Tapestries of Life

"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 consciousnesses to challenge conventional accounts of women's and men's lives."—Women's Review of Books

"Aptheker's eloquent defense of women takes its place within an ongoing argument over the meaning of gender in history, and as such will be required reading for feminist scholars."—New Directions for Women

"Aptheker has recaptured, I think, the spirit of the women's movement as we first knew it in the 1970s. After all the academicism, the jargonization of feminist language, the bitterness of political infighting, the dividing of even feminist women in the workplace, the wounds from battles fought with the very ones we have loved, [she has] reminded me of why we have been doing it all."—Frontiers

"An interesting an important introduction to a crucial discourse, i.e., what are the ways in which women as a gender view the world differently from men and in what ways can women use this knowledge to build a humane culture?"—Choice

"A balanced, caring work . . . that should speak to women of all ethnic and racial groups and of all political and sexual persuasions."—Kirkus Reviews