Preview of Death in a Tenured Position Summary:

Death in a Tenured Position is the first of the Amanda Cross mysteries to confront directly the issue of feminism.

The central plot involves the hiring of a woman to fill a tenured position in the otherwise all-male tenure ranks of the Harvard English department. When an anonymous donor gives Harvard a million dollars to endow a chair for a woman, Janet Mandelbaum, a scholar specializing in the seventeenth-century, is hired to fill the position and is found dead in the men's room of the department during her first year. Kate Fansler's investigation eventually proves that the death is a suicide precipitated in part by Janet's disappointment at not being taken seriously as an intellectual, but instead assumed to stand for the woman's position — a sort of token. A subsidiary plot concerns a community of radical feminists in Cambridge, two of whom become...