Wendy Sanford

From Friends Journal: "These Walls Between Us, is written by Quaker author Wendy Sanford, who offers fiercely honest stories about her own decades-long struggle to leave behind a conformist outlook that left her “with a large dose of internalized superiority and a habit of dominance.” It helps that Sanford, one of the coauthors of the feminist classic "Our Bodies, Ourselves", grew into a deepening awareness of her own oppression as a woman and lesbian. Yet the ultimate power of her book is her remarkable ability to interrogate her own experience and upbringing as a person shaped by both class and White privilege.

There Sanford highlights the story of her repeated Nantucket encounters with her parents’ summer domestic servant Mary Norman—a poor, working-class African American woman about Sanford’s age from the Jim Crow South. Slowly and fitfully, she explores her years of perpetuating small, medium, and large aggressions and indignities against Norman, while also sharing their long journey to break through the social walls between them to become true friends across the boundaries of race and class. Sanford’s story is filled with telling examples of her journey—often made up of moving two steps forward and one step back—on the road to gaining insight into the social power dynamics that harmed and limited these two women who were from very different backgrounds, making real friendship between them almost impossible.

Yet that is not the end of the story. Through reading dangerously; becoming active in social justice movements; engaging with the best of her Quaker spirituality; learning about her own oppression; listening carefully to her supposed “inferior”; hearing Norman’s challenges; and reflecting deeply on their intertwined histories, differing social worlds, and complex experiences together, Sanford ultimately becomes capable of being a supportive and caring friend with Norman. Their early, warped relationship as “skilled, attentive server and sometimes conflicted beneficiary” ultimately heals and moves toward a more just and beneficial relationship over time. It is a moving journey." Steve Chase… (meer)