Wendy Sanford

I grew up in an affluent white suburban family in Princeton, New Jersey, USA. During the socially turbulent time of the 1970s, I became a feminist, a lesbian, and a Quaker. A founding member of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, I co authored and edited many versions of Our Bodies, Ourselves, the women’s health and sexuality classic. In my fifties, I began to reckon with my own white skin and the benefits that came to me through being white. I wrote These Walls Between Us: A Memoir of Friendship Across Race and Class, to honor the sixty-five year friendship between myself and Mary Norman, who is Black, and to speak with utter honesty about my missteps and necessary lessons in the friendship as a white woman shaped by white supremacy culture. Debby Irving, author of Waking Up White, calls These Walls Between Us a “tender, honest, cringeworthy and powerful read.”