Our Words Were Our Bond: A Mother-Daughter Relationship Preserved in Letters is an evidence-based memoir built around five years of correspondence that starts when the daughter goes off to college – a momentous occasion, the first time she and her mother were ever apart. While it is the specific story of a low-income first-generation college student during the turbulent 1960s, it is also the universal story of the fledgling learning to fly. The voices of both the mother and the daughter are clearly articulated as they navigate new terrain including social and political events of the era. The letters demonstrate how each of them was able to overcome sorrow as well as other barriers, such as the mother’s limited education and the daughter’s awareness of class differences between her schoolmates and herself, to become more self-confident and more independent of the other, staying closely connected even as they were less intertwined. Mary Huff Stevenson is a Professor of Economics Emerita at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is a co-author of The Urban Experience: An Interdisciplinary Policy Perspective, Second Edition; The Boston Renaissance: Race, Space, and Economic Change in an American Metropolis ; Low Wages and the Working Poor; and the author of Determinants of Low Wages for Women Workers. She grew up in a slum tenement in Brooklyn and a public housing project in Queens. She is currently in her encore career as a fitness instructor for older adults.