ISBN: 0-88739-366-7
184 pp.
Size: 6 x 9
Pub Date: 1/2002
Paperback Original
Price: $14.95
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Ties Across Time: A Woman's Life in Social Work
Merle Updike Davis
More than a memoir of a professional woman's life and struggles at a time when career-driven women were rare, Ties Across Time is also an informal history of social work in America, as it moved out of the realm of private philanthropy into that of public responsibility...and back again.
With a psychologist's eye for cause and effect, Merle Davis recounts her childhood on an isolated farm in Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains during the Depression. She describes graduating from a woman's college with a liberal arts degree, just when World War II had deprived the country of its young men and left the professions clamoring for women. She talks of the clash between her need for independence and her yearning for marriage and children in the fifties and early sixties, when the women's movement was gaining steam but the men she dated had yet to understand it.
In Ties Across Time Merle Davis has produced a memoir that is both clear-sighted and uplifting: clear-sighted for the lucidity with which she views her life and individuality in the context of social history. And uplifting because it is the story of a woman with a keen sense of social responsibility who achieves the rare feat of engaging and living up to that responsibility.
As I ended my career as a clinical social worker in 1996, I found myself confronting a massive assault on the human values and human services I had spent my life upholding.... My plans for a tranquil retirement no longer seemed relevant.
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