Full Description
Reclaiming Class offers essays written by women who changed their lives through the pathway of higher education. Collected, they offer a powerful testimony of the importance of higher learning, as well as a critique of the programs designed to alleviate poverty and educational disparity. The contributors explore the ideologies of welfare and American meritocracy that promise hope and autonomy on the one hand, while also perpetuating economic obstacles and indebtedness on the other. Divided into the three sections, Reclaiming Class assesses the psychological, familial, and economic intersections of poverty and the educational process. In the first section, women who left poverty through higher education recall their negotiating the paths of college life to show how their experiences reveal the hidden paradoxes of education. Section two presents first person narratives of students whose lives are shaped by their roles as poor mothers, guardian siblings, and daughters, as well as the ways that race interacts with their poverty. Chapters exploring financial aid and welfare policy, battery and abuse, and the social constructions of the poor woman finish the book.
Offering a comprehensive picture of how poor women access all levels of private and public institutions to achieve against great odds, Reclaiming Class shows the workings of higher learning from the vantage point of those most subject to the vicissitudes of policy and reform agendas.
Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise of Higher Education in America - Vivyan C. Adair and Sandra L. DahlbergSpeech Pathology: The Deflowering of an Accent - Laura Sullivan-HackleyPart I: Educators Remember1. Disciplined and Punished Poor Women, Bodily Inscription, and Resistance through Education - Vivyan C. Adair2. Academic Constructions of "White Trash," or How to Insult Poor People without Really Trying - Nell Sullivan3. Survival in a Not So Brave New World - Sandra L. Dahlberg4. To Be Young, Pregnant, and Black: My Life as a Welfare Coed - Joycelyn K. Moody5. If You Want Me to Pull Myself Up, Give Me Bootstraps - Lisa K. WaldnerPart II: On The Front Lines6. If I Survive, It Will Be Despite Welfare Reform: Reflections of a Former Welfare Student - Tonya Mitchell7. Not By Myself Alone: Upward Bound with Family and Friends - Deborah Megivern8. Choosing the Lesser Evil: The Violence of the Welfare Stereotype - Andrea S. Harris9. From Welfare to Academe: Welfare Reform as College-Educated Welfare Mothers Know It - Sandy Smith Madsen10. Seven Years in Exile - Leticia AlmanzaPart III: Policy, Research, And Poor Women11. Families First-but Not in Higher Education: Poor, Independent Students and the Impact of Financial Aid - Sandra L. Dahlberg12. The Leper Keepers: Front-Line Workers and the Key to Education for Poor Women - Judith Owens-Manley13. "That's Why I'm on Prozac": Battered Women, Traumatic Stress, and Education in the Context of Welfare Reform - Lisa D. Brush14. Fulfilling the Promise of Higher Education - Vivyan C. AdairAbout the Contributors
