The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 writings in ways that mattered to me. I did not want to hurt them, so I could not go for the jugular. I could not reveal their deepest demons, their humiliations and unnamed fears—those were between them and Jesus. This is not a “tell-all” biography. I did not write this to expose them but to better understand the private worlds of white women in this generational cohort. Moreover, given my position as intimate insider, my mom and my aunts did not have the same privilege of withholding information as do strangers we encounter in the field. I know things about them that they could have kept hidden from outsiders. This ethically required a more restrictive reporting strategy. I had to allow them to edit out material that they felt made them vulnerable.

      Some of my social science colleagues worried that I gave the Grasinski Girls too much control, and that their stories would be too “constructed” in a way that implied falsehood. But anthropologist Clifford James argues that ethnographies are always constructed truths shaped by the politics of the academy and the observer, and they are always partial, but not necessarily false. He writes, “All constructed truths are made possible by powerful ‘lies’ of exclusion and rhetoric. Even the best ethnographic texts—serious, true fictions—are systems, or economies, of truth. Power and history work through time in ways their authors cannot fully control.”¹⁸ Our understandings of the world are always shaped by paradigms and ideologies (hidden or visible), as well as taken-for-granted privileges and power. We are mistaken if we see only the paradigms and partial truths of the people of study, and not those that belong to the social scientist. We all look at some parts of the social world and ignore others. We manipulate data to argue a point or minimize conflicting data to emphasize analytical categories. We construct theoretical questions to fit with the methods that we know. We censor the solutions we propose according to the political ideologies we espouse.

      In this study, the Grasinski Girls’ life stories were constructed in the relationship between us, and in that relationship I was a niece and a daughter. As such, it felt odd and ineffectual to use only a traditional academic style of writing which, as Susan Krieger notes, “is designed to produce distance and to exclude emotion—to speak from above and outside experience, rather than from within.”¹⁹ Sociological language seemed too stark and sterile to be able to describe Aunt Caroline’s wheat-colored baskets of overflowing dried flowers cascading from the tops of large wooden cabinets, or Aunt Nadine’s rich desserts that are not too gooey, not too chocolaty, but have a lingering sweetness that makes me hold them on my tongue and groan, reluctant to swallow. When speaking from within, the complexity of the world is magnified by closeness. When we look at ourselves, or people who are close to us, the intimacy breathes contradictions and defies stark categorization: we can love and hate the same person, we resist and roll over in the face of oppression, we are both privileged and disadvantaged. The distant social scientist can more easily see individuals as social categories. But when I write about my aunts, I cannot see the categories for the faces.

      What price did I pay for this closeness? While this insider knowledge made me privy to a lifetime of glances, nods, and stories that they do not want told to nonfamily outsiders, how does the fact that they are my mother and my aunts, for heaven’s sake, interfere with my ability to “get it right?”²⁰ Sociologist Robert Merton notes that the problem of being an insider is that the myopic vision obscures the interpretation. “Dominated by the customs of the group, we maintain received opinions, distort our perceptions to have them accord with these opinions, and are thus held in ignorance and led into error which we parochially mistake for the truth.”²¹ But Merton also argues that in every situation researchers are both outsiders and insiders, and outsiders err by mistaking their own paradigms for the truth. Too close, we have distortions; too far, we have misunderstandings. The best we can do is work to correct our near- and farsighted visions.

      My distortions come from a deep respect for the working class and my love for my family. Sharing my work with other academics helped adjust for this myopia. My misunderstandings are found in my feminist framework, which was critical of the Grasinski Girls’ life worlds. I’ve tried to correct this by including in the text their responses to my interpretations as well as my objections to their responses. Ironically, the feminist stance that created the potential for misunderstanding also provided a corrective. Feminist inquiry rejects the methods of traditional science based on a positivist model which posits a duality СКАЧАТЬ