, overcoming multiple hurdles, and producing intellectual contributions of equal quality to that of their male peers. Conceptually, this article calls for the inclusion of academic travelers from other disciplines than geography into feminist histories of geographical knowledge and argues that rather than stereotyping gender differences, greater comparative research on the experiences of female and male academics is needed in order to understand the mechanisms of gender inequality within the university.

History

Department

  • Geography and Environment

Published in

The Professional Geographer

Volume

69

Issue

4

Pages

670 - 682

Citation

JONS, H., 2017. Feminizing the university: the mobilities, careers, and contributions of early female academics in the University of Cambridge, 1926-1955. The Professional Geographer, 69 (4), pp. 670-682.

Publisher

© Taylor & Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Acceptance date

2016-11-02

Publication date

2017-03-17

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Professional Geographer on 17 March 2017, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/00330124.2017.1289778.

ISSN

0033-0124

eISSN

1467-9272

Language

  • en

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