Paperback Edition
ISBN: 9781558612761
Publication Date: 12-01-2001

Mary Mason's life story, spanning from the late 1920s to the mid-1990s, records her triumph over the limits society sets for the disabled and her later discovery of another barrier—the sexism of friends, family, and even herself as she strives to become a respected scholar. Declared "concise, clear, sensitive and beautifully written" Mason's struggle is one of courage as she contends with the forces that seek to define and limit her (Choice).

"[Mason] became a brilliant scholar but then encountered formidable obstacles set up not only by 'able-ism' but also by sexism. Her triumph over both isms makes her memoir more than just readable." —Booklist

"Mason's concise, clear, sensitive, and beautifully written memoir resonates with anyone trying to understand another human life." —Choice

"Highly recommended for all women's studies and disability studies collections." —Library Journal

"A compelling and evocative story of a woman’s life—her pleasures, work, passions, and losses. Mason’s focus on strength and healing tell a fresh disability story." —Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, author of Extra-ordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature

"Life Prints brings home the point that scholars in the relatively young field of disability studies stress: like race, class, and gender, disability configures our experiences, identities, and cultures in fundamental ways. Absent a disability analysis, Mason's experiences sound very much like those of, say, Adrienne Rich, who has written of her years as a 'faculty wife,' and her awakening into feminism and out of institutionalized domesticity and motherhood." —Women's Review of Books