get your way, to be grateful for the gifts you have been given. To be sure, happiness may be correlated with privilege—the more one’s needs are met, the easier it is to be happy. But, for these women (and, I suspect, many others), happiness is also a modus operandi, and one of their life tasks is to figure out how to be happy.
While the sisters wanted me to present them as women who were happy, I wanted to present them as tough women who, even when things weren’t going exactly right, figured out ways to live satisfying lives. Perhaps they didn’t change the world, but they had the social competence to live in the world with dignity. They rejected many of my attempts to portray them, or their mother, as feisty, defiant, or discontented. They were not fighters, they said, but peacemakers; they were not wanderers, but homemakers. Even if they were less than happy at times, they did not see my point in focusing on that part of their lives.10 As one sister said, “If you are going to say it, put it somewhere in a little corner, don’t broadcast it and emphasize it,” because the unhappy parts were not representative of their lives. They were privileged, they say (“blessed” is their term, because God, not social structure, is the prime mover in their worldview).
They were privileged by race and to some degree by class. They had, for the most part, economically stable and comfortable lives. As adults, some moved into the middle class, and even those in the working class lived well; they were certainly not poor, not even working poor, even if they were on tight budgets. And yet, growing up, they did not have the opportunities that the middle class offered—for example, the encouragement and means to continue their education. Moreover, they were not given (though some did acquire) the dispositions, routines, and linguistic styles of the professional middle class. They were also disadvantaged by their gender identities—at least my feminist perspective leads me to believe this. So do many of my colleagues, who shook their heads at these women’s constructions of a “blessed” life, saying, “they have a revisionist history,” “they are suffering from false consciousness,” or the “opiate of their religion is really strong.” You may also be suspicious. You may think that because I love and respect my aunts I won’t tell their whole stories—warts and all. You are right. Weren’t there more failures, sorrows, and ugliness? Yes. How complete is the story I am telling you? It is partial. How truthful is the story? There are sins of omission but not commission. There are no falsehoods or deliberate attempts to mislead you. I respected their right to construct their life stories as they wanted—if they wanted to leave out some parts, so be it. My question was, why did they construct their narratives in the way that they did?11 Why do they want to present themselves as happy women—and how did they achieve, to varying degrees, their happiness?
Their happiness is partly a consequence of their position of relative privilege via race and class identities, but it also comes from their own actions, what sociologists call agency, their potential to construct the worlds within which they live. Their mother and their grandmother taught them how to sing and how to pray, how to plant flowers and how to suckle children. They also taught them how to be women: to depend on their selves and their Jesus to make them smile; to be strong, like the Blessed Virgin Mary, especially when things are bad; and to define their lives in the private sphere, in the family. The Grasinski Girls did not passively and blindly accept the insults of gender and relative class inequality. Instead, they resisted—not by joining social movements, but by planting gardens and listening to love songs, taking driver-training courses and using lawyers to help collect child support payments.
Black women writers like Patricia Hill Collins, Paula Giddings, and Audre Lorde taught me to look for resistance in places that no white male authority or traditional sociologist taught me to look: in the belly, in the backyard, in a late-afternoon conversation.12 Even thought can be resistance. Refusing to engage in self-blame or refusing to believe negative messages of inferiority are ways of resisting oppressive cultures. These women claimed freedom by not embracing the competitive, alienating values of the public sphere; they claimed space in the house by taking over the kitchen table with their projects; they claimed power through generations by arguing for their daughters’ right to move more freely in the worlds of work and love.
What I am calling resistance, some historians have called accommodation. Eugene Genovese, writing about slavery, defined accommodation as “a way of accepting what could not be helped without falling prey to the pressures for dehumanization, emasculation, and self-hatred” and suggested that accommodation “embraced its apparent opposite—resistance.”13 Accommodation is a non-insurrectionary form of resistance, a resistance that does not attempt to overthrow the system, but, at the same time, does not submit wholly to the humiliations of subordination. While it does not challenge the objective conditions of inequality, it does help prevent the internalization of inferiority. Even if the resistance takes place only in the mind, accommodation, as an adjustment to social conditions, implies action not docility, agency not resigned acceptance. This response to structural conditions offers both dignity and a modicum of happiness.
For the Grasinski Girls, the mind and the family were sites of resistance. Patricia Hill Collins argues that women often use existing structures to carve out spheres of influence rather than directly challenging “oppressive structures because, in many cases, direct confrontation is neither preferred nor possible.”14 The Grasinski Girls did not disrupt the balance of power, but they did create private worlds based somewhat on a set of values that ran counter to those that dominate public space. Whether conscious of it or not, their domestic routines and commitment to motherhood, while complementing men’s work in the public sphere and thereby reproducing gendered status and capitalist relations of production, nonetheless tempered the arrant commercialization of the private sphere. Their moral careers as mothers, caretakers, and spiritual teachers valued affective rather then instrumental relations, placed people before profits, and embraced the nonmaterial and noncommidifiable forms of religious devotion.
. . .
Once, I was sad about a problem I was having with a relationship that stemmed, I believed, from larger structures of gender inequalities. I was crying and wanted some female empathy, so I called home to my mother. I poured out my woes and feelings of anger, sadness, and depression and then asked, “Mom, haven’t you ever felt this way?” She paused, coming up with nothing at first, but then said brightly, “Maybe you’re pre-menopausal.”
In trying to tackle these two tasks—explaining the lives of these ordinary women who represent the majority of women in America in their age cohort, and trying to understand their laughing personas—I landed in the middle of an epistemological funk. How do I step out of my worldview, my set of values, my matrix of perception, to see them as they see themselves, to understand them from their social location rather than from my location?15
The Grasinski Girls live in a world of colors, texture, shapes, and aromas; they live in an emotional world where sentences are punctuated by laughter and tears. They live in a caring world where the relationship comes before the self, and the self is found in the relationship. They live mostly at home. In contrast, I live in the public sphere, in an academic world made up of words and arguments, thoughts and books. I live in relationships, but my identity also is shaped by my profession. I live in a world of competition and ambition. My life is oriented toward seeing inequality with the purpose of changing it; their lives are oriented toward cultivating happiness in the social house into which they were born.
They live in a world very different from my own. At first I could not reconcile how my view of the world and their view of the world could be so different without one of us being wrong. And so I challenged their contentment, their belief that women have more power than men, their desire to stay in the private sphere. I challenged their playing dress-up with life; I challenged their days defined by how many pounds they have gained or lost and how good they still look. I challenged their “life is grand, cook him a good meal, believe in Jesus” brand of living. I wanted them to be feminists, to not be so concerned with diets and clothes, to understand gender and race and class inequality and to do something to fix it. I wanted them to stop coddling men and start
