Welfare Brat

Mary Childers's intimate and frank memoir tells the story of growing up in a family in which five out of seven children dropped out of high school and four different fathers dropped out of sight. With this lyrical and often humorous examination of how she became the first person in her family to attend college, Childers illuminates the causes of welfare dependence, generational poverty, and submission to a popular culture that values sexuality more than self-esteem and self-sufficiency.

A woman who grew up in the blighted Bronx during the 1960s offers an intimate, candid memoir of poverty, abuse, and the welfare system, describing a world of urban decay, rampant crime, race riots, white flight, alcohol and drugs, and her own difficult struggle to achieve self-sufficiency. 30,000 first printing.

Star Parker tells the inspirational story of how she turned her life around from a world of drugs, crime, and welfare to success as an entrepreneur, founder of the Coalition on Urban Affairs, and spokesperson for African-American conservatives. Reprint.

In this compulsively readable social history, political scientist Stephen Pimpare vividly describes poverty from the perspective of poor and welfare-reliant Americans from the big city to the rural countryside. He focuses on how the poor have created community, secured shelter, and found food and illuminates their battles for dignity and respect. Through prodigious archival research and lucid analysis, Pimpare details the ways in which charity and aid for the poor have been inseparable, more often than not, from the scorn and disapproval of those who would help them. In the rich and often surprising historical testimonies he has collected from the poor in America, Pimpare overturns any simple conclusions about how the poor see themselves or what it feels like to be poor—and he shows clearly that the poor are all too often aware that charity comes with a price. It is that price that Pimpare eloquently questions in this book, reminding us through powerful anecdotes, some heart-wrenching and some surprisingly humorous, that poverty is not simply a moral failure.

The most important collection of essays on American Women's History This collection incorporates the most influential and groundbreaking scholarship in the area of American women's history, featuring twenty-three original essays on critical themes and topics. It assesses the past thirty years of scholarship, capturing the ways that women's historians confront issues of race, class, gender, and sexuality. This second edition updates essays related to Indigenous women, slavery, the American Revolution, Civil War, the West, activism, labor, popular culture, civil rights, and feminism. It also includes a discussion of laws, capitalism, gender identity and transgender experience, welfare, reproductive politics, oral history, as well as an exploration of the perspectives of free Blacks and migrants and refugees. Spanning from the 15th through the 21st centuries, chapters show how historians of women, gender, and sexuality have challenged established chronologies and advanced new understandings of America's political, economic, intellectual and social history. This edition also features a new essay on the history of women's suffrage to coincide with the 100th anniversary of passage of the 19th Amendment, as well as a new article that carries issues of women, gender and sexuality into the 21st century. Includes twenty-three original essays by leading scholars in American women's, gender and sexuality history Highlights the most recent scholarship on the key debates and future directions of this popular and contemporary field Substantially updates the first edition with new authors and topics that represent the expanding fields of women, gender, and sexuality Engages issues of race, ethnicity, region, and class as they shape and are shaped by women's and gender history Covers the breadth of American Women's history, including Native women, colonial law and religion, slavery and freedom, women's activism, work and welfare, culture and capitalism, the state, feminism, digital and oral history, and more A Companion to American Women's History, Second Edition is an ideal book for advanced undergraduates and graduate students studying American/U.S. women's history, history of gender and sexuality, and African American women's history. It will also appeal to scholars of these areas at all levels, as well as public historians working in museums, archives, and historic sites.

Author John Sullivan describes himself as an underachiever, much more driven by the fear of failure than the urge to succeed. Growing up in Greenport, New York, there were neither great expectations nor dire predictions as to how he would turn out. But many have been pleasantly surprised at his success; none more so than Sullivan himself. In Raised by a Village, he offers both a thank you and tribute to the people of Greenport who helped him survive a challenging childhood and attain a degree of success Sullivan never dreamed possible as a child. This memoir describes a host of challenges including a lack of financial resources, a paucity of nutritious food, substandard housing, poor hygiene, insufficient medical/dental care, and negligent, but very loving, parental care. Raised by a Village presents an up-close and personal picture of who Sullivan was and how he became the man he is today, showing he was not only was raised by a village but raised well.

Behind each policy debate over welfare reform, AIDS funding, and hate crime laws are the people struggling with poverty, illness, and discrimination. While the experts cite statistics and employ rhetoric about drug abuse, crime, and child abuse, individuals confront the horrors of addiction and the trauma of victimization. Book jacket.

Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors--some eminent, some less well known--who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and determination to find opportunity where little appeared to exist. All of these perspectives are explored within the larger context of economic insecurity--a needed perspective in this time of growing inequality. These memoirists grew up in families that led "hardscrabble" lives in which struggle and strenuous effort were the norm. Their stories offer insight on the realities of class in America, as well as inspiration and hope.