Becoming Herself

By Maureen Reid

Book Overview

What if ... you were told you won't be accepted because you don't sound like everyone else... you want more choices than your world offers... you love a man you can never have ... you need to reconnect with the land you left behind? That is Margaret's story. Becoming Herself is the tale of a woman's road to self-discovery in the first half of the 20th century. It is as current as today's headlines.

On her first day in America, seven-year old Maggie Clancy is placed in an orphanage by her grieving widowed father. She is told that from now on she will be called Margaret. Maggie will no longer exist. She will have to forge her own path in this new world of upstate New York. Her lovely singing voice provides her the needed entry.

In an era when she loses the corset and gains the right to vote, Margaret struggles with balancing the roles of wife and mother with her longing to do even more with her life. She's a witness to the prejudices experienced by Irish immigrants and to Americans questioning the patriotism of their German-Americans neighbors during WWI. Despite that, she hopes and believes that man's inhumanity to man will lessen when women make their voices heard.

Margaret embraces the changes and challenges of a world that's experiencing airplanes in the skies, radios in the parlor and women beginning to assert their independence inside and outside the home. Margaret yearns to find the Maggie who's been lost by returning to Ireland, the land of her birth.

In Becoming Herself, Margaret shares her dreams, conflicts, and never- to- be-told secrets. It is the story of a woman searching to become all she is capable of being.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1949864235
• ISBN13: 9781949864236
• Release Date: January 1
• Publisher: Red Penguin Books
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.70 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

As soon as I read "Becoming Herself" I knew I wanted to share this book with my daughter, my sisters

This is the wonderful telling of a young Irish girl's journey to America. Set in Upstate and Western New York called-up the sweetest memories for me of visiting my own relatives in that part of the world in the mid twentieth century. With so many challenges early in the century, we could not have imagined Maggie's journey without Ms. Reid's vivid conjuring of the geography, historical events and beauty of the women who became our inspiration. Margaret's story is still told in the lives of many women today. "Becoming Herself" stands strong as a great read and a great reminder of what our predecessors dealt with as they forged the progress of women in the early 20th century.