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

by Michelle Tea

An urgent testament to the trials of life for women living without a financial safety net Indie icon Michelle Tea -- whose memoir The Chelsea Whistle details her own working-class roots in gritty Chelsea, Massachusetts -- shares these fierce, honest, tender essays written by women who can't go home to the suburbs when ends don't meet. When jobs are scarce and the money has dwindled, these writers have nowhere to go but below the poverty line. The writers offer their different stories not for sympathy or sadness, but an unvarnished portrait of how it was, is, and will be for generations of women growing up working class in America. These wide-ranging essays cover everything from selling blood for grocery money to the culture shock of "jumping" class. Contributors include Dorothy Allison, Bee Lavender, Eileen Myles, and Daisy Hernáez.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Essays, Class, Memoir, Gender, Womens Studies

259 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 16, 2004

About the author

Michelle Tea (born Michelle Tomasik) is an American author, poet, and literary arts organizer whose autobiographical works explore queer culture, feminism, race, class, prostitution, and other topics. She is originally from Chelsea, Massachusetts and currently lives in San Francisco. Her books, mostly memoirs, are known for their views into the queercore community. In 2012 Tea partnered with City Lights Publishers to form the Sister Spit imprint.

Reviews

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this collection of short essays about working class women from a wide variety of backgrounds as they struggle through poverty, inadequate health care, humiliation, inferior housing, poor working conditions, unemployment, dead-end jobs. Their stories were raw, personal, sometimes depressing, yet always engaging. These women may be victims, but they are also strong and resourceful survivors.

[Ciara · Rating 2 out of 5]

i had big hopes for this book, but i thought it was kind of a letdown. i mean, the female experience of growing up working class? dude, that's me! i was so hoping to see my experiences reflected through brilliant prose. & although in some ways, i saw my own experience reflected in some of these essays, i thought the construction of the book was a little weak. i'm sure you will be shocked to hear, in light of my high esteem for michelle tea (*cough*), that i thought the editing was problematic. i got the sense that there was more curating than editing going on, which is too bad, because some of these peeps needed an editor. c'mon, ladies! it doesn't shore up your working-class cred to be a crummy writer. you can grow up poor & still know how to construct a sentence. it's called a rough draft & you don't go to print with it. i felt with many of these stories that the writer was trying to elicit sympathy of guilt from the reader, playing the whole "i had it worse than you" game, & that really annoyed me. i find that shit obnoxious. i don't know, i just didn't think that the issue of growing up female &/or working class was drawn out in a sophisticated way. i walked away from the book thinking, "tell me something i don't already know." & that made me feel that the book was for middle-class tourists who wondered what the working class experience was like--NOT for me. & that pissed me off.

[D. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stories too familiar to be shocking, I could have written some and easily grown up next to the others. Dramatic without condescension, these vignettes will linger for a while inside my head.

"There exist the wealthy and the working class. At Vassar I learned the two are not mutually exclusive. No matter how rich I might become, I will always be the daughter of a janitor. I will always look the woman who empties my garbage in the face. I will always say thank you to the man who serves my lunch. I am one of them, and I do not want to Get Out unless they can come too.
That was it for me, the Game Piece. I would not take a lucrative corporate job and I would not participate in the brain drain of the working class. Game Over. The culture of the people I come from is as valuable as any I have studied. Our language, our unique perspectives, our strengths and weaknesses deserve critical attention. It is not our status as workers that prevents our happiness, but the glaring disparity between our paychecks and the paychecks of the ruling class. Working-class culture is not something we should run from even if we are offered the opportunity to escape poverty.
Poverty is not a natural conclusion. It is an invention. We are not poor because we are inferior as a group of people; we are poor because it is imperative to the global economy that a limitless supply of labor exist. The labor must be cheap and disposable.
This Game Piece respectfully declines the opportunity to exploit the labor of somebody else's mother or father. As long as we believe it is desirable to get out of the working class, we will continue to be afraid. Assimilation does not free us; it whitewashes the most obvious lie ever told. The Game is a con. The Wheel is fixed. It's time to invent a new one.
What are our choices?"
- Frances Varian, 'Getting Out'

[Chelsea Chase · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading this was like meeting 15 cousins and childhood friends I'd somehow never met before: some wise in that 15-going-on-30 way, some straight up fiercely, aggressively brilliant and one that your mom makes you play with. I know I'm going to go back and say hi because Shawna Kenney remembers, even if her sister doesn't. I hope there will be a Without a Net II soon! We need one in 2018!!!

[Kristine · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hits home. Powerful and raw. This collection of writers offer their different stories not for your sympathy or sadness, but as a proclaimation of how it was and is for generations of women growing up working class in America, fighting, suffering, loving.

[Rory · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'd have given this book five stars, but any collection of personal essays will have some clumsy, less-than-stellar stuff. but, mostly, these mini-memoirs made me shaky with sadness (the good, thinking kind of sadness) and appreciation.

[Leah Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the variety of experiences represented in this book but hardly dare expand upon them because I most usually have a net. This is a must read. I don't know--this may be the true representation of the USA, not the super rich who are running for President or what is left of the middle class. The writers each are living or have lived without a net. We all think we know these people and some of us surely have had some of these experiences but rarely do we have this inside glimpse of them or our own reflections when we have been on a similar journey.

[Kperry167 · Rating 5 out of 5]

I strongly recommend this collection of well-written essays about the struggle women face to overcome poverty, sub-standard education, race, and class to achieve the "American Dream". The reader is offered a new perspective on upward mobility in America and why most will fail.

For those who make it to and through college, to the good job and nice home, fitting in is uneasy at best. Does she share her past with those who disrespect the community that raised her,with labels of lazy, welfare queens, thugs, and drug dealers? If she does, will those who have no idea what "hard enough" entails, use her story as evidence that the community could move up if they only worked hard enough?

While respecting the accomplishments of the authors, these essays are not written to elevate their stories. They demand respect for the communities that raised them; that continue to struggle, every single day against conditions and odds we truly cannot imagine, to give their children a good home, a leg up and out.

[Rhiannon Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read my full review on my blog: http://ivoryowlreviews.blogspot.com/2...

This book has been hanging out on my unread shelf for a VERY long time! After reading Barbara Ehrenreich's Nikel and Dimed and some other books exploring poverty and the working poor I picked this book up but it got shelved. I'm not sure why except to say I always have a huge queue of books and I have been focusing on frontlist titles for the last few years. Deciding to grab something from my backlist, I picked this off my shelf. While many books may explore the topic of the working class, too often we do not hear their stories firsthand--especially from women and girls. To dig even deeper, we don't hear the stories of LGBTQI woman-identifying people and women of color. Edited by indie icon Michelle Tea, Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class contains raw and powerful first-hand accounts of working class experiences. The first essay alone will leave you with your jaw on the ground! While it was written in 2004, it is still relevant and provides insight into the daily sacrifices and struggles of an often disparaged demographic. I think an updated or additional volume of essays would be well received by the general public and anyone interested in America's economy and class systems.

[Rory · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay, this might be my favorite contemporary political/feminist anthology. It was incredible to find a book that reflected my experiences so vividly. Full of sharp commentary and witty prose, this book is definitely not a sob story about how hard it is to be poor. It does reveal the strength and resilience of working-class kids and women, and offers smart stories from some of the best writers in the genre. Also: I know some of the authors!!

[Samu · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book deserves more than five stars, it deserves all the stars in the world.

An anthology about growing up poor in America, and making it anyway. And not making it. And family, and community, and lack there of. Everything in between.

This book made me desperate to try harder still.

[kL7kqlLYGD0Y · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's possible that I would have given this book 5 stars had all of the stories in it been stellar, but that's a high demand of any short story collection. Most stories were very memorable regardless.

I really enjoyed this book, it was hard to tear myself away from it. I think most of the appeal came from how personal and genuine the stories felt. It was also interesting to look at the variety of poverty-related experiences -- how different people end up poor and how different people deal with it. This was a nice surprise, as I started reading this book with the expectation of confirming my suspicions of poverty being an almost generic, universal experience.

What I probably found most interesting about some of these stories were the feelings of loathing directed at the middle class by some of these women. It is so much more common to witness hate towards the upper class and the upper class only, that it was startling to think that someone like me could be hated for something as simple as being able to hold down a minimum wage job.

I'd probably read this book again. It's too bad that there isn't a sequel, as I'm sure there are plenty more stories like these out there, plenty that deserve to be heard.

[Ginger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall I found this a mixed bag. I thought some of the essays were beautifully told and really well done, and others just seemed to be going for shock value, and were filled with so much anger it was hard to see anything else. Some of the essays almost seem to have a bragging tone, of "I've had it worse than you." But as one of the writers said, when you grow up in a poor neighborhood, there is always someone poorer than you. I grew up playing in alleyways and abandoned lots with neighborhood kids who were skipping school by 2nd grade and had never seen a carrot until they came to our house. At the same time, my sister and I were never hungry, had two loving parents, and went to a progressive school with mostly middle class kids. I learned very early there was a big divide from the kids in my neighborhood and the kids at school. A lot of these stories seemed to touch on that sense of not really belonging anywhere. The isolation you feel when the people you grow up with treat you as different and the people you go to school or work with have so much more privilege. Its hard to find people who can identify with both where you've been and where you're going.

[Berg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an awesome collection of stories from the perspective of people living in poverty in the US, or who have grown up poor or working class and carry that experience with them through life. There was a really nice range of voice represented (with some emphasis on the young, queer, and Calfornian.)

Things that to stuck out to me included the pervasive theme of hunger, the differences in middle vs. working values as they do and do not directly relate to monetary resources, the sense of class-identification that one has grown up with as holding as much or more weight than one's current economic status.

This book opens up a lot of room for discussion and is a total pageturner!

[Angel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Without a Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class is a collection of essays written about working class (mostly working poor) women BY working class women. These stories tell about everyday struggles with poverty, abuse, addiction, health care, housing, humiliation, feelings of inferiority, and the struggle to survive. The essays avoid the usual trappings of voyeurism and romanticism of the working poor and are often gritty and visceral. Stories such as these are very rare as most stories about the working poor are written from an outsider’s perspective and thus these stories feel more immediate and real to the reader.

[Bec · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was amazing. Although, there were a couple of the stories that were not well written but that's too be expected because it was a collection of stories of women who grew up poor/working class. I personally related to several stories in this book. Finally, a book that gives women who grew up poor/working class a voice to tell their own stories. I loved it!! I especially enjoyed it because it not only tells the day to day hardship that some women endure but it also shows how we survive, and some of us can get quite creative... they are wonderful stories.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really about class structure in the US. As much as we like to think that we all have the same opportunities, it really touches on the working class situation. Also, it really makes you open your eyes and realize a) how lucky you might've been, and b) that you can take the girl out of the neighborhood, but your roots are still there. No matter how hard you try to remove them... I thought the stories about working class girls making it to middle class (and upper class) college environments were the most interesting.

[Saturnq · Rating 5 out of 5]

This. Book. It should be a bestseller in the front of every book store. In an age of economic struggle for many millennial women, this book was a warm hand on the shoulder saying "YOU ARE NOT ALONE!".

The short stories in this book offered a wide variety of experiences of lower / working class women across race, gender and generation.

My personal favorites were:

Farm Use by Joy Castro
The Prison we Called Home by Siobhan Brooks
Winter Coat by Terri Griffith
Blueprinter and Hardwires by Cassie Peterson
Getting Out by Frances Varian
Fighting by Bee Lavender

[Cate · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took me about three weeks to finally finish it (got a little sidetracked...), but it was really engrossing and amazing. The first essay, Waiting, really haunted me, as did My Season of Paper Dresses. Dirty Girl, Dinner Talk, Ghetto Fabulous. My Mother was a Whore. Really, most all of them stick out in my mind in one way or another. Truly wrenching, sticky stuff. Full speed ahead recommendation.

[Cinnamon · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were a few essays I really liked, but the book just became depressing and too similar after a while. I like the concept, I like the belief behind the pieces, I like Michelle Tea, but the book itself left me wanting more. I wish I knew of other books that handled this subject better to suggest people read instead. And sadly I identified with many people in this book. Or not so sadly. Reading these essays made me want to write my own.

[Ryan Mishap · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strong collection covering a wide range of experiences and backgrounds, this anthology strives to allow women to tell their own story; to help fill the gap in our literature that ignores poor and working class women except as charity cases or bad people. Many of the stories in here reminded me of what I read in personal zines.

[Monica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book moves me. I return to its pages to read stories that inspire me to tell my own.

[Sangeetha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection of essays examines the intersections of class, gender, race, and sexuality in modern America. Tea ensures that they're well balanced between discussing trauma and depicting class mobility, though the latter comes with a price. What I loved most was the undercurrent of defiance. Our society pretends to be egalitarian and based off of meritocracy, but as one essayist says, most people never exit the class they were born into. These essays refuse to ignore class, refuse to be ashamed, and refuse to accept the status quo. As one of the essayists puts it, working class people have their own culture, vernacular, desires, and interests that merit scholarship and art. I enjoyed reading a sliver of it.

[jessica ☾ · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was very eye opening to the complexities of poverty; it is greatly enhanced by the narratives of the women coming from various backgrounds. Some narratives are funny and others are sad and some are even inspiring. I love how the narratives paint multiple pictures of the working class since America does view the working class as lazy and just living off the government. To almost experience the plight of these women in their stories is transformational. I definitely recommend this book.

[Lena Kelly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Published in 2003 and so little has changed; if anything, I imagine the divides between the classes are worse now. I loved the intro - Michelle Tea just wants to give working class women a voice of their own without any other prerogative (ie providing middle class readers with a “working class tourism” experience.) I want to own that this book wasn’t made for my approval. My opinions on it don’t matter. I’m just here to read and learn and support the writers who put their experiences to paper.

[Briar · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great series of essays from various authors. I was never as bad off as some, but much of their essays sounded familiar. One could say they made it when others didn't. More voices like these need to be listened to. My one complaint is that I want more details. The last essay was the perfect closer.

[Martijn Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

The book I was looking for that gives insights to daily life situations without boring unnecessay information. Very inspiring.

[Waffle · Rating 3 out of 5]

Certainly worth reading for the good essays. Still the same pitfall of many essay collections: some are great, some less so.

[Ana Rita · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high expectations, and came out feeling underwhelmed.
It was fine, but it didn't have enough punch.

[Roxana Rathbun · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lots of good stories and perspectives. I really appreciated this.