But it seems that it didn’t matter if we were kept back or let go, both Grandma and I became wanderers and we both carry small bags. My orbit is a little wider than hers, but, like her, I keep returning home, never able to walk away and keep on walking.
. . .
Today, Helen’s daughters are called Caroline, Gene, Fran, Nadine, Angel, and Mari. Many of you will recognize the Grasinski Girls in your own mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers. They are white, Christian Americans of European descent, and therefore represent the sociological and numerical majority of women in the United States. Born in the 1920s and 1930s, they created lives typical of women in their day: they went to high school, got married, had children, and, for the most part, stayed home to raise those children. And they were happy doing that. They took care of their appearance and married men who took care of them. Like most women in their cohort, they did not join the women’s movement and today either reject or shy away from feminism. They do not identify with Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” and they are on the pro-life side of the abortion debate.1 They give both time and money to support charitable (usually religiously affiliated) organizations working to ease the suffering of those less fortunate.2 Most of them go to church every Sunday and they read their morning prayers as faithfully and necessarily as I drink my morning coffee.
The Grasinski Girls’ immigrant grandparents were farmers. Their father was a skilled factory worker, and their children have college degrees. Their Polish ancestry is visible in their high cheekbones and wide hips, but otherwise hidden in the box of Christmas ornaments stored carefully in the attic. Theirs is a story of white working-class women.
Who are these women who sing in church pews, hum in hallways, and cry to sad songs about miseries they do not have? Do we see their curved backs tending gardens in the backyard, or bent over sewing machines or dining room tables cluttered with their latest craft project? When I read social science literature written before the 1970s, I read mostly about men—and mostly white men. Since then we have heard more women’s voices, mostly the voices of white middle-class women. But again, that is changing, and now we hear from and about black women, Latinas and Chicanas, Asian women, and Native-American women, as well as low-income women, homeless women, and immigrant women. Traditional gender studies ignored class and race when they developed theories about all women based on the experiences of white middle-class women.3 Contemporary gender studies are more likely to acknowledge race, but too often they obscure class by folding it into race. For example, Aida Hurtado states, “When I discuss feminists of Color I will treat them as members of the working class, unless I specifically mention otherwise. When I discuss white feminists, I will treat them as middle class.”4 When combined with those of white middle-class women, the voices (and disadvantages) of white working-class women are lost. A similar confusion occurs when white working-class women are grouped together with working-class racial minorities and immigrants. In this case, however, white native-born privilege gets overlooked.
When the voices of white working-class women are heard, they are more likely to be public and “classed” voices related to labor-market position. Social scientists generally examine social life in places where they can see it, that is, in the public sphere (e.g., the workplace, the neighborhood association, government offices). Public-sphere activity is also easier for scholars to grasp and write about because it is normative.5 Donna Gabaccia found that immigrant community studies “do not ignore women but describe mainly those aspects of women’s lives (wage-earning and labor activism) that most resemble men’s. Distinctly female concerns—housework, marketing, pregnancy or child rearing—receive little or no attention.”6 As a result, we hear working-class women chanting protests in front of factories and challenging public officials at neighborhood meetings, but we seldom hear them praying in the early dark of morning or laughing with their sisters in the warmth of the kitchen.7
While the Grasinski Girls moved through the public sphere as secretaries, nurses, cooks, teachers, and den mothers, they constructed their identity mostly in the domestic sphere. To begin to understand their worldview, I visited with them in their kitchens, living rooms, dining rooms, bedrooms, and local parks. Over a period of four years (1998–2002), I listened to and recorded their stories. I then constructed their oral histories from these transcripts. Then, they reconstructed my construction. Together we hammered out a representation and an analysis of who I thought they were and who they wanted to be seen as.
. . .
Every phase of my life, just wonderful things have been there, I have to admit it. Well, there are some mistakes you always make, but basically, I mean I liked the way I live, what life has given me, what came from that little farm girl.
Nadine
The Grasinski Girls tell stories of contented lives with abundant blessings, a God who loves and protects them, and children who are healthy. “I don’t think there is anything I would have changed or say I regret. God has been good to all of us,” Fran writes to me. They experienced no great tragedies but instead lived “ordinary” lives. Sure, there have been ups and downs, but they pretty much, in all categories, fall in the middle of the bell curve. They are “normal,” and social scientists have not studied normal very much. Perhaps this is because the life of the average Jane is not as compelling as that of the exotic Jane. Perhaps it is because stories that are seductively sensational are easier to sell.8 A less cynical reason that ordinary lives are not researched is that they do not present “social problems.” Social scientists more often study populations and institutions that are troubling and cry out for solutions (e.g., drug addiction, suicide, domestic violence). But what are we missing when we focus on the extremes and ignore the more subtle ways that social structures constrain lives? And what are we missing when we focus on discrimination but not privilege?
When privilege is taken for granted, it is not placed “under the microscope” for examination, and the absence of problems becomes defined as “normal” rather than as privilege. When, instead, we focus on the “normal,” as Ashley Doane has done, privilege becomes visible and we can see those otherwise hidden ways that the political and economic structures relatively advantage certain populations.9 Alternatively, when we focus on extreme oppression, we miss the subtlety of inequality. When we study horrific problems, we amplify social life so that we can hear it more clearly. Domestic violence shouts “patriarchy.” But where is the whisper of patriarchy that robs women of the opportunity to develop their full potential? In the same way, when we study social movements, we see individuals publicly working to change social institutions, but not the nudging of resistance in our private lives. How does resistance operate in the kitchen and the bedroom? How do people challenge structures of inequality in their everyday routines? And, conversely, how do their routines reproduce inequality?
In telling the stories of the Grasinski Girls, I try to make visible their privileges hidden under the cloak of normalcy as well as the nuances of oppression often overlooked. Their contented life stories made it easier for me to see their privilege than their oppression. Moreover, they construct narratives of happiness that undermine discussion of oppression. In fact, they do not even like the word oppression appearing in a book written about them. One of the sisters, commenting on a draft of the manuscript, said, “This oppression, this is the one thing that we didn’t feel. It just seems like it’s brought up so much. You see, it’s very hard for you to go back in time to where we were. You’re putting feelings into us that were not there. We didn’t feel like we were oppressed. It wasn’t that we didn’t recognize it, it just wasn’t there.”
They have wonderful lives, they say. While there were some dark moments, they shied away from bruised areas, and did not dwell in the valley of darkness. Have faith; be happy! That’s their motto. Why? I wonder. Why do they insist on constructing happy narratives, and how do they go about achieving happiness? Happiness is not the absence of sadness but an ability to live with sadness and still see the beauty of the day. To breathe deeply and inhale the gray wetness of rain as nourishment,
