Class Encounters: A Memoir of the 1960s by Frinde Maher

In her graceful, aptly titled memoir, Class Encounters, Frinde Maher traces her journey away from her privileged origins on Boston’s North Shore. She takes us through Radcliffe and Oxford into community organizing, anti-Vietnam War activism, factory work and membership in the Maoist-leaning communist Progressive Labor Party, before becoming a high school teacher in South Boston and later a college professor. Maher captures the stresses, nuances, complex choices and serendipities of navigating different social worlds that, themselves, were being shaken by the multiple revolts of the 1960s. Being members of Students for a Democratic Society wasn’t radical enough—when her father’s first cousin David Rockefeller attended her wedding to John Maher, himself a Harvard-educated anti-war organizer, John had already been challenged by Rockefeller’s daughter for not more openly supporting the Viet Cong. America has long underplayed social class, while amplifying it in practice. Scholars, novelists and memoirists— Baltzell, Marquand, C. Wright Mills and Maher’s own brother Nelson Aldrich included—have explored the fault lines of high WASP culture and its now faded hegemony. Most observers have been men. Maher adds gender to the mix, along with attempts to cross the same class lines the other authors delineate. She explores her emerging voice and agency as she moves into the wider world to craft her own life—a life of change, self-discovery and continuity. She reminds us how central “class encounters” are to the American experience, a national strength when honestly embraced. This book is a timely reminder.

About the Speaker

Frinde Maher is Professor Emerita of Education and Women’s Studies at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts, where she taught for twenty-seven years. A scholar of higher education, she is the co-author, with Mary Kay Tetreault, of several books, including The Feminist Classroom (1994) and Privilege and Diversity in the Academy (2007), as well as many articles. She has two children and four grandchildren, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.