The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
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, the white thickness of fog as misty backdrop. To be happy is to smile even when you don’t 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