The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
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 thinking about themselves. I did not necessarily like the way they were women, and I think a part of me blamed gender inequality on women like them, women who throw like a girl and can’t drink like a man.
They challenged me to see them without judging them by my standards, my values, my routines. Comparing their generation to my generation is different from judging their generation based on the values and beliefs of my generation. They struggle and resist, not in the way I do, which is to fight to join the man-made world. Instead, they fight to preserve their private, female world. My job as a sociologist was to try to understand their world. In some ways, it felt like going into foreign territory, in other ways, like I was coming home.
Our understanding is shaped by our position in the social order and embedded in the relation between the object (what we seek to know) and the subject (ourselves). Sociologist Karl Mannheim refers to this as relational knowledge.16 Relational knowledge is not false knowledge, but partial knowledge. It is a view of the world from a particular social position or, as some feminist scholars refer to this, a particular standpoint.17 The relevant epistemological and sociological questions are not about the veracity of knowledge but the social base of knowledge: Why do they think the way that they think? Why do they see the world the way that they see the world? What aspects of social structure shape how they perceive and understand their world?
Each generation has different opportunities, different perceptions of those opportunities, and, as a result, different choices. I want to both understand the world as they see it, and, with generational distance, frame their lives in historical-structural context. But when I use my frames—the frames of an educated professional woman who came of age in the 1970s—to understand the lives of these women, I am not hearing them, I am hearing myself. As is often the case, travel into foreign lands teaches us mostly about ourselves. And so, writing about their generation laid open my generation; trying to understand their lives, I could better see the value structure underlying my own standpoint.
Understanding knowledge as standpoints (theirs and mine) produced more egalitarian relations because the production of knowledge became the sharing of standpoints. I have tried to let you hear both their voices and mine, to give you their objections to my interpretations as well as my objections to their narrations.
. . .
Dear Mary Patrice,
Sending you a few things. Upon seeing you last, I think the Grasinski Girls are wearing you out. It’s difficult to write about people who see themselves one way, [different] than the way others see them.
I love you, Nadine
The Grasinski Girls guided this work. I would give them drafts and they would say, “No, that is not who I am!” “Where are my children? Put my children in the book!” “Tell them I love being a mother, did you say that, did you tell them I love being a mother?” One sister wrote to me early on that she was suspicious of my intentions: “We are not women with flabby arms flapping in the wind while we bake our apple pies.” Don’t insult us! I tried not to, and toward that end I gave them the right to edit the manuscript.
The participants in qualitative studies are always at least indirectly coauthors, in that they construct their story from which the social scientists construct their story. But this was a collaborative project in more explicit ways. The Grasinski Girls had ownership of their printed words. The collaborative, egalitarian structure of the project was a result of (1) the recognition of standpoints; (2) the fact that I was going to use their real names; and (3) the knowledge that I would always be going home for Christmas. Because of my intimate attachment to these women, I could not temporarily enter into their community, gather information, and then leave. There would be consequences to my