Tapestries of life : women's work, women's consciousness, and the meaning of daily experience

Tapestries of Life proposes a way of putting women at the center of our thinking by structuring it out of the dailiness of women's lives. The focus is on women of diverse races, classes, ages, and geographic regions in the United States. Aptheker draws upon the works of women writers, poets, artists, dramatists, dancers, musicians, and academics as well as the words of women factory workers, domestics, and agricultural laborers. She explores how to promote balance in a system that institutionalizes class, race, and gender inequities at every level.

Aptheker 'weaves together the voices of women survivors of the Holocaust and of the U.S. concentration camps for Japanese Americans, Chicana cannery workers and southern cotton-mill girls, older lesbians and elderly Jews, Afro-American women in slavery and contemporary Afro-American writers, and others, in order to explore women's ways of seeing. Her analyses of oral histories, novels, legends, poetry, and art show how we can use these records of women's and men's lives.' -- Sandra Harding, Women's Review of Books

Publishers Weekly

Aptheker ( Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex, and Class in American History ) avers that ``women have a consciousness of social reality that is distinct from that put forth by men,'' and her book seeks to define such consciousness ``as it is constructed in the artifacts of daily life.'' The exposition partially exemplifies her hope to locate a ``woman-centered'' way of thinking: the author considers the poems, fictions, testimonies and artwork of women and she outlines the experiences and conditions that inform her own point of view (she grew up in New York, in a middle-class, Communist, Jewish family; she married and divorced; she lives with her lesbian lover and their children)--but she withholds reference to the notoriety her politics have brought her. Commendably, Aptheker attempts to address the distinct needs of minority women; in doing so, however, she becomes patroniz ing. Similarly naive are her privileging of lesbian women (``A lesbian presence signals a potential for female independence'') and her colorless interpretations of the art she cites. (July)