June Book of the Month

Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class

Edited by Michelle Tea

Seal Press, 2003.

Review by Sheri Whatley

Without a Net is a book of essays collected and edited by feminist writer and kickass poet Michelle Tea. The essays are written by women who either grew up poor or are currently living in poverty. All give personal accounts of struggles that came up because of their experience growing up female and working class.

The issues covered in their essays are as varied as their individual responses to poverty and sexism. Some of these issues include rape and/or incest, racism, hunger, no access to education, lack of affordable health care, and homophobia. Most essays include the condescending attitudes of a society that views them as dirty, stupid, invisible or sexually available.

Some accounts maintain a sense of humor about childhood. Terry Ryan writes in "A Catholic Leg" about growing up in a family with 10 kids, an alcoholic dad who worked as a machinist under pre-OSHA conditions, and a mother who compulsively enters contests and writes jingles to win money and household appliances. When her father's leg becomes gangrenous and needs to be amputated, they must sort through their bewilderment and arrange a proper Catholic burial for the leg.

Other stories make you angry at other people's ignorance, but show the strength and depth of the woman in struggle. ALatina poet, Meliza Banales, tells of how desperately she has always wanted to become a writer in "The Poet and The Pauper."

At a Laundromat, she runs into a very published and famous poet, a white man. He drills her about what topics she writes about. When he finds out it's about "family, magic, poor people, brown people, mixed-race" he responds, "huh, all that? There's not really a huge market for poor people. You probably won't do too well, especially since it's your first book. How did you get a book deal?"

After remembering a whirlwind of memories related to growing up poor and dealing with all the struggles that have only made her sharper in dealing with bigots like this one, she rises. "The fact that, amid the patriarchy, racism, classism, homophobia, and ageism of this society, I was able to get a book published that did not represent these structures, but worked against them, made me see that maybe the famous poet's question was appropriate. How did I do this. How did I get here. How did this come to be."

Some writings are a roundhouse kick to the head. Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina contributes an essay called, "Steal Away." She writes of the hunger that she's always felt being poor. Not physical hunger, but more of a hunger to get the things and the information the world has withheld from her.

She steals everything; it's the only thing she can do to make life a little bit more equal. Eventually she begins stealing books from her wealthy sociology professor who romanticizes Allison's life of poverty, asking her, "your family is very poor, aren't they?" Allison takes these academic books, plows through them, and returns them with her own comments in the margins written in bright blue.

Within these stories, you hear the voices of women who have lived through the worst and are still surviving. Some are still reeling from the pain of sexual and physical abuse, the shame of being poor, and the health effects of growing up without money for doctors and hospitals.

This is a very important political book. These are women who are not usually listened to or who haven't always had the time to write a story about their life, because they're too busy dealing with all that life throws at them. But within their stories lies the core of America.

These women tell the horrors that the capitalist structure, along with patriarchy and racism, has done to them and their families. Their stories are crucial in order to understand the human casualties of our profit-minded system. Their stories need to be told.

This article is reprinted from Left Turn magazine, (www.leftturn.org)

View previous Class Action Book of the Month selections...

May Book of the Month: Women Without Class: Girls, Race and Identity

April Book of the Month: Trembling in Bones

March Book of the Month:The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality

February Book of the Month: Class and Parenting

January Movie of the Month: The Story of Stuff

December Book of the Month: Graceful Simplicity: Towards a Philosophy & Politics of Simple Living

November Book of the Month: All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life

October Movie of the Month:The Milagro Beanfield War

September Book of the Month: Tearing Down the Gates

August Book of The Month: Staff Picks

July Book of the Month: Theory of the Leisure Class

June Book of the Month: Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons

May Book of the Month: Death in the Haymarket

April Book of the Month: Food Politics

March Book of the Month: Psychology and Economic Injustice

February Book of the Month : What's My Name, Fool?

December Book of the Month: Dead Heat: Global Justice and Global Warming

November Book of the Month: Awol

October Book of the Month: Class Passing

September Book and Video of the Month: Beyond Silenced Voices and Declining By Degrees

August Books of the Month: Human Cargo and Gathering the Sun

July Book of the Month: The Overworked American by Juliet Schor

June Book of the Month: More Money Than God by Steven R. Leder

May Book of the Month: Global Class by Jeff Faux

April Books of the Month: Classified and Strapped

March Book of the Month: Welfare Brat, A Memoir by Mary Childers

February Book of the Month: Fingersmith by Sarah Waters

January Book of the Month: Invisible Privilege: A Memoir about Race, Class, and Gender by Paula Rothenberg

View last year's Book of the Month selections...

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