No Straight Path

About this book

"This remarkable book presents ten first-person accounts of women's experiences when they chose to enter the professional world as academic historians. The contributors, all successful female historians, came of age after World War II, in an era when it was unusual for women to think of pursuing professional careers in academia, and especially in history. Few of the contributors took a straight path into the profession; most attempted the more conventional pursuits of college, public school teaching, marriage, and motherhood. Given those commonalities, however, their stories are fascinatingly diverse: one rose from poverty in Arkansas to the Rutgers graduate program to the chairmanship of the history department at the University of Memphis; another pursued an archaeology degree, studied social work, and became a college administrator before entering the history graduate program at Tulane and becoming a professor there; another was a lobbyist, went to seminary, taught high school, entered the graduate history program at Indiana, and helped develop two Honors Colleges before becoming a history professor; and yet another grew up in segregated Memphis, taught high school for many years in New Jersey before earning a graduate history degree at the University of Memphis, where she now teaches. The experiences of the other contributors are equally distinctive. For all the essayists, the key words have been persistence and tenacity"--