“The Secret of the Faculty Wife” at Contingent

Contingent is an online history magazine. It explains: “Our writers are adjuncts, museum workers, independent scholars—all people who work outside the tenure-track professoriate.” Learn more here.

Recently the Contingent editors commissioned a series of articles about the intersection between history and mystery stories. The article launching that “History & Mystery” series today is “The Secret of the Faculty Wife,” my look at Lillian McCue, who in her early forties created a career as mystery author Lillian de la Torre.

I wrote about De la Torre’s whodunnit stories about Dr. Samuel Johnson earlier this fall. This short article looks at the situation from another angle: the choices of a faculty wife, restricted by sexism and the employment policies of the Depression from fulfilling her own intellectual potential.

That situation has been in my head more since finding an essay my mother wrote around 1970 when she was in a similar situation. Her graduate studies in English literature had stalled out as she had two children, now my brother and I were going off to school, and it wasn’t clear what she should do with her time. As it turned out, Mom earned a doctorate in chemistry and later a nursing license, becoming college faculty in both fields. She finished her work life as a piano technician and knitting consultant.

That’s not the same plight as contingent faculty members, who have too much teaching to do for too little pay and not much hope of advancing up the professorial ladder. But it’s close enough that I thought the story of Lillian McCue’s career would speak to this audience.

I’m looking forward to seeing how other writers approached the “History & Mystery” theme.