In Her Own Words: The American Dream in the Age of Entitlement

In this dazzling collection, we meet twelve remarkable women -- from Shirley Chisholm, the West Indian-raised girl who became the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Congress, to Janet Frame, the brilliant New Zealand writer who overcame involuntary treatment in a mental institution to write one of the archetypal analyses of the post-colonial experience. We learn how the world of politics and the private self intersect in the four offshoots of the old British world, and see how these women have made a difference -- by their honesty, by the scale of their struggle for self-knowledge and autonomy, and by the power of their writing.