The participants recount their stores sequentially from childhood abuse to adult resolution over a period of 35 to 65 years. They describe their lives until 1986 retrospectively and then share their experiences from 1986 to the present. Individual chapters examine the societal context, the family settings and personal histories of childhood sexual abuse of the original group of 72 women participants, the cumulative developmental damage that followed the trauma, and the ways in which amnesia both facilitates and disrupts the lives of victims. Additional chapters focus on the interim years between abuse and recall, which typically involves more than three decades of secrecy and silence in the women's lives; the triggering of lost memories in the amnesic women; and the re-evaluation of past trauma by the non-amnesic women. Further chapters examine the crisis of recall as survivors faced the past, the survivor's personal responses to remembering, the reactions of people close to the survivors, the issue of whether and how to confront the past abuser, the task of integrating the reality of abuse into the survivor's concept of the world, and findings of a final survey of the participants in 1998 and 1999. The author is an incest survivor who is also an emerita professor of behavioral science. Tables, figures, notes, index, and 148 references