Navigating Retirement From Academia: Women, Invisibility, and the Unexamined Transition in Higher Music Education

Abstract

In this study, we explore how women in higher music education, both retired and approaching retirement, negotiate questions of identity, legacy, and purpose within the gendered structures of academic life. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 13 women in music teacher preparation programs, we examine how participants articulate their transitions out of institutional roles while navigating the emotional, intellectual, and relational dimensions of retirement. Our analysis identifies recurring themes of institutional betrayal, the invisibility of women's labor, the reimagining of professional identity, and the creation of new pathways for engagement. Care, mentorship, and community-building continue to shape these women's sense of contribution beyond the institution. Across these narratives, legacy emerges not as an endpoint but as a living process, an ongoing negotiation between past commitments and future possibilities. There remains, however, the haunting realization of being made invisible, of slipping away from a field into which these women poured much, held alongside the understanding that whatever acknowledgment comes may never fully hold the depth of their contributions or the complexity of their absence. Yet within this wounding paradox of disappearance and endurance lies another truth, one revealed in the lives of these women themselves. Finally and always, these women reveal that a life in music education was never just about music or teaching but about meaning-making in all its fragile, human forms, an enduring presence that resists final disappearance.