The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans
us who they are, by making more evident their class location. This was another reason I used oral histories, and another reason they felt somewhat demeaned by this project. One sister said, “You shouldn’t have left all those words like ‘cuz’ and ‘watchacallit.’ I know what you’re trying to do. You’re putting us in a class that you feel that we were in, kind of uneducated or kind of behind or something.” Another said, “I didn’t know you were going to take [us] word for word, I thought you were going to put it in your beautiful flowery writer’s language. [laughs] And then again, I didn’t really like the reason why you did it because you’re like putting us with low poor-class people [laughs] and I didn’t want to be portrayed like that.”
I never intended to put them in a “low” or “poor” or “uneducated” class of people. All I said was that I wanted to show their working-class roots, and this was seen as denigrating them.
The Grasinski Girls do not identify themselves as working class, but as middle class. One sister continued to make notations in the margins whenever I mentioned that her father was a tool-and-die maker, writing, “He worked himself up . . . he got so he was wearing white shirts at work. He was the boss.” In Mari’s story, she talks about her reluctance to define herself as working class because it meant that she had not moved up in class from where she started. I asked Angel, the wife of a skilled auto laborer in Michigan, what she considered her “social class,” and she said, “middle white class.” I followed up: “Who is working class?” She answered, “That’s all my friends. I think of all my friends as working class, people who work their whole life, nothing was ever given to them. Middle and working go together in my mind.”
Class is one of the more unspoken oppressions in the United States. One way we avoid looking at class inequalities is by assuming we are all middle class (except the undeserving poor, the ideology of individualism argues, who could be middle class if they would only get a job). Lillian Rubin contends that the working class gets lost when it is “swallowed up in this large, amorphous and mythic middle class,” which in 1990 was defined by the Congressional Budget Office as including any family of four with an annual income between $19,000 and $78,000.24 Within these brackets the Grasinski Girls were all middle class.
Social class is a muddy category, as one’s location is determined not only by income, but also by education and occupation (and this almost always refers to paid labor). For married women like most of the Grasinski Girls who are primarily engaged in unpaid domestic work, the social class of the household is determined largely by the husband’s income and occupation.25 Class also has ragged edges because democratic societies allow for some mobility over the generations, so that the class location of adulthood can differ from that of childhood. Moreover, classes bleed into each other, the working poor into the stable working class, into the lower-middle class, into the middle-middle class, and so on.
And yet, despite these complexities, ambiguities, and fluctuations, class differences are nonetheless real. While the economically stable working class and the lower-middle class may share the same income, neighborhoods, and schools, the skilled union worker has a different relation to production than the retail manager or small business owner.26 While the sisters had different childhoods (e.g., some experienced the Depression, while others did not), they were raised by the same parents, whose level of education and cultural routines were shaped by their own class and ethnic background. Despite the fact that they have had different adult experiences (one needed food stamps, and another lives in a chateau; some have college educations, and others high school diplomas; some married men who have professional occupations, while others married tradesmen), their class background shaped their choices and their dispositions. The psychological dimension of class is “learned in childhood,” Carolyn Steedman argues, and the emotions and scripts that we learn stay with us long into adulthood.27
Class provides cultural capital as well as material capital, and cultural capital (social skills, linguistic styles, tastes, preferences, and habits) is quite durable.28 These repertoires of cultural and mental routines are taught to us by parents, teachers, and peers, and learned and practiced in institutions—in particular, the educational system. As such, our class backgrounds are encoded in linguistic and cultural practices. I left their language in the truest form possible so as to illustrate their class location and gendered personalities as encoded in the rhythms of their speech, their vocabularies, and their grammar. But they wanted their language changed for the same reason I wanted it preserved—it revealed class identity and education level.
With their speech kept as it was spoken, it felt as if their words had betrayed them, or that I had betrayed them.29 But for what reason? In the 2001 National Basketball Association playoffs, Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia 76ers referred to something as “the most funnest.” That grammar mistake was repeated in broadcasts numerous times over the following weeks. Why was it so necessary to repeat that phrase? What were they trying to do, show the world that his command of English was not as good as theirs? Was it a racist insinuation? Perhaps the Grasinski Girls thought I was doing the same thing, that I was looking for their class colors in order to insult them. But I don’t show you these women to ridicule them. I reproduce their language in its original (sometimes grammatically incorrect) form because that is how they speak. I wanted to capture their class culture as manifest in their language styles and to be as true as possible to their experiences, and I didn’t think that my professional speech alone could adequately reflect their everyday being.
Unfortunately, my naive attempts to produce egalitarian relations were derailed because I forced them to play my game—the academic game. Their spoken language is perfectly suitable for kitchen table discussion; it is the book context that makes it appear inadequate. I was trained to write, and that gives me power in this arena. As one sister said, “You write very nice. Of course you do, because that’s what you do. I mean that’s your education and that’s what you do.” Moreover, I can edit my formal language (and edit and edit and edit) and draw on my professional networks to make my written words read better—colleagues, publishers, copy editors all read the manuscript and cleaned up my language. I definitely have more power in this setting to shape my presentation of self than they do.
Given that I am a professional writer, I could have made them sound “better” than I did. And, given that I was family, maybe I should have. Yet, I thought that they looked damn good the way they were, and that in life, as in this book, they wear too much makeup. But then, they most likely think I don’t wear enough.
. . .
In this book, I am interested in what C. Wright Mills calls the intersection of biography and history. I begin with the story of Frances Zulawski. Born in Chicago to Polish immigrant parents, she moved to a Polish farming parish in southwestern Michigan, where her father arranged her marriage. Her fourth child, Helen Frances, born in 1903, married Joseph Grasinski, and together they had seven children—six of whom were girls, the Grasinski Girls. The life grooves that were available to these Roman Catholic working-class American girls of Polish descent who came of age in the 1940s and 1950s started at the altar: marriage to God or marriage to a man. While the feminist frameworks in the 1970s challenged their ways of being in the world, they resisted both the negative patriarchal definitions of women and the feminist devaluation of the choices they made. These women struggled to assert their needs, carve out alternative life routes for their daughters, and retain dignity and pride within the worlds they actively constructed. They carried Christmas trees home on city buses, found open seats in crowded churches, and survived emotionally by developing a thick skin (something the next generation would require Prozac to accomplish).
Fig. 1. Caroline in front of her home, 1979
While the Grasinski Girls represent a gender cohort (modified by class and race) and therefore share values and behaviors, the six women are also different, in part because their birth dates span twenty years, but also because of class mobility and educational achievements.
Caroline Clarice (Caroline), the oldest of the sisters, remains rooted in the family home in the ethnic farming parish that was the