Layers of identity: Perspectives from returning women students

The ways in which returning women students view their personal and academic identities was analyzed from the perspectives of six undergraduate women between the ages of 40 to 63. The women are white and all but one have working class backgrounds. The women were in various stages of their undergraduate work.;The women were asked to write personal and academic life narratives, and participated in three individual interviews over a period of eighteen months. I utilized Labov's problem solving narrative structure for all the interviews and Clandinin and Connelly's three dimensional inquiry space to analyze the participants' written narratives.;Feminist standpoint theory provided the theoretical framework for ideas of authentic voice, subjective knowledge, and identity. The idea of "womanist" theory emerged from my understanding of the women's authentic experiences; the importance of voice, which was the women's ability to view their identity as valid and realize this validation comes from internalizing their lived experiences; and finally, "womanist" theory provided a space of seeing women's struggles not as a form of victimization but as a form of liberation.;Four overarching categories emerged from the analysis of the field texts: the women's ability to be resilient or flexible, their strong resistance to the norms of male and female dominant culture, their self-determination, and competitiveness. The women's understanding of these personality traits enabled them to comfortably cross the boundaries between their personal and academic lives finding success in both. The dissertation process helped illuminate how I gained a better understanding of my own undergraduate identity and my awareness of my own growth as a feminist researcher and writer.;This research is significant because issues of power structures, lived experience, and voice need to be addressed within a university. The top down hierarchical model used in the university often deters females from building coalitions in order to have a frank discourse concerning their similar and/or different struggles within the institution. Narratives or women's life stories are the foundation of their knowledge and representation of meanings, and these should be contributing factors in shaping meaningful academic discourse.