ABSTRACT
The author was determined to include black women teachers' narratives, from the very beginning of the author's project. In contrast to her belief that she could elicit and analyze the narratives of Catholic women religious and Jewish women of the New Left, throughout her study of black women teachers she have been troubled by the fear that she would not be told or could not understand the life stories of this group because she was white. Conversations with her colleagues, Susan Laird and Jan Jipson, together with Marianne Hirsch's book, The Mother/Daughter Plot, inspired a paper on teacher-as-mother, which gave her first real insight into the central controlling metaphor of the black women teachers' narratives. This chapter recognizes the ways in which black women teachers' narratives challenge the dominant white meanings which have always already been constructed around their personal, work, and social relations.
