Big Dreams: Essays on Recreating a Life

Donna Brazzi Barnes

jul 2022 · She Writes Press

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Growing up in the ’50s in what was then the small town of Napa, California, Donna Brazzi had loving parents, a backyard the size of a football field with a swing and a big wooden picnic table perfect for summer barbecues, a cocker spaniel named Patty, and a cat named Stinky—everything a kid could want. She was a happy child. But as she grew older and started to reach for more than a young woman from a working-class, Swiss-Italian family was expected to want—a university education and a career in the larger world beyond her hometown—she began to see that if she was going to realize her big dreams, she was going to have to fight for them. Big Dreams is Donna’s story of pursuing her education goals while confronting society’s assumptions about women’s roles in work, marriage, and motherhood from the 1950s through the mid-2000s, helped along by the evolving social movements for equality. Her journey from obedient daughter to minister’s wife to PhD in sociology was never a smooth one—but ultimately, with passion and persistence, she broke free of the family and cultural assumptions constraining her, forged her own identity, and shaped the life she wanted.

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Donna Brazzi Barnes taught dental hygiene for over twenty years before earning a PhD in sociology from the University of California, San Francisco, after which she began a career teaching women’s studies and continuing her research on women with HIV/AIDS in three US cities. Barnes has given talks at numerous national social science conferences, including the International AIDS Society Conference in Paris and International AIDS Conferences in Toronto and Barcelona. Her scholarship has been anthologized in Women, Motherhood and Living with HIV/AIDS (Springer, 2013), and two other books, as well as in various academic journals. She lives in Kensington, California.