Sheilas Shop invites us into a Southern beauty parlor to meet workingclass African American women. We get to know the women individually as they discuss everything from relationships and beauty to politics equality race gender and class. We hear them speak in their own words about their families and communities and the struggles they face in all areas of life. Sheilas Shop acts as a microcosm of female workingclass AfricanAmerican society.Kimberly BattleWalters spent over sixteen months interviewing and listening to women at Sheilas Shop while researching this valuable ethnographic work. Literature and the media tend to report either on the lives of upwardly mobile middleclass African Americans or on the poor ignoring workingclass women. Sheilas Shop focuses on these women introducing a conceptual model of racial and gender victorization to explain the process by which workingclass African American women learn to see themselves as victors rather than victims despite their complex and often difficult lives. This book also provides insight into the informal support networks that are fostered in public places such as beauty shopsthese support networks lay the foundation for strong African American women families and communities.