Big Dreams

Donna Brazzi Barnes knew from adolescence that her future lay beyond the bounds of the small California town she grew up in—but she didn’t know to what extent assumptions about the role of women would get in the way of her aspirations. In this memoir in essays, she shares how she took on—and overcame—the many obstacles she encountered on the way to realizing her big dreams.

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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.