"When she is six, Mary Grimley is the nation's first "poster child," dining with President Roosevelt at the Warm Springs rehabilitation center and posing in her wheelchair for publicity shots.".

"As a brilliant young scholar in the 1950s and 1960s, Mary Grimley Mason refuses to focus on her disability and instead makes herself privy to a revolution of ideas. In college and graduate school, she surrounds herself with writers and thinkers, plunging into the bohemian lifestyle of cooperatives and radical intellectualism. But inchoate concepts of "normalcy" soon twist Mason's path, and she finds herself laying aside her own dream to become the dream of another.".

"Mason has spent her life struggling against prejudice toward disabled people; now she has discovered an even more formidable enemy: the sexism of mentors, friends, family, and even herself. But she will find the courage to contend with both of the forces that seek to define and limit her.

After undergoing years of physical therapy and social isolation, after forcing the strictures of disability behind her, she at last accepts her identity as a disabled person, abandoning "that double in my life - that consciousness or voice that tried to pass as able-bodied." At the same time, she moves beyond the limitations society has prescribed for women, embracing feminism - and discovering her life's work.".

"In this frank life story, Mason recounts her struggles to stand as an independent person, an engaged scholar, and an active woman."--BOOK JACKET.