Reclaiming Class: Women, Poverty, and the Promise

"The authors offer a solid and updated policy analysis, identifying reforms that support poor and working-class women and uncovering the policies that drive them away from the academy." Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work "Reclaiming Class is an important book that will inform readers about the short and long term effects of welfare reform on the capacity of women to use higher education as a means of social advancement. Offering a rare and accessible discussion of both welfare policy and welfare stigma and their impact upon people's capacity to learn within American institutions of higher education, it brings much of the current literature on welfare and welfare stereotypes into a concrete realm that students will understand in connection with their own lives. For that reason especially, it is a very valuable book." Radical Teacher Review "This book is uniformly well written and conceived, with a coherency that is difficult to achieve in edited volumes...Reclaiming Class adds substantially to literature on the classed and gendered experiences of poverty class women in higher education. Hopefully, it will also inform policymakers at all levels who have the ability to clear the path to higher education for this group of people." NWSA Journal "Reclaiming Class is truly first-rate. An extremely thoughtful, illuminating analysis of the role class plays in American society, particularly the perception of poverty, the stigma of poverty on those who are or who have ever been poor and the role of higher education in the survival of poor women. What is perhaps most valuable about the book is the combination of the personal with the theoretical and the analytic. The writing is vivid, immediate and compelling; the volume has an intensity that I believe will capture readers' attention and involve them in the debates and dilemmas poor women face." --Ruth Sidel, PhD, Professor of Sociology, Hunter College and author of Keeping Women and Children Last "Adair and Dahlberg have compiled a daring collection that challenges both the core values of punitive welfare reform policies and the myth of meritocracy in American higher education. It is a moving demonstration of the best kind of social justice scholarship." --Carolyn Law, Dissertation Adviser in the Graduate School at Northern Illinois University and co-editor of This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class and Out in the South (both Temple) "Every college professor no matter what discipline should read this gripping and compelling collection of narratives and analysis about poor women and higher education. This sometimes brilliant book deconstructs and subverts the conventional wisdom about poor women and women on welfare offering instead a sociological imagining of their lives that sloughs off stereotypes to open up voices within. It portrays higher education as both problematic and opportunity, and offers compelling policy analysis." --Sari Knopp Biklen, Cultural Foundations of Education, Syracuse University "This book seems likely to be very useful in a number of educational settings, inside and outside the academy, because of its diverse approaches to the issues. Further, nearly all the professional educators and policy analysts have had firsthand acquaintance with poverty and/or welfare, and this enriches their narratives and their analyses both. One can scarcely read this text without affirming and reiterating the final words of Vivyan Adair: 'We stand at a critical juncture.' Feminist Collections: A Quarterly of Women's Studies Resources