Publisher's Synopsis
"My mother still wants me to get a 'real' job. My father, who is retired after 44 years in the merchant marine, has never read my work. When I visited recently, the only book in his house was the telephone book".;"I do not know that my mother's mother ever acknowledged my college education except to ask me once, 'How can you live so far away from your people?'";Thus write two of the 20 women from working-class backgrounds whose voices are heard in this collection of essays. Each of the women has lived through the process of academic socialisation - as both student and teacher - and each has thought long and deeply about her experiences from an explicitly feminist perspective.;The editors ask: what are the issues - pedagogical, theoretical and personal - that affect the professional and private lives of these women; how do they resolve tensions between their roles as middle-class professionals and their roots in working-class families; how do class and gender intersect in the academy?;The volume begins with a dialogue on class between Kate Ellis and Lillian S. Robinson. The next four sections contain essays on belonging by Saundra Gardner, Donna Langston, Valerie Miner and Joanna Kadi; on individual experiences by Bell Hooks, Laura H. Weaver, Patricia Clark Smith, Jacqueline Burnside and Suzanne Sowinska; on teaching by Pam Annas, Cheryl Fish, Elisabeth J. Johnson and Rose Zimbardo; and on language and cultural politics by Pamela A. Fox, Sharon O'Dair, Pat Belanoff, Elizabeth A. Fay and Hephzibah Roskelly. The book concludes with an epilogue by Michelle M. Tokarczyk.
