W Stands for Women against Women

If you would understand why women so often play important roles in firing women, cherchez les hommes.


When first I began to fathom promotion and tenure at Puget Clowns, I was sur­prised by the role of women in the firing of other women. In 1992 I observed that male sexists had difficulty attacking women because faculty females shredded women before the old boys could lumber over to the corpses. Were lionesses reducing pigs to scavenging through carrion? My seniors patiently explained how ingeniously the old boys had ar­ranged sanc­tions – negative as well as positive sanctions – to promote the appearance and the reality that women devoured women and that men merely came upon the carnage. The obvious killers, the “Women Against Women” [WAW], had adapted to the oldest old-boy imperative: a candidate for advancement must be “one of us.” Those who had pros­pered by making themselves unobjectionable to the men who then controlled the uni­ver­sity perpetuated the importance of such “personal and professional characteristics” as promised to stifle dissent and insure continuation of myths and rituals that routinized and legitimized control of the university. This control remained largely in the hands of the old boys.

My subsequent studies of WAW have confirmed the wisdom of the old hands who set me straight. A grown woman savaged sisters for the approval of an old boy to whom she had some twisted relationship resembling a school-girl crush. As females in his department tore apart evaluees centerstage, this old boy and his pals “reluctantly” put junior faculty females out of their [and his] misery behind the scenery. Another member of WAW seemed quite responsive to the will of males until females gained positions of power, at which time she was as ob­se­quious to fe­males as she had been to males. In instances of this second sort, at­trac­tion mattered less than self-advancement, although being flattered by old boys made the compliant fe­male feel more like lamb than the mutton she each day resembled more. A third but related class of women ravaging other women led in the 1990s to the “Crone Hypothesis,” whereby attractive females, especially blondes, were trashed in their depart­ments by sisters who had not attracted admiration from one or another sex for some time, if ever. Of course, Puget Clowns hosted a number of women who cherished their exclu­sive status enough to preserve it by leaving junior females to old boys who whispered what Justice McReynolds stated when he heard that a second Jew had been appointed to the Supreme Court: “Not another one.”

When the ravaged females escaped their departments, first-generation females [pro­fessors who had few or no female mentors or models when they were under 30] ap­pointed to the Faculty Advancement Committee [FAC] were often more old-boyish than the old boys on the FAC, and thus camouflaged secondary victimization of self-admitted females. Once the university recruited and retained females who had had female models or mentors, self-described feminists assailed junior faculty women who were actual feminists. These second-generation females, too, legitimized the demise of women in the eyes of the credulous or the masculine or both. In my 22 years at Puget Clowns, pretenders to femininity and to feminism alike have masked sexism individual as well as institutional.

That first- or second-generation females trash their sisters was to be expected from the enduring misogyny of the institution and dependency of females on old boys for pa­tronage and permanence. Female instructors serving under a traditional chair often be­haved as “at will” employees or found themselves unemployed. Females who depended on potentates less for their jobs than for cherished classes, monetary advances, or collegial respect likewise tended to conform to the views of their betters, especially if those betters so lacked chivalry that they threatened overtly those whom they could not cow covertly.

Even women who were safely tenured or promoted to full professor behaved as if they were under some man’s gun. To be sure, some such cravenness followed from a decade or more of socialization at Puget Clowns. What once was calculation after a dozen years became rote, especially as security made it ever more imperative to deny how tenure had been achieved. Who once craved tenure and promotion came to crave respect, luxurious schedules, and time off. What once was done out of friendship or attraction or desire to hold onto one’s job soon enough became dirty deeds to ensure esteem from the FAC or the Professional Standards Cult [PSC] or some other source of sway. Indeed, to attain tenure and fullness, senior females sacrificed the moral to the mercenary so long ago that many could not re­call when they sold out. Soon enough, they no longer distinguished sell-outs from ship-outs lest they raise questions about how they themselves had managed to survive and to prosper. “Which trustee was your patron?”

Females who earned respect and spoils under the elder regime had to show that they could play like the boys, but they became more useful to the old boys than boys were because they were presumptively free from sexism. That meant that a woman had to be cruder and more thuggish than a man even to be suspected of being a self-loathing woman. If a colleague advanced herself by reminding concerned students and faculty that collegiate females could prey upon innocent male faculty, woe betide the colleague who observed that one might as well fixate on the perils that stam­peding lambs might trample sleeping lions. If a member of a power committee never managed to disagree with the dean, she nonetheless could coo agreeably when the special rigors of being a female in academia were inventoried because such lists made her survi­val all the more Homeric. It would have been uncivil or defamatory, of course, to ob­serve that some starlets and harlots resisted much more powerful men for far longer. Male fellows well met instead made a show of taking advancement of females for evi­dence of special merit, which amounted to a tacit admission of discrimination lost on most colleagues.

None of the above denies such usual dynamics as “the Queen Bee” who despises [female] rivals or jealousy over other attention to other women or “pulling up the ladder” after the first female clambers aboard the yacht. Indeed, the modal manner of success for females is the mode for males as well: lie low and do not be associated with losers. Nothing above lets women off the hook by attributing sole or overwhelming agency to men. Women who assail women are responsible for their Msdeeds whether they do so out of their own insecurity or from job insecurity wielded by men.

Still, promotion and tenure are to a large degree matters of whether an evaluee is “one of us,” and males continue to control the definition of “us.” As women assume more of the high offices on campus, the definition of “us” may benefit from women’s touches. It is more likely, however, that women at Puget Clowns will resemble Orwell’s pigs at the end of Animal Farm: would-be revolutionaries not easily distinguished except rhetorically from those against whom they revolted.