The Grasinski Girls. Mary Patrice Erdmans

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СКАЧАТЬ researcher.²² Allowing the Grasinski Girls to comment on and edit the manuscript helped correct the biases that arose from my outsider (academic and feminist) stance.

      . . .

      I want this story not only to be about them but also to reflect them, to contain their affective, textured life of color, taste, sound, and light, to embody the warmth of thick breasts and fleshy arms. I want you, the reader, to meet them, giggling and jiggling and not finishing sentences, losing their selves in mixed pronouns, talking about “you” when they mean “I” and rearranging and reinventing the English language so that they can say what they want to say. I want you to see how they created space for themselves at their kitchen tables, found and lost their voices by talking and silencing each other, and maintained their happy faces by singing and praying and wearing lots of makeup.

      To better hear them, I chose to use long passages from their oral histories, and to keep the words in their spoken form. Oral speech is less formal than written speech and captures their kitchen-table style of talking. To make the narrative more readable, I edited out many of the dead-end sentences and tried to tame the rambling, disjointed nature of conversation. I spliced sentences together, sometimes dialogue that was pages apart, because I wanted to keep intact the thread of the story. What I did not do, however, was “clean up” their language. I kept the rhythm of the oral speech, for example, the repetitions and partial sentences; I also kept the double negatives, the noun-verb disagreements, and a lot (but not all, or even most) of the filler phrases such as “you know,” “like,” “watchacallit,” as well as the elided and blurred nature of oral speech (for example, “gonna,” “wanna”).

      My intent from the beginning was to “give them voice.” I wanted to empower them by letting them narrate their lives on their own terms in their own voices.²³ But the stories told in their own words while sitting around their kitchen tables became “sort of funny looking” when “we see it on paper, and we don’t like it”—especially when their informal, spoken words were placed next to my formal, written, professional language. Stuff that could be fixed, like poor grammar, they wanted me to fix. They wanted this for the same reason they put foundation on sallow skin or brighten their eyes with eyeliner. They didn’t want a face lift, just some eyebrows. One sister said, “like, you always say ‘gonna,’ and I don’t know if you did that purposely because you say that all along and it sounds like a hillbilly talking.” As a result of exchanges such as this, I took most of the “gonna’s” out of their text. As for the grammar mistakes, they all had a chance to edit their words. They did things like replace “kids” with “children,” and “stuff” with “things.” Some took out their double negatives. When they caught their own mistakes, I changed them. When one sister caught another sister’s mistake, however, I did not fix it.

      Some of them tried to rewrite their narratives, or at least large chunks of them, but I would not substitute written autobiographies for oral histories. I took some of their written comments and included them in different parts of the manuscript, but I always labeled them as written. For their life stories chapters, however, I pleaded with them to keep their animated, spirited style of oral speech, reassuring them that it did not sound “bad.” I gave them pep talks about how the repetitions in spoken speech serve as emphasis, tone, mood, emotion, and that these are “typical” of spoken speech—they are “normal.”

      ME: There’s nothing wrong with your words. You can communicate very well. It’s not about using fancy words.

      GG: You make me feel good because everyone always told me I didn’t know too much.

      ME: Using big words—

      GG: —doesn’t mean everything.

      But using big words usually does mean something. It is one way that people signal their education as well as class position.

      It is not just the content of their stories that describes what it is like being white working-class women. The form of their storytelling also shows 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 СКАЧАТЬ