My First Thirty Years

Summary

Shortly after its 1925 publication, Gertrude Beasley's ferociously eloquent feminist memoir was banned and she herself disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Though British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell called My First Thirty Years "truthful, which is illegal" and Larry McMurtry pronounced it the finest Texas book of its era, Beasley's words have been all but inaccessible for almost a century—until now.

Beasley penned one of the most brutally honest coming-of-age historical memoirs, one which strips away romantic notions about frontier women's lives at the turn of the twentieth century. With characteristic ferocity, Beasley rejected a life of dependence, persisting in her studies and becoming first a teacher, then a principal, then a college instructor, and finally a foreign correspondent.

Along the way, Beasley becomes a strident activist for women's rights, socialism, and sex education. She is undaunted by authority figures but secretly ashamed of her origins and yearns to be loved. My First Thirty Years is profoundly human and shockingly candid, a rallying cry that cost its author her career and her freedom.

Her story deserves to be heard.

Contains mature themes.