Susan Gubar reflects on her career as a woman scholar and queries in what ways women’s roles in English departments, and in academia, have evolved over the last few decades.

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Examines the dilemmas of mid-career feminist professors, including: escalating demands on their time; pressures of work and family; high casualty rates among women hired; friction between generations and among feminists; and doubts about what professionalism means to the collective participants in the feminist venture. Discusses strains of this paradoxical combination of privilege and powerlessness for senior women within male-dominated institutions.

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IT HAD BEEN A TYPICAL FEMINIST CONFERENCE in early March 1979, in Buffalo, New York, a kind of high-voltage pressurized capsule in which we enacted what we wrote about and discussed what we enacted. Only in this safe place, on this common ground, could we feel free enough to dramatize disputes that would, in turn, energize further insights: unfortunately, nationally visible star, in this case Dorothy Dinnerstein, was effectively silenced by her so-called commentator; three forty-minute papers were given in a session scheduled to last an hour; third-world women, now termed of color, were ostentatiously absent, to guilty dismay of organizers; a female psychoanalyst announced to an astonished audience that clitoris, which she called the woodchip, produced an insufficient orgasm until it set fire to real explosion or big bang in vagina; first of two male speakers strutted his stuff in a combative performance in which he chastised women scholars for hiding behind skirts of sisterhood in an effort to evade genuine intellectual competition; at a Last Supper that night, over spicy fried chicken wings, a specialty in Buffalo, one of only two extant American feminist Lacanians-understandably exasperated with all these difficulties-reacted by hitting other one with a crumpled cigarette package and calling her a bitch. Set heat of this hectic activity against polar expiation of Buffalo in winter. We were all desperately afraid, or so we repeatedly exclaimed to each other, of being stranded in Buffalo. It was during a hot ride in an overcrowded car, through freezing night rains, that feminist critic Annette Kolodny asked about our teaching in Indiana Women's Prison: she was especially curious about inmates' attitude toward feminism. As we recalled atmosphere of prison nights and realized their similarity to dramatic enactments at conference, we knew that she had articulated crucial question we had faced when we team-taught in prison two years earlier. For prison (no less than conference) had been a

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