on the picket line, and at the ballot box. But few studies have peered into the homes to examine the hidden, inner social world of white ethnic families and communities like those of Polish America and, more specifically, the private lives of the white ethnic women of modest, working-class backgrounds who lived therein.
Through extensive interviews and interactions with five Polish-American sisters—the author’s own aunts and mother—sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans enters this secret yet signally important world to tell the story of a generation of women who, for the most part, have remained voiceless in both the ethnic and women’s history narratives. In The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made, Erdmans describes this world as seen through the women’s own eyes, a world of small victories, silent hurts, ordinary pleasures, and, above all, the triumph of survival. Their world, to be sure, was bounded by the structures and strictures of patriarchal relations with their father, their husbands, and their employers, but men remain mostly offstage in this volume. This is, instead, the story of five women and the personal engagement of one Polish-American daughter and sociologist with the lives of these women, who, perhaps without their knowing it, nurtured her own professional ambitions and feminist consciousness.
Professor Erdmans, associate professor of sociology at Central Connecticut State University, also is the author of Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990. In The Grasinski Girls, Erdmans has written a unique and pathbreaking study of gender, ethnicity, and class that will enlighten scholars, students, and general readers interested in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and the Polish-American experience.
The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made is the fifth volume in the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. The series revisits the historical and contemporary experience of one of America’s largest European ethnic groups and the history of a European homeland that has played a disproportionately important role in twentieth-century and contemporary world affairs. The series aims to publish innovative monographs and more general works that investigate under- or unexplored topics or themes that offer new, critical, revisionist, or comparative perspectives in the area of Polish and Polish-American Studies. Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary in profile, the series seeks manuscripts on Polish immigration and ethnic communities, the country of origin, and its various peoples in history, anthropology, cultural studies, political economy, current politics, and related fields.
Publication of the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series marks a milestone in the maturation of the Polish Studies field and stands as a fitting tribute to the scholars and organizations whose efforts have brought it to fruition. Supported by a series advisory board of accomplished Polonists and Polish-Americanists, the Polish and Polish-American Studies Series has been made possible through generous financial assistance from the Polish American Historical Association, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies at Central Connecticut State University, Madonna University, and the Piast Institute, and through institutional support from Wayne State University and Ohio University Press. The series meanwhile has benefited from the warm encouragement of a number of persons, including Gillian Berchowitz, M. B. B. Biskupski, the late Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Thomas Gladsky, Thaddeus Gromada, Sister Rose Marie Kujawa, CSSF, James S. Pula, Thaddeus Radzilowski, and David Sanders. The moral and material support from all of these institutions and individuals is gratefully acknowledged.
John J. Bukowczyk
Guide to Pronunciation
THE FOLLOWING KEY provides a guide to the pronunciation of Polish words and names.
a is pronounced as in father
c as ts in cats
ch like a guttural h
cz as hard ch in church
g always hard, as in get
i as ee
j as y in yellow
rz like French j in jardin
sz as sh in ship
szcz as shch, enunciating both sounds, as in fresh cheese
u as oo in boot
w as v
ć as soft ch
ś as sh
ż, ź both as zh, the latter higher in pitch than the former
ó as oo in boot
ą as French on
ę as French en
ł as w
ń changes the combinations -in to -ine, -en to -ene, and -on to -oyne
The accent in Polish words always falls on the penultimate syllable.
INTRODUCTION
The Grasinski Girls
THEY HAVE BEAUTIFUL NAMES: Caroline Clarice, Genevieve Irene, Frances Ann, Mary Nadine née Patricia Marie, Angela Helen, Mary Marcelia. These are the Grasinski Girls. They are the daughters of Helen Frances Grasinski, and I am her granddaughter.
What I remember about my grandma Helen is that she was tall and she stood tall. She kept her shoulders back and chin high. I remember her as a wanderer. I have images of her getting on and off buses, in and out of cars, with a small suitcase that was actually just a big purse, as she traveled from house to house, one-bedroom apartment to one-bedroom apartment, daughter’s house to daughter’s house. Caroline, her eldest daughter, recalls, “Mom used to say, the minute she hears the freight train she wants to pack her suitcase and go. I really don’t know if it’s a thing, a place, or whether it’s something inside you, this wandering and searching and looking for something.” She moved eighteen times in her life. She was a good traveler, everything efficiently packed in that neat little bag, and she had an ability to make a place a home in a short period of time. Caroline continued, “She would be unpacked with all the pictures on the wall by the end of the day, and then she was sittin’ there.”
What I don’t remember about my grandmother, but what I am often told, is that she had a beautiful voice. I don’t remember her singing, but her daughters do. She sang arias while washing the dishes and folk songs while peeling potatoes; she sang Polish carols like “Lulajże Jezuniu” at Christmas and popular American songs like “Let the Rest of the World Go By” and “I’ll See You Again and I’ll Smile” while picking the grime out of the space between the floorboards with a safety pin. As a young farm girl she took voice lessons in Grand Rapids, riding twenty miles on the Interurban. She was a soprano, and if I close my eyes I can imagine a robust, resplendently piercing soprano, chin held high, neck straight, shoulders squared. At the age of sixteen she was given her chance. A professional impresario offered to take her to New York to become a concert singer. But her father said no. Instead, she married a local boy, Joe Grasinski, sang to her seven children, and spent the rest of her life moving here and there, around and about a sixty-mile ring of familial enclosure in southwestern Michigan.
Years later, Helen found her daughter—my mother—sitting in my bedroom listening to a scratchy Crosby, Stills, and Nash tape and crying, saddened by the fact that I had gone to live in Asia for a few years. She expressed
