Ambiguous Empowerment: The Work Narratives of Women School Superintendents / Edition 1

by Susan E. Chase

Overview

Like other women who work in professions dominated by white men, women school superintendents tell stories about rising to influential positions, developing confidence in their authority and ability, yet continuing to confront discriminatory treatment in an occupation structured by gender and racial inequalities.

In this book, Susan E. Chase examines these contradictory experiences of power and subjection, drawing on interviews with professional women of various ethnic and racial backgrounds who head schools in rural, small-town, and urban districts across the United States. Chase focuses on the tension, implicit in the language these women use, between ostensibly gender- and race-neutral discourse about professional work and contentious, gendered, and racialized discourse about inequality. Through close analysis of their stories of success, she shows how these women have developed a range of narrative strategies for articulating and coping with their ambiguous empowerment.

Innovative in conception and interdisciplinary in approach, this study contributes to our understanding of how general social processes--the reproduction of culture, the construction of self-understandings--are embodied in the everyday practice of storytelling. It also invites us to listen in new ways to what professional women have to say about their lives.

University of Massachusetts Press

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870239502
Publisher:	University of Massachusetts Press
Publication date:	04/25/1995
Series:	Women's Studies/Education/Sociology Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.53(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.91(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Susan E. Chase is associate professor of sociology and cofounder of the women's studies program at the University of Tulsa.

University of Massachusetts Press

What People are Saying About This

John P. Hewitt

Many scholars have turned toward the study of discourse and the close analysis of conversational detail, but few have put these methods to such good use in showing how discourse figures in the construction of self and why attention to conversational detail is important in discovering the meanings people attribute to their lives.... I can readily imagine Ambiguous Empowerment becoming a widely-cited 'classic' work in its genre.