Mrs. Sims was my grandmother

20 March 2022

Since today is the last day of Spring Break, I took a peak at my work email inbox to see what tasks await me Monday morning. The text preview of one new message begins with “Dear Mrs. Sims.” As a born and raised US Southerner teaching at a university in the US South, I recognize that Yes Sir, No Ma’am, Dear Mrs., and Please Mr. are part of my region’s cultural language norms, indeed our moral values. However, as many women professors will attest, while students’ attempt at being respectful is appreciated, being called Mrs. is frustrating when you have spent the time, energy, blood, sweat, tears, and debt to complete your doctorate.

The “Dear Mrs. Sims” email is from a student with whom I have previously corresponded. I signed my previous reply to them "Best, Dr. Sims (Mrs. Sims was my grandmother)." A graduate school colleague of mine had shared that referencing her grandmother was her go-to reply once when the issue was being debated on AcademicTwitter. As I reflected on this, thoughts wandering back to my own family, it hit me that another reason I dislike being called “Mrs. Sims” is actually because my grandmother was Mrs. Sims. She should have been Dr. Sims, too.

I recently finished reading Kerry Crawford and Leah Windsor’s book The PhD Parenthood Trap: Caught between Work and Family in Academia (Georgetown University Press, 2021). Drawing on original survey data, personal experience, and interspersed with vignettes from parent-scholars spanning all stages of an academic career, the book documents, analyzes, and offers concrete correctives to the cultural and structural academic status quo that jeopardize the careers of parents, in particular mothers. Early and often in the book, they acknowledge that their work has a measure of survivorship bias since the present arrangements result in a "leaky pipeline" that costs academia many talented scholars.

My paternal grandmother was one such scholar. Born in the 1920s in Mississippi, she met my grandfather in college in Tennessee, married, and had two kids. While not dropping the ball on her expected role as a 1950s wife and mother, she also attended graduate school part-time and completed her Masters and Educational Specialist degrees in the 1960s. During her career, she held positions like Director of a special education center and achieved “firsts” like being one of the first Black teachers to integrate the faculty at White schools during desegregation.

While not discounting hers or any career in K-12 education, I cannot help but wonder what the scholarship and practice of education may have gained if women like Mrs. Sims would have had the support needed to continue on to an EdD or PhD. Patricia Hill Collins observed that Black women’s position in a White patriarchal society affords us a unique, critical lens with which to observe and analyze social phenomenon and produce knowledge. What knowledge of race, education, and institutionalized schooling under Jim Crow and during the Civil Rights Era might Mrs. Sims have been able to disseminate had academia not been structured to present nearly insurmountable barriers for mothers and minorities?

As vignettes from senior and retired academics in The PhD Parenthood Trap remind us, academia has improved in this regard over the past few decades; and despite still being far from equitable, that improvement facilitated my mother's and my academic careers. My grandmother lived to see her daughter-in-law graduate with a PhD and become Dr. Sims, however she died as I was somewhere over the Atlantic flying home from collecting my dissertation data.

I know there are those who consider my and others’ preference to be called Dr. an “obsession” and/or “elitist.” Were I insisting that my 3^rd grader’s friends or the take-out cashiers at restaurants all call me Dr. Sims then I would agree. But specifically within academia, it is because of the tenacity and dedication to equal education of women like Mrs. Sims that I am, and thus should be called, Dr. Sims.