ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to convey the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and class in the life of a female, Italian American, mixed social class faculty member in a higher education and student affairs leadership doctoral-only program. Through storytelling, it illustrates how these intertwined social identities shaped the author's developmental journey and led her to seek an unpopular path in her chosen profession, down a feminist road. Recent literature exemplifies the complexity involved for an individual to create an integrated multiple social identity. No longer seen as isolated and independent constructs, social identity is now framed within multiple integrated and interconnected concepts. The historical context of the time set the backdrop for the author's family’s arrival in the United States. In the late nineteenth century and the early 1920s, Southern and Eastern Europeans arrived in the United States as “new immigrants”.
