These Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents (review)

I am an academic with a working-class background; my legacy in the small Alabama town in which I was born was a shift at the local cotton mill. I escaped this fate but not without the survivor guilt explored by the authors in Kathleen A. Welsch's anthology Those Winter Sundays: Female Academics and Their Working-Class Parents. The contributors to These Winter Sundays were all born into circumstances similar to my own; as adults we also share the complicated relationship with our parents. Their struggle is one of leaving behind, yet somehow remaining attached to, a past they seek to escape. Janet Zandy notes in the forward that for these women, as is true for all of us with working-class families, "it is rather a zigzag class journey made possible largely through education, grit and luck, but not without sorrow and loss" (viii). These sixteen women write poignantly of their attempt to stay connected to their parents even though the script of class mobility dictates leaving behind their working-class past. Lori Amy writes that those of us from working class backgrounds "inherit the ghosts of a history that is paradoxically unnamed but palpably present" (134).

These memoirs are powerful stories that are well told. All the contributors were educated in English departments and all but one now teach English and Composition. Each woman was taught that to enter the middle-class one must master standard English. My own sixth grade teacher, Miss Jiles, taught us that "people who want to improve themselves must learn to speak properly." Class mobility requires becoming bilingual.

These narratives warn against romanticizing poverty. Crystal Brothe explains in her essay titled "You Ain't Never Gonna Be Better Than Me" that she longed to invite kids over to a nice three-bedroom home "that didn't exist" (13). She writes, "So I was poor, yes, but there was no joy in staring down a dark hall at my mother's face as she told the landlord she didn't have the rent money" (13). This thread connects all these stories—the idea that poverty makes one different, deficient and that poverty is not anything to be proud of. Indeed, poverty brings enormous shame for these women. Poverty meant that one was perceived as flawed. Patti Swartz observes, "If we were poor, there must be something wrong with us" (73). Often contributors speak of the power of imagination to escape the trap of not having enough of everything material. Swartz says simply, "I tried to pretend I was someone I wasn't" (69).

Editor Kathleen A. Welsch observed that in writing the memoirs, each of the authors engaged in archeological work sifting "through layers of experience to find what has long been buried" (xviii). In arranging the essays she selected Diane Kending's to begin the anthology because of its engagement with Robert Hayden's poem "These Winter Sundays" in which he discusses his relationship to his father. Kendings weaves a narrative that tells of her own relationship with her father and compares it with the father of Hayden's poem.

In writing these memoirs, the contributors have confronted head-on their relationship with the pain of poverty. These women write of the power of telling their students of their own working-class roots; many teach in institutions whose students come from backgrounds similar to their own. Students tend to believe that professors were born into the middle-class. Sharing one's own struggles with classism helps students fell less isolated in institutions of higher learning. Lori Amy observes wisely that, "Education is a matter of human relations. The quality of an education hinges upon the quality of relations students can forge with their teachers and with each other" (142).

These memoirs are all refreshingly readable in accessible language so that they may be shared with students at all levels, from freshmen to graduate students. These Winter...