Richelene Mitchell

Dear Self: a Year in the Life of a Welfare Mother Richelene Mitchell

Ms. Mitchell was born in the rural south, the daughter of an African American sharecropper. She would venture to the northern ghetto of Philadelphia to enhance her educational opportunities. Hence, her early life was shaped by the twin forces defining African American life in the Twentieth Century, the rural south and the urban north. An honor student in high school, Ms. Mitchell's promising academic career was curtailed by an eventually failed marriage that led to a set of circumstances which rendered her a single mother of seven children living in a sprawling public housing project in New Britain, Connecticut. Forced to deal with the humiliation of public assistance, she chronicled a year of her life, 1973, in this penetrating journal. This book is a valuable resource for all of those seeking to understand the reality faced by millions of Americans whose plight rarely finds an informed and articulate voice such as that possessed by Ms. Mitchell. Though written over thirty years ago, her intimate experience with and intricate insights into the reality faced by an expanding American underclass are as relevant today as they were then. She sheds an informing and penetrating light on race relations, poverty, mothering, gender relations and many other pertinent issues.