Telling Our Lives: Conversations on Solidarity and Difference (Feminist Constructions) - Softcover

The discussion of differences between women: class, race, ethnicity, religion, and sexual orientation, has been posed as a competitive exercise in 'political correctness.' In their dialogical telling of their lives, Frida Furman, Elizabeth Kelly, and Linda Williamson Nelson craft a refreshingly new approach. Instead, their histories meet and mingle as mutual enrichment that is a 'hearing of one another into speech.' -- Rosemary Radford Ruether, Claremont School of Theology These candid, eloquent, engaging, and thoughtful narratives about three different lives interweave with each other to offer multiple portraits of the ways in which socioeconomic class, ethnicity, sexual identity, gender, and family history have shaped the entry of the authors into the spaces of academic life and textured their experiences within it. A must-read for all of us interested in thinking about the forces that shape knowledge production, academic success, and our prospects for genuinely inclusive academic institutions. -- Uma Narayan, Professor of Philosophy, Vassar College

Telling Our Lives explores how three working-class women-from Jewish, African-American, and Irish-American backgrounds-connect across their differences through storytelling and conversation. Three distinct voices intertwine in this book as the authors, now college professors, discuss family legacies of diaspora and dislocation, analyzing how these have shaped their personal and professional lives. Social class, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and spirituality intersect and diverge in these pages, as the authors reflect on how they have been enriched and transformed by the relationships forged in the process of storytelling.