Teen Bride to Scholar | 1950s–1970s
by Sandra Schackel
Suddenly, I thought: There must be some other way to be married. This powerful epiphany underpins Schackel’s journey from a 1950s teen wife and mom living through second wave feminism—a cultural tremor that would shake up the way women in the 1960s and ’70s would view their lives and identity.
Print and ebook editions are available where all fine books are sold.
Schackel’s memoir helps us understand how feminism can slowly emerge in a traditional, teenage marriage. With the unembellished perspective of a historian, the memoir shares how education and feminism shaped a new lens. Schackel confronts herself and her culture, inexorably outgrowing the life created by a 1950s marriage and ultimately achieving her dream of a professorship in history. Sandy’s journey is heroic.
This book will help any woman take one more look at life and ask: Is this truly where I wanted to go?
— Jan Salisbury MS, MCC
Executive Coach
Salisbury Consulting
Meet the Author
Sandra Schackel grew up happily in a small, Midwestern town. Marrying and becoming a mom at age seventeen shaped her identity over the next three decades. Education proved to be the lifeline enabling her to reclaim her own dreams. She retired in 2010 as Emerita Professor, Boise State University, where she taught American Women’s History and History of the American West for twenty-one years. During this period she published on twentieth-century women’s lives, including Working the Land: Stories of Ranch and Farm Women in the Modern American West, based on oral histories from women in six Western states. With Apron to Gown, she moved from recording other women’s journeys to writing her own life story. Today she hikes, bikes, skis, and thrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.