Stoic women.(Voices of the Silent Generation: Strong Women Tell Their Stories)(Book review)

Words may be deeds--Aesop

Voices of the Silent Generation: Strong Women Tell Their Stories Barbara Baillet Moran Avisson Press, 389 pages, $29.95

To hear feminists tell it, American women who came of age in the 1950s were only slightly better off than Afghani women under the Taliban. We are their gold standard of gender discrimination, their template of unassertive conformity, their Rosebud of low self-esteem, kept high-heeled and pregnant by men, the beasts, and forbidden to do anything with our minds except lose them in a battle against what Betty Friedan called "the problem with no name."

Here is a book with a refreshingly different point of view. Compiled by Barbara Baillet Moran, writer and long-time academic presence at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, it is a collection of oral histories of 17 women of varied backgrounds who, like herself and this reviewer, were born between 1930 and 1940. …