Women's Untold Stories: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity

Honest, vivid, and diverse, the essays collected inWomen's Untold Storiesreveal women's narratives that have largely gone unheard--stories of women of different ages, races, sexual orientations and ethnicities. These stories are outside the "master narrative", describing experiences that have been suppressed, ignored, or are somehow difficult to tell. The stories reveal race, class and gender pressures with accounts of a Mexican maid's daughter and a tomboy who breaks gender norms as a "butch" straight woman. Experiences of motherhood and family life are covered with stories of home births, women of color's struggles with infertility, and a mother's side of an incest story. Narratives of women in public life are also included: a scientist's unconventional orientation to her work, a sweatshop worker's advocacy within the workplace, and Japanese-American women who were interned during World War II. And rare portrayals of women who demonstrate remarkable political efficacy appear in this book aswell: life-long political activists, a white woman in the civil rights movement, and a Hmong refugee who is a community advocate. Fascinating and often intense, these women's wide- ranging experiences, contextualized by the contributors, help readers to understand the importance of those women's lives that have been left at the margins of history and politics.