Class Encounters: A Memoir of the 1960s

In her graceful, aptly titled memoir, Class Encounters, Frinde Maher traces her journey away from her privileged origins on Boston’s North Shore. She takes us through Radcliffe and Oxford into community organizing, anti-Vietnam War activism, factory work and membership in the Maoist-leaning communist Progressive Labor Party, before becoming a high school teacher in South Boston and later a college professor. Maher captures the stresses, nuances, complex choices and serendipities of navigating different social worlds that, themselves, were being shaken by the multiple revolts of the 1960s. Being members of Students for a Democratic Society wasn’t radical enough—when her father’s first cousin David Rockefeller attended her wedding to John Maher, himself a Harvard-educated anti-war organizer, John had already been challenged by Rockefeller’s daughter for not more openly supporting the Viet Cong.
America has long underplayed social class, while amplifying it in practice. Scholars, novelists and memoirists— Baltzell, Marquand, C. Wright Mills and Maher’s own brother Nelson Aldrich included—have explored the fault lines of high WASP culture and its now faded hegemony. Most observers have been men. Maher adds gender to the mix, along with attempts to cross the same class lines the other authors delineate. She explores her emerging voice and agency as she moves into the wider world to craft her own life—a life of change, self-discovery and continuity. She reminds us how central “class encounters” are to the American experience, a national strength when honestly embraced. This book is a timely reminder.

Those who lived through these years of struggle will identify with the choices Frinde Maher confronted. Younger generations will learn what it was like to participate in important life and death struggles. Hopefully, they will feel her same energetic commitment to the current round of struggles—climate justice, true democracy, a world our grandchildren will want to live in. —MICHAEL MEEROPOL, Lifelong SDS Member and Red Diaper Baby

Frinde Maher takes us back to the early 1960s—personifying its idealistic and earnest curiosity. These are people striving to fulfill an “American Dream” more egalitarian than the materialistic versions current today. Class Encounters evokes a time when even the moderately wealthy believed they already had enough, so they could devote their own lives to other’s behalf. It leaves us wondering what is so intractable about class within our so-called classless society. —CAROL BUNDY, author of The Nature of Sacrifice, a Biography of Charles Russell Lowell

Frinde Maher’s memoir is a gift! Honest, sweet and heartbreaking, Class Encounters shows a young woman’s remarkable journey, from a privileged 1950s childhood through coming of age—socially, politically, culturally, and personally—during the tumultuous 1960s. Filled with humor, deep reflection, and remarkable insights, her story is a needed counterbalance to the many male memoirs of the time. —KATE CLIFFORD LARSON, historian and New York Times bestselling author

Growing up in Marblehead, Massachusetts, among the Boston elite, Frinde Maher describes leaving that world for the student anti-war movement of the 1960s, which led her to the Progressive Labor Party, a Maoist communist group, to work in a lightbulb factory, and to teaching low-income high school kids in South Boston. You can take the girl out of the elite, but can you ever really take the elite out of the girl? That’s one of the many provocative questions bravely posed by Maher in this fascinating memoir. —KATHA POLLITT, poet, essayist and columnist for The Nation