Sociology of Education

This article describes and analyzes how black and white working-class women define and claim knowledge. It is based on participant observation in classrooms and in-depth interviews outside school with women attending adult basic education programs. The women's perspectives challenge feminist analyses that have identified a single or universal mode of knowing for women; instead, they speak to complex gender, racial, and class relations of power that shape how they think about learning and knowing. Their claims to knowledge simultaneously accept and reject dominant social relations and create paradoxical situations for the women as they pursue adult basic education.