First Chapter: F. CAROLYN GRAGLIA Two perceptions with which I had emerged from my youth were that women were usually better persons than men and that it would be highly risky ever to place my welfare in the hands of a man. These perceptions derived from my experiences growing up during the Great Depression and living in straitened financial circumstances with my divorced mother. My parents separated when I was two years old, and I never saw my father from the time I was seven, although we lived in the same city. The neighborhood in which I lived with my mother was an ethnic mix of mainly lower-middle-class and working-class Irish and Germans. I knew no parents who had attended college; many--including all my maternal relatives except my mother--had not graduated from high school. My keenest perception was that women's and children's lives would have been much improved if men consumed less alcohol and allocated more money to their families' support.