School-smart and Mother-wise: Working-Class Women's Identity and Schooling

School-smart and Mother-wise illustrates how and why American education disadvantages working-class women when they are children and adults. In it we hear working-class women--black and white, rural and urban, southern and northern--recount their childhood experiences, describing the circumstances that led them to drop out of school. Now enrolled in adult education programs, they seek more than a diploma: respect, recognition, and a public identity. Drawing upon the life stories of these wo...