Women Writing Women: The Frontiers Reader

Women Writing Women The Frontiers Reader Edited by Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon, with Susan H. Armitage WRITING ...

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Women Writing Women

The Frontiers Reader Edited by Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon, with Susan H. Armitage

WRITING WOMEN WRTING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN

WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING

WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN

WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING WOMEN WRITING

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Women Writing Women

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Women Writing Women The Frontiers Reader edited by patr icia hart and karen weathermon, w ith susan h. armitage

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University of Nebraska Press

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Lincoln and London

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© 2006 by Frontiers Publishing, Inc. “Sense and Responsibility,” “La Verdad es Muda,” and “Olvídate de todo, menos de mí” © 1999 by Maribel Sosa “Fragments from a Family Album” © 1998 by Shawn Michelle Smith All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America ⬁ 䡬

Set in Minion by Bob Reitz. Designed by Ray Boeche. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women writing women: the Frontiers reader / edited by Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon, with Susan H. Armitage. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn-13: 978-0-8032-7336-8 (pbk.: alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-8032-7336-3 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Women’s studies—Biographical methods. 2. Women—Biography. 3. Women—Social conditions. I. Hart, Patricia, 1950– II. Weathermon, Karen, 1961– III. Armitage, Susan H. (Susan Hodge), 1937– IV. Frontiers (Boulder, Colo.) hq1185.w66 2006 305.4—dc22 2005022109

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Contents

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Introduction Patricia Hart, Karen Weathermon, and Susan H. Armitage [-5], (5)

1 Writing the Self 7 Weave and Mend Joanne B. Mulcahy 20 Sense and Responsibility, “La Verdad es Muda,” and “Olvídate de todo, menos de mí” Maribel Sosa 29 Of Milk and Miracles: Nursing, the Life Drive, and Subjectivity Katherine Sutherland 48 It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness: A Stretch of the Imagination Nancy Reincke 65 71 78 103 112 114

Writing Family Two Cherokee Women Roseanna Sneed Like a Bamboo: Representations of a Japanese War Bride Debbie Storrs Filming Nana: Some Dilemmas of Oral History on Film Connie Broughton Fragments from a Family Album Shawn Michelle Smith Potties, Pride, and pc: Scenes from a Lesbian Mothers’ Group Anne Aronson

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Writing Other Women

Gender Issues in the Afghanistan Diaspora: Nadia’s Story Audrey C. Shalinsky 156 From the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to the Urban Communities of the Midwest: Conversations with Rural African American Women Valerie Grim 175 Walls and Bridges: Cultural Mediation and the Legacy of Ella Deloria Janet L. Finn 199 Writing Women at a Distance 205 A (Boarding) House Is Not a Home: Women’s Work and Woman’s Worth on the Margins of Domesticity Kari Boyd McBride 225 “Broke in Spirits”: Death, Depression, and Endurance through Writing Pamela Riney-Kehrberg 241 “It is hard to be born a woman but hopeless to be born a Chinese”: The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan Judy Yung 265 Appendix: Alternative Grouping by Topic 267 Contributors 271 Index

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Introduction

[First Page] [-7], (1) At the heart of Women Writing Women is the diversity of women’s voices. This aptly reflects the basic feminist commitment to women speaking for themselves as they explore such gendered realms of experience as identity, family, sexuality, motherhood, politics, and religion. The selections in Women Writing Women employ various methods of autobiography, biography, sociology, ethnography, and history and so represent the endeavors of feminists working across the academic spectrum, yet each maintains its focus on the firsthand experiences of women. For more than twenty-five years, a commitment to multidisciplinary approaches and to breaking down boundaries between scholarly writing and the realities of women’s diverse lives has remained a guiding principle for the editors of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies. This diversity of women’s experiences cannot be overstated, and it is to this splendid and complex reality that this collection is selected and dedicated. As we looked over the various types of essays that Frontiers has published in which women write about their lives and those of other women, the categories that emerged describe the distance of the author from the subject. The four sections of this volume thus comprise essays in which the authors write of their own lives (“Writing the Self ”); essays in which the authors write about women well known to them, in this case about family members (“Writing Family”); essays in which the authors write about women with whom they have developed professional and/or personal relationships (“Writing Other Women”); and finally essays in which the authors know their subjects only through the diaries and letters these women left behind (“Writing Women at a Distance”). These categories, however, are not entirely distinct. For example, writing about oneself almost always involves writing about one’s family in some way; likewise,


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writing about a family member or about research subjects with whom one has developed a relationship — either in person or through primary documents — entails writing to some degree about one’s own place in that relationship. Indeed, one way to view the arrangement of essays is to think of the sections as concentric circles that build on each other, one ring always existing in the context of the others. Another is to see how the sections refer to previous sections so that, for instance, the selections in “Women Writing at a Distance” rely on the letters and diaries of women writing about themselves, and the resulting essays attempt to understand the significance of those personal narratives, both for those women writing in the past and for contemporary readers. We have further organized the selections within each section to illustrate a variety of topics and levels of complexity. Generally, the sections begin with essays that present the relationship between author and subject in fairly straightforward fashion, in ways that might be thought of as the traditional genres of personal narrative or autobiography, biography, ethnography, and history. Each section, however, also includes essays that complicate the genre, demonstrating ways in which seemingly traditional and simple formats can be used to present complex and nuanced understandings of women’s experience. Personal narrative, for example, can be used as a means of understanding issues much larger than those affecting a single individual. Likewise, the subjects of the narratives — whether the author herself, a family member, or a research subject — shape their stories to fit their audience, and understanding that shaping becomes part of the story the essays convey. Our hope in including this range is that readers will recognize the opportunities and challenges afforded by these different ways that women write about women, widening their view of women’s lives and their connections with them. We envision this text as one useful for students in women’s studies courses as a means to explore various epistemological approaches to studying women’s lives — and the complexities of these approaches. In this way the text can be used as a reader, a jumping-off point for class discussions about how we know what we know about women’s lives. We also recommend Women Writing Women for thematic composition courses that explore a variety of rhetorical approaches and genres. For this purpose, the text provides a range of models for a variety of research strategies, topics, rhetorical stances, and modes of development and analysis. The most ideal fit might be a combination of the above, where students have opportunities both to discuss the issues and approaches and to apply them in their own writing. For those who use this text to model various approaches to writing, the progression of the book’s sections uses composition theorist James Moffett’s

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theory that writers learn to write best when they begin with the personal before moving on to subjects more distant from the self. However, we can envision that some classes might prefer to proceed in reverse order, beginning with archival research and ending a course with more personal writing, once students are more comfortable with each other and with the issues inherent in writing about people’s lives, including their own. Still other courses might organize the readings topically, focusing on the issues covered rather than on the relationship between the author and subject. For those who use the book in this fashion, we provide an appendix with suggestions of alternate groupings by topic. Regardless of how readers use this book, we hope that these essays deepen appreciation for women’s lives and for the writers who explore them. [-9], (3)

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Writing the Self

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In its effort to bridge the gap between women in the academy and in the community, Frontiers has encouraged from its inception forms of writing not typically seen in academic journals, including that of personal essay. On one level, the inclusion of personal narratives has embodied the feminist adage that “the personal is political,” acknowledging that what happens in the lives of ordinary women rightfully belongs in the consideration of larger feminist and political concerns. On another level, these narratives have reflected the journal’s commitment to providing a forum for a variety of women’s voices, allowing women to speak for and about themselves in ways that have often been excluded from academic discourse. “Moving from silence into speech,” writes bell hooks, is a powerful act “for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side,” an act that “heals, that makes new life and new growth possible.” 1 In this way, Frontiers has encouraged women to “talk back” and include their voices in the record and public discourse. The essays included in this section certainly illustrate these principles. In varied ways, they give voice to the complexity of women’s experiences and illustrate the power of this genre to plunge the reader textually into the details of those experiences. But these are more than simply interesting stories; they also demonstrate the power of the personal to illuminate, and even interrogate, a variety of wider issues. As Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson write, since the 1970s women’s autobiography has become “a privileged site for thinking about issues of writing at the intersection of feminist, postcolonial, and postmodern critical theories. . . . The texts and theory of women’s autobiography have been pivotal for revising our concepts of women’s life issues — growing up female, coming to voice, affiliation, sexuality and textuality, the life cycle.”2 For feminist studies, then, writing about the self is not just about recording life experience; rather, it is about exploring the full spectrum of political and social issues by tracing their connections to life experience. The essays in this section, like the genre of women’s autobiography as a whole, draw us not only into the authors’ lives but also into issues of wider significance. This section begins with Joanne B. Mulcahy’s “Weave and Mend,” an essay that in many ways sets the stage for this entire volume. In narrating her experience of working with women’s writing groups in Northern Ireland, Mulcahy tells not only her own story but also those of the writers with whom she worked. Part autobiography, part ethnography, and part reflection on the power

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of storytelling, she explores how stories weave and mend together the fragments of women’s experiences, allowing those who tell and hear them to know those experiences in new ways. The next piece explores the complexity of navigating cultural hybridity as the writer’s home culture intersects with American middle-class and academic cultures. In “Sense and Responsibility,” Maribel Sosa narrates the widening gap she experiences as her own academic success leads her away from her family’s immigrant agricultural life. Sosa remembers how, as a child, each night her mother would rub Spanish “slowly into our chests until the sore throat was gone, until we could return to school the next day and struggle with the cryptic sounds of instruction.” Yet as her own proficiency in English improves, she becomes embarrassed of her parents’ lack of fluency in the language — even as she admires them and acknowledges the emotional and financial price they pay for her own success. The emotional complexity of Sosa’s narrative moves what is, in many ways, a personal narrative that is traditional in its form to one that addresses the experience of women who traverse multiple languages and cultures in ways that are never simple or easily navigable. Personal criticism, theory that includes the personal, according to Smith and Watson, “facilitates the reading of personal experience and theory through each other, . . . [aiming] to bridge the troubling gap between academic feminists and feminist activists. It is a search for a wider audience, a broader conversation, ideally on more honest and equal terms.” 3 This is a description that is particularly apt for the next essay in this section, Katherine Sutherland’s “Of Milk and Miracles: Nursing, the Life Drive, and Subjectivity.” While Sutherland describes scenes from her lived experience, in this case episodes of her early weeks mothering her daughter in a neonatal intensive care unit, she does so to critique standard psychoanalytic theory that foregrounds separation, isolation, and the death drive as the forces that create subjectivity. Instead, Sutherland proposes Melanie Klein’s breast-based model as an alternative way of theorizing subjectivity in a way that foregrounds connection, reparation, and the life drive. As Sutherland weaves theory and personal experience, she creates an elegant polyphony of voices — those of various theorists, her own academic voice, and her voice as new mother — to interrogate a topic that has typically valued theoretical bodies over material ones; in doing so, she very much deepens our understanding of both the theoretical and the personal. Finally, the last selection of this section, Nancy Reincke’s “It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness: A Stretch of the Imagination,”brings us back to the first topic of storytelling introduced by the Mulcahy essay. Reincke narrates the process of writing a presentation of global feminism, illustrating the inextri-

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cability of the process from the product, and of the personal from the academic. Weaving together media coverage of the murders of two Filipina maids in Singapore, Jessica Hagedorn’s novel Dogeaters, and Reincke’s own relationship with her underemployed, working-class mother, Reincke illustrates that true global feminism involves “making connections between the lives around [her] and the lives of women who live at great distances from [her], both geographically and experientially.” In trying to “stretch her imagination” to encompass the lives of oppressed women distant from herself, she is ultimately brought back to consider the same issues of power, complicity, and exploitation in the lives of those she knows and in her relationships with them. This complex and selfconscious view of autobiography uses the experience of writing about the self to explore the intersection of theory with the personal in a way that utilizes [5], (5) each to illumine the other, even as it raises the ethical complexities of using real people’s lives as academic material. What responsibilities do authors have for the representations of others — family members, colleagues, acquaintances, Lines: 25 to strangers — who also inhabit their self-narratives? Narratives always inhabit a ——— context of other texts, other events, and other people’s memories. The issues 3.92401p raised by Reincke’s essay are ones that reverberate throughout this volume even ——— as they resist easy answers. Normal Pag As the above descriptions of these essays indicate, personal writing is clearly * PgEnds: Pa not simply writing about the self; it is also writing that directs the writer and reader out into the realm of society, political practice, and theoretical analysis. Far from being merely interesting stories of other people’s lives that have little [5], (5) to do with one’s own, autobiographical writing as it has been envisioned by Frontiers over the past quarter century seeks to give voice to personal experience in such a way that it forges new connections, new perspectives, and new understanding of women’s lives. Notes 1. bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston: South End Press, 1989), 9. 2. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Smith and Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 5. In this extensive introduction, Smith and Watson provide an overview and bibliography of the main theoretical issues and approaches to women’s autobiography from the late 1960s through the 1990s, and the anthology that follows contains the essential essays on the topic; together they provide a excellent starting point for readers interested in women’s life writing. 3. Smith and Watson, “Introduction,” 33.

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Weave and Mend

joanne b. mulcahy

[First Page] [7], (1) Freedom. It isn’t once, to walk out under the Milky Way, feeling the rivers of light, the fields of dark— freedom is daily, prose-bound, routine remembering. Putting together, inch by inch the starry worlds. From all the lost collections. Adrienne Rich, “For Memory”

On a fine June day in 1995, Ruth Carr, an Irish poet and editor, picked me up at the Belfast bus terminal. As she patiently cradled her seven-month-old baby, Amy, I argued with the counter clerk about where to store my bag. Not in the station, he assured me, because, “Ye just don’t know what’s in a wee bag, now do ye?” My duffel finally landed across the street at the Europa, the most frequently bombed hotel in Europe. This was not my first confrontation with lingering traces of the bloody, thirtyyear “Troubles,” the contemporary cap on centuries of conflict between Catholics and Protestants. Yet I kept expecting rifts to heal before my eyes. This was the fabled first summer of peace, following cease-fire declarations by both the Irish Republican Army and Protestant Loyalist/Unionist groups. I’d arrived in Ireland several weeks earlier for a six-month residency at the Verbal Arts Centre in Derry, an ancient walled city on the country’s northwest border with the Republic. 1 With a grant from the British Council, I’d come to research women’s lives, but I had no plan for what that might entail. From my childhood in Philadelphia to my adult home in the Pacific Northwest, I had learned Irish history and literature through men: Michael Collins,


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Robert Emmett, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. Contemporary news coverage of the conflict in the North gave us notable names like Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley. But I was after other stories, the unofficial tales that often stay hidden. Trained as an anthropologist/folklorist, I had worked for more than a decade with women in Alaska and Oregon. Their oral traditions amplified and sometimes contradicted written history, challenging the American West’s metaphors of conquest and domination. Did Irish women similarly confront existing myths? Where were their stories? Scholar and activist Monica McWilliams suggests that throughout the twentieth century, Irish women shaped politics in community centers, shelters, and kitchens and on the streets. However, the documentation of their work has been lost to the greater demands of daily life. 2 Excavating such tales would require time and patience. But somewhere in Northern Ireland lived the stories that might realize Seamus Heaney’s nowfamous plea for the rhyming of “hope and history.” These, I suspected, would be narratives of daily life, of family and local history, the cultural mortar that solders long-standing schisms, the threads that reweave the jagged tears of religion and politics. Women’s groups seemed a perfect entry point for discovering such stories. Yet driving with Ruth to her writing class in Belfast that June day, I was a bit apprehensive about how to decipher the nuances of Northern Irish life. This was our first meeting; I knew Ruth by reputation as someone dedicated to making women’s lives public and visible. She’d edited a collection of women’s stories from Northern Ireland, The Female Line, written feminist essays and poetry, and taught in varied community settings. One of her poems echoed back to me as we drove through town, past brick buildings crowned by barbed wire and broken glass. She’d written the verse for her daughter Amy, who was slumbering in the backseat,“who dreamed nine months in my inner sea / tumbling, kicking, hiccuping / while ceasefires were declared / in the world that she will absorb / like litmus paper.”3 We talked in fragments, the way women do while minding a sleeping child, trusting that the whole cloth of story would grow from scraps. At the Greenway Women’s Centre in East Belfast, Ruth works each week with a lively, religiously mixed writing group. When we arrived, tea mugs rested on the table next to homemade scones. Who had time to bake, I wondered? In Northern Ireland, women have long worked outside the home, often as the primary wage earner. In Belfast, the linen industry brought women into the factories in the eighteenth century; in Derry, women still file each morning into the shirt factories. One popular Derry song, “The Town I Love So Well,” chronicles “the men on the dole” who “played a mother’s role.” Soft-voiced, sixty-year-old Marie read a poem about her mother’s Irish soda

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bread. The next story came from a small, fiery woman self-described as a “mongrel,” neither Catholic nor Protestant. The mood shifted quickly from the cultural salve of food to yet-unresolved political divisions. Short, blonde Diane, eyes twinkling, related a fable. Her protagonists, the leaders of Sinn Fein and the leading Unionist party, bitter enemies in real life, are Siamese twins separated at birth, now destined to search for their other half. “In my peace plan,” she declared, “there would be forced mixed marriages, Catholic and Protestant, for twenty-five years.” The room exploded with riotous applause. Ruth told me later about a writing prompt she’d given the group, “What does peace mean to you?” Diane, whose husband is a police officer with the largely Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary, didn’t hesitate. With the cease-fire, she wrote, she could hang her husband’s police uniforms on the outside line without fear of reprisal by the ira. The simplest task, laundry, tore the center of her daily life for thirty years. “Weave and mend, weave and mend,” Ruth intoned from Canadian writer Anne Cameron’s Daughters of Copper Woman, to close the group’s meeting. 4 Those words echo even now, meshed with olfactory memories of Ireland — incense in Catholic churches, the earthy sweetness of burning peat, chips sizzling in hot oil, and the acrid stench of burning rubber from carjackings and burnings during that first summer of peace. From the room I rented in Derry, I could see and smell the breadth of the Catholic Bogside neighborhood, site of some of the worst violence of the Troubles. On July 3, I woke under a black dome of sky. Smoke filled the streets. A truck smoldered at the corner, a burning prompted by the release of Lee Clegg, a British soldier serving time for the murder of a Belfast girl, free after only two years. The stench followed me to the bus station as I fled to Donegal to visit a writing group. I was anxious to leave behind reminders of the Troubles. When I reached Killybegs, a fishing village on the west side of Donegal, the burning rubble seemed a distant memory. Noelle Vial, a poet in her early forties with five children, set me up in her comfortable home, a remodeled nineteenthcentury school. That evening, herring seiners streamed by the Bayside Hotel as we waited for Noelle’s writing group to gather. A liquid feast of tea, red wine, then tea again sustained us as women trickled in after bedding down children. With no official starting or closing time, the critique crept toward 3 a.m. A poem about breastfeeding followed a story about the Famine, but sandwiched in between was the magical world of what the Irish call craic: gossip about local politicians, abusive physicians, wayward husbands, and children’s mischief. Here were the truths I was after: the not-yet-polished and still-information stories. The Irish live by the spoken word, which by its very nature, argues poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “has a plumb line into the subconscious.”5

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Stories create as well as reflect the world, and I hungered for these incompletely articulated stories, the raw sources of literature. I returned home to a message from the director of the Derry Well Woman Centre, requesting a writing teacher. Well Woman provides aid unavailable or often curtailed in the Catholic Republic: counseling for unwanted pregnancy, support groups for survivors of sexual abuse, domestic violence, cancer, and other illnesses. Few in the support groups would claim the title “writer”; they are individuals struggling to give form to painful experience. I eagerly volunteered for the job. I would begin with two groups, cancer and sexual abuse survivors. Cancer has not touched my life, so I felt initially awkward in this group. At our opening meeting on a Friday afternoon, we wrote on “firsts.” Most chronicled joyful memories: first school days, kisses, loves. But politics crept in with the prompt “what if . . . ?” Aine was back to the dark night when she carried newspapers to a British soldier at the checkpoint. She was en route home to Donegal after a visit to Derry. Hadn’t that soldier asked her nicely, and wasn’t he lonely there, and hadn’t he only wanted a wee paper? Her children fumed: didn’t she know she could be taken for an informer? But she stood by her actions, crossing family expectations as well as tightly drawn political lines. Linda told of the repeated political raids on her house — the broken glass, the food ground into the floor, the children’s terror-filled nightmares, and the panicked waiting. Tension hovered like a slumbering giant. “One night,” she described,“they came in while the wains [children] were watching television. I was out and the soldiers stormed right in!”The group braced for blunt edges, brutality.“Sure, I got home, didn’t I see guns propped in the corner. And weren’t the soldiers on the couch with the wains, the lot of ’em eating popcorn and watching Little House on the Prairie!” Laughter broke up the craic, which everyone agreed was good. The first Tuesday of the sexual abuse survivors’ group, I felt better prepared. This was familiar terrain, since I had worked with women’s crisis-intervention programs in the United States. Each participant brought a photograph or an object to write about. Bridgette, who often facilitated the group, showed the two-year-old shoes of “the person I was before the abuse.” Marian displayed a photograph of a child in a dress and pinafore, held upside down by a man in what appeared to be a well. The strange setting and awkward angle skewed the photo. The child’s vulnerability struck me first, but closer inspection revealed a slightly turned face, flooded with light, a nearly religious glow. The face of an angel. “Aye, it’s me kissing the Blarney stone,” Marian announced proudly. “I’m ten. It was my only vacation.” We laughed about the Blarney stone and the proverbial gift of gab in tricky situations that it supposedly confers. For weeks afterward, as Marian detailed the court case against her father, the man

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who “interrupted” her and her sister and sired their children, the innocence and hope in this photo flashed in my mind like the memory of crocus buds in deepest winter. Near the end of our meeting, pixie-faced Rosemary, younger-looking than her forty-some years, silent through most of the session, turned to me. Her voice taunted, “So, what’s this writing supposed to do for us?” She had written a short piece about the man who repeatedly abused her as a child, whom she still saw outside the bar where he worked, his nonchalance a brutal trigger to her pain. “Make me cry, will it? I haven’t shed tears in years. Won’t, either. I feel nothing.” Here was a rip in the uniformly smooth welcome I’d been given in Northern Ireland. I cringed, stung by her challenge to my belief that words might release us from the darkness of inchoate memory. Leaving the Well Woman Centre, I moved slowly past rows of stately Georgian homes toward the pub to meet my partner, Bob, who had joined me in Derry for three months. “A tough nut to crack,” I lamented to Bob, giving only a rudimentary description of Rosemary. “I didn’t know you were here to crack nuts,” he countered gently. What was I in Northern Ireland to do? I played with the perfectly formed shamrock on the foam of my Guinness, guessing that the bartender shaped these only for tourists. Being entrusted with women’s stories had moved me beyond that status. Yet the weight of their words rested uneasily on my shoulders, and I wasn’t sure why. Stories were a point of entry, but the violence in women’s lives erected a barrier as thick and impenetrable as Derry’s stone walls. I still rested on the other side. In late summer, Ruth invited me back to Belfast, this time to the meeting of her poetry collective, Word of Mouth. The group gathers monthly at the Linen Hall library, the oldest in Northern Ireland, an eighteenth-century structure sacred in this culture wed to words. The collective includes twelve of the country’s finest writers, but I wouldn’t have found their work on bookshelves. In shops and in library catalogs, a huge gap exists — the place where “Northern” and “women” conjoin as a literary category. The gap stretches across Irish history. Women’s literary traditions — oral and written — have long been ignored or denigrated. Historically, folklorist Clodagh Harvey points out, Irish women’s oral Seanchas, or “histories” — short, realistic narratives — were deemed pale versions of the men’s Scealaiocht, literally “stories” or hero tales. Angela Bourke, a writer and Irish scholar, points to the one poetic form women traditionally ruled, the caoineadh — keening for the dead with discipline and artistry, a skilled conveyance of grief that led the entire community through emotional catharsis. Despite the importance of women

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poets, laments poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “the literary canon was drawn up without them.” Irish written literature has always featured women, but they were, in poet Eavan Boland’s words, “passive, decorative, raised to emblematic stature.” A case in point: the 4,044-page, three-volume Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, published in 1991 and billed as the definitive anthology of Irish literature, included almost no women authors. The editors finally acknowledged their error and agreed to produce a fourth volume. 6 In the Republic, women have forged new literary paths with anthologies such as Ailbhe Smyth’s Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Irish Women’s Writing. In a relatively short time, Boland argues, “Women have moved from being the subjects and objects of Irish poems to being authors of them. It is a momentous transit.” 7 Yet few women writers in the North have achieved such visibility. Some Irish women’s anthologies include Northern women, but they are rarely heard as separate, historically and culturally distinct voices. In anthologies of the Troubles collected and edited by men, women are largely absent. In my conversations with Ruth Carr, she argued that the notion that Northern women just aren’t good enough is itself “simply not good enough.” At the Word of Mouth collective meeting, I witnessed the truth of her words. Each woman read skillfully, offering insightful critiques to the others. Joan Newmann, one of the few members with a collection in print, opened with a haunting poem about her childhood. 8 Ann McKay, writer, teacher, and administrator of the prestigious Pushkin literary prizes, followed. She struggled with a stillemerging writer’s identity. Like many other women I met, she fought the urge to both honor and transcend a religious cultural identity. She seemed wistful for her days as a teacher in Zimbabwe, when she was seen not as Protestant but simply as “Irish.” I told Ann about a gay-and-lesbian-pride parade I had attended in Derry, dismayed by the dour Protestant men in black reading biblical passages in protest. Her eyes flared in shared anger, then she added quietly, “But they’re part of me, too, those dour men.” Ann’s words crystallized an evolving awareness that I still struggled to articulate. How, three months into my stay in Northern Ireland, I had just begun to grasp the complicated shape of religious-political divisions. Some Catholics, historically disenfranchised, now claim rights to greater cultural authenticity and “Irishness.” Some of the same Protestant women who marched alongside Catholics in the 1960s civil rights marches feel silenced, denied access to the Irish language, folk traditions, and other cultural resources. The schisms cut deep, with many complex layerings. The Troubles’ rifts did not mend after the cease-fire, as I’d naively hoped. Arson and carjackings dotted the newspapers through the summer; angry confrontations during the annual Protestant

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“marching season” had brought British tanks to Derry’s main square just weeks before. I’d walked to town on a Saturday morning to encounter a sea of graygreen armored trucks, a small glimpse of what must have been the Troubles’ unchanging landscape. Yet the women I met wrote stories that seared through the mythic divides. Did stories reflect temporary repair or genuine mending? At this meeting only six of the usual dozen Word of Mouth collective members were present, yet the room felt full. “Aye, the ghosts are here,” Joan’s daughter, Kate Newmann, told me only half in jest, followed by the assurance that “many people have seen them.” Courageous women they were for inhabiting the Governor’s Room in this august literary space where phantom men still hovered. Another kind of bravery drove the women in Killybegs to gather at midnight. All at once, I wanted the Word of Mouth group to hear the stories I’d witnessed in Killybegs and Derry and Omagh. As Joan closed the meeting, I sat quietly, struggling with an emerging idea. Here, where division and silence have ruled, collaboration was needed, a physical gathering of women from varied backgrounds, religions, and classes. If stories are shaped not merely as individual memories but also in the flow of social life, how else might a new vision of Northern women find form? I voiced the idea of an overnight conference to bring women together to write and share stories — oral and written, with no division between amateurs and professionals. All stories would be welcome. Quiet murmurs of interest came first. Then several women expressed a frequent concern: Wouldn’t this invite American-style-writing-as-therapy, Oprah-chatshow-culture thinly veiled as literature? I thought of Marian and Rosemary from the survivors’ group. Were their stories “simply therapy”? In the end, the members of the group offered to help organize the event. I left feeling heartened. A month later, on a warm August night, I met with Ruth, Joan, Kate, Ann, Noelle, and four other women at The Smuggler’s Inn B&B in Greencastle, a fishing town in northeastern Donegal. On the map, this edge of the Innishowen Peninsula forms a mouth to Lough Foyle, the top lip poised to kiss Magilligan Point across in the North. The geographic symbolism of open flirtation seemed apt; crossing the border, everyone marveled at the absence of army checkpoints, dismantled in the wake of the cease-fire. As we gathered that weekend in Greencastle, the differences eased further, giving way to common purpose. Nine clear, ringing voices came together to plan “Multistoried Women,” the gathering that had germinated through weeks of visits to writers’ groups. Several were teachers from the Verbal Arts Centre; others, such as recent Trinity College graduate Tricia Hegerty, simply appeared and volunteered to help. The event’s name plays on the “multistoried” parking structures now ubiquitous in

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Northern Ireland. Many consider them an eyesore, a sign of too rapid growth in need of dismantling. “Yes, we are multistoried,” several women responded with a grin to the suggested analogy. We talked over tea at the B&B, on walks along the granite cliffs licked by white tongues of sea, and over dinner at Kieley’s Seafood House. Two a.m. found us back on the pier for a game of kick the bottle under a waning moon. Miraculously, the next morning we left with an outline for the gathering. This was planning, Irish-style. Back in Derry, getting ready for Tuesday night’s sexual abuse survivors’ group, the vexing charge of writing as therapy stayed with me. Which of the stories I would hear that night might transform to literature? At the Well Woman Centre, I invited everyone to “Multistoried Women.” Several women voiced polite interest. Marian updated the case against her father, whom she feared would be exonerated because of his public position. Her story now vied with the Catholic Church’s sex scandals for the front page of the tabloids. When we wrote on “I remember . . . ,” Marian described herself at fourteen, in the hospital delivery room, feet in the stirrups, “one blue sock, one pink.” She had had so many questions for her mother on their nightly walks through the graveyard, late, under shadowy cover. “Where will the baby come?” she’d queried. “Same place it went in,” came her mother’s matter-of-fact reply. Many in the group wept quietly, except Rosemary and me, our faces dry masks. Did we feel the grief but keep it at bay, mimicking the discipline of the caoineadh, the traditional keener? Why couldn’t I tap the smoldering rage I expected to find? In the 1970s, when I worked in a women’s crisis center in Alaska, I listened to women who had survived rape, incest, domestic violence. I couldn’t know their lives; still, I grieved with women, entered, if only for a moment, their storied worlds. But in Northern Ireland, the convoluted melding of history and family violence felt too volatile, the path in too labyrinthine. How else to explain my curious detachment as I listened to these stories? The words simply washed over me. Rosemary and I sat silent, eyes locked in shared denial. A light rain chilled the evening as I left the Well Woman Centre to meet Bob at the pub. A gaggle of young people streamed in for the evening music session: black leather, black high-heeled boots, black hair, and lined eyelids shimmering through the smoky haze. These were the children of the Troubles. Nothing could penetrate the blackness of this raw, biting night until I remembered Rosemary’s eyes as she bid good-bye. For just an instant, I had thought I saw a spark of hope. A week later, Bob and I drove out past the first wash of aubergine heather to The Rural College in Draperstown, a wooded, modern facility that might serve as a site for our conference. Against the Sperrin Mountains southeast of Derry,

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a farmer moved mounds of drying turf that spilled out onto the velvet hills. The land here welcomes as fully as the people, as though blood never soaked this soil. As we drove by, the farmer raised a hand in welcome, and I felt again the heartbreaking graciousness the Irish don like a light shawl, the heavy cloak of history dropped. We passed the towns of The Cross and Claudy, crossed the Banagher and Moydamiaght forests, and discovered at Draperstown the perfect setting for our gathering. At the very heart of Northern Ireland, The Rural College is nearly equidistant from Derry, Belfast, and parts of Donegal, far from the demands that devour women’s time at home. The next day, excitement filled the Verbal Arts Centre as we finalized plans. With grant funds, we arranged sumptuous meals,“creche” (child care) facilities, poetry readings, music, and theatrical presentations. Angela Bourke, a writer and Irish scholar, agreed to offer a keynote talk on women’s stories. Brochures advertising the event stacked up in the outgoing mail. In the bottom right corner rested Muriel Rukeyser’s words, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? / The world would split open.”9 We were stuffing envelopes, the room abuzz with talk, when I looked up and saw Rosemary in the doorway. Shocked that she had sought me out in a public place, I introduced her, giving no indication of how we had met. We chatted over tea between rows of computers, under the spire of St. Columb’s Cathedral. Rosemary tapped nail-bitten fingers on the worn wooden desk. She’d been thinking, maybe this gathering we were planning, well, she wasn’t certain, but she might like to talk about it. Would I meet her at Austin’s the following day? The pride of this department store, located on Derry’s central square, is its 115-seat restaurant, and surely we could blend anonymously into the sea of tea drinkers. The next day, I ascended Austin’s stairs past plaid jumpers and wool blazers toward bobbing heads and white teacups. Rosemary stood out in a bright crimson sweater. “Well, then,” she picked nervously at her bread as she described her struggle to keep a part-time job, to somehow find release from the relentless tug of her past. It was always there, the powerless feeling of suffocating, a smothering under something that kept her numb, sapped her energy, and suctioned her tears. She talked on and on. Her face softened and I nodded, released to a violent incident in my own past, a memory I’d kept at bay while in Northern Ireland. Safe in the anonymous crowd, I returned to a dark wood, a jumble of unknown men, the gasping for air, the years of disbelief and shadowy dreams, and then, the embrace of a rape support group in Seattle. Ten years before in a different Northwest, we had shared stories, like rivers finding common source, ending with a reading of Anne Cameron’s Daughters of Copper Woman:

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There are Women everywhere with fragments gather fragments weave and mend 10

Language, our shared salvation, formed a narrow island on which I now stood with Rosemary, each of us surrounded by turbulent waters of memory. Rosemary’s face came back into focus, flushed as the flaming sweater. Perhaps this gathering of women at Draperstown might help her, maybe even get her writing a bit, get past some of this, you know? I looked out onto the square, where British tanks had rolled in August, the miraculous cease-fire challenged, where peace again prevailed, and I knew that there is more hope in this world than our fragile beings can hold. When the flood that threatened to engulf me stilled, when I had matched the caoineadh’s discipline, I could finally look up. Sounds emerged and I heard my voice give calm encouragement that yes, of course, Rosemary should come to Draperstown. For that moment, I was released from debates over art and therapy, because I remembered that to crawl to the opaque center of a story and scratch away slivers of light is how the slow transformation to what we call literature begins. As we struggle to refine our words, we sometimes forget the surfacing from silence, the groping toward the very notion that we have a story worth telling. At Draperstown, under bright October skies, we remembered. For two days, women of varied backgrounds and ages inhabited the nucleus of Northern Ireland. As participants arrived, faces I recognized streamed by — writers from groups I’d visited in Donegal, Belfast, Omagh, and Derry. Rosemary appeared early. She hung back from the crowd, a bit apprehensive, but her face flushed with excitement and anticipation. The following morning, Angela Bourke read her story “The Dark Island,” the transformation of a traditional tale, “The King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter.” 11 In both versions, when the king’s wife dies, he declares that he will marry the only woman who fits the dead queen’s clothes — his daughter. Terrified, the daughter puts off the wedding again and again with requests for new clothes. In Bourke’s version, the heroine outwits her father and escapes with the aid of a henwife. Following her prompting, the daughter hides under a downy bed in a trunk tossed into the sea until she washes onto a new shore. A hush fell over the room as the tale ended. My eyes closed as I conjured the image of Marian, hopeful and innocent, poised above the Blarney stone. Where was she now, in a courtroom with her father? I prayed for rivers of eloquence to flow miraculously to Marian’s tongue.

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Saturday’s workshops dealt with writing from personal experience, editing and revision, humor, storytelling, and publishing. Themes revealed how women remake received myths and stories yet carry on traditional life. They refused the either/or of dominant mythologies. The roles of writer, editor, and creative worker emerged alongside, not as substitutes for, those of mother, partner, caregiver, sister, and friend. Silences were broken. “There is more than one way to rape,” lamented one woman. “I am a woman who lays out the dead,” wrote another, a tribute to both the traditional “handywoman” who handled birth and death and to the contemporary woman who nurtures aging parents through their final days. Everywhere, women reached across divides. Published writers, such as Aine Miller and Joan Newmann, sat with women from support groups who had just begun to voice their stories. The Troubles were present, but as a soft undertone, not often the governing metaphor. Nationalist women sat with policemen’s wives. An image rose, the statue of an ancient Celtic deity on Boa Island in County Fermanagh who is, historian Catherine Shannon argues, like Northern women, able “to look in two directions at once and still remain whole.”12 In one workshop, storyteller Liz Gough offered each person a key with directions to narrate the group through the locked doors in their lives. I saw Rosemary enter, worried that this task would strain her brittle emotions. We had talked of her fears; I had reassured her that she didn’t need to tell the story of her abuse. I wanted to plead, “Don’t let that story rule you. We are multistoried.” But I remembered the complex, sometimes labyrinthine nature of multistoried structures. One twisted channel may block access to the rest, one story may subjugate the others into frozen stillness. Who can know when and where someone else’s path might open? Rosemary accepted the key, fingering its smooth, chill challenge. She found voice and slowly descended, unlocking and entering the dwelling place of demons that for thirty years had choked her emotions, clogged her tears, bent her slender self like a wire taut with anger, a sealed container through which no stories flowed. The women sat spellbound under her tale, but they couldn’t know the full miracle of wetness on her cheeks. Or so I imagine it was. For I saw the session only through Rosemary’s excited words in the hallway afterward, when she tugged at my sleeve with an animated, tightly whispered, I cried! The words rolled over me like thunder sweeping vast skies, a longed-for explosion. The world split open. In 1996, a year after I’d left Northern Ireland, a slim volume of poems, Word of Mouth, arrived in my mailbox in Oregon. Named for the poetry collective I

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visited in Belfast, this fine publication holds the offerings of friends, including Ruth Carr’s poem for her daughter, born “while ceasefires were declared / in the world that she will absorb / like litmus paper.” 13 The heathered center of Northern Ireland felt close, accessible, full of multistoried possibility. The poems carried me back to Derry and Draperstown, and to a long table in a Belfast restaurant. There we held our final, celebratory gathering, uncorking bottles of red wine in a flow of laughter and possibility. Kate and Joan Newmann presented me with a gift — a flowing, purple sari from their travels in Asia. We ordered pizzas and talked for hours about the next step for women to ensure that our gathering wouldn’t simply fade to a “once-off.” I missed the last bus to Derry. Sleeping on Ruth Carr’s floor, I drifted to sleep dreaming of the world that sleeping Amy would soon absorb. Today, I drape their words around me like the shimmering floral sari, shaped by a distant hand, carried back from India, across oceans of words. The subtle layers of “text” and “textile” remind me that they share the Latin root texere — to weave. Sometimes, sliding my fingers over the sari’s smooth cloth, I light upon a ragged piece, ripped perhaps in transit back to Oregon. I remind myself to find needle and thread, lest the tear grow. The cloth will be stronger for the mending, I know, yet I rest a long while stroking that jagged edge, wanting only to remember how it feels. Notes 1. “Londonderry”is the city’s official name and the one used by the Loyalist community; however, I use “Derry” throughout because it is the more common, colloquial usage, adopted both by Catholics and many Protestants. 2. Monica McWilliams, “Struggling for Peace and Justice: Reflections on Women’s Activism in Northern Ireland,” Journal of Women’s History 6, no. 4–7, no. 1 (1995): 13–39. 3. Ruth Carr, “Community Relation,” in The Female Line (n.p., n.d.); reprinted in Word of Mouth, ed. Ruth Carr et al. (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1996), 103. 4. Anne Cameron, Daughters of Copper Woman (Vancouver, British Columbia: Press Gang Publishers, 1981), 149. 5. Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, “What Foremothers?” Poetry Ireland Review 36 (1995): 29. 6. Clodagh Harvey, “Some Irish Women Storytellers and Reflections on the Role of Women in the Storytelling Tradition,” Western Folklore 48 (1992): 109–28; Angela Bourke, “More in Anger than in Sorrow: Irish Women’s Lament Poetry,” in Feminist Messages: Coding in Women’s Folk Culture, ed. Joan Newlon Radner (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 160–82; Dhomhnaill, “What Foremothers?” 22; Eavan Boland, “A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition,” in A Dozen Lips (Dublin: Attic Press, 1994), 72–92; and Seamus Deane, ed., The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (New York: Norton, 1991).

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7. Ailbhe Smyth, ed., Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Irish Women’s Writing (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989); Boland, “A Kind of Scar,” 75. 8. Joan Newmann, Coming of Age (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 1995). 9. Muriel Rukeyser, “Käthe Kollwitz,” in her The Speed of Darkness (New York: Random House, 1968), 103. 10. Cameron, Daughters of Copper Woman, 149. 11. Angela Bourke, “The Dark Island,” unpublished translation read by the author at the conference. 12. Catherine Shannon, “Recovering the Voices of Women of the North,” Irish Review 12 (1992): 30. 13. Carr, “Community Relation,” 103.

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Sense and Responsibility

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[20], (14 We were never taught to believe that horizons were intangible things. The bold black line where the sky and earth met seemed always to exist only several miles away from our home, and, if our mother would only let us, my sister and I were positive that on a Saturday afternoon we could reach that line before it disappeared to the other side of the world. But we were at an age when we could also block out whole cathedrals, mountains, and moons with our right eyes squinting and the left ones shut, our thumbs held out, eclipsing the intended object. Our world seemed, to us, the center of the entire Godfashioned universe. My sister and I would sit on a couple of empty fertilizer pails drinking strawberry Kool-Aid, leaning back against the trailer’s aluminum walls, our legs dangling and swaying back and forth to an understood rhythm. There we would sit and contemplate the seconds it would take the mountains to engulf the sun, to transform gracefully from an immense royal blue, and to disappear and be replaced by the striking sincerity of the desert night. My parents never invaded or countered our wondrous musings; it was, instead, in town and at school that we learned to deal with perspective. Both my parents had a very limited knowledge of English. Their English was forced, painful, unmelodious. They knew enough to get by. When we would go to town for visits to the dentist, to the bank, or to shop for groceries, my sister or I would translate for my mother. With age the novelty of it all wore off. It became apparent to us how people treated my mother, how they talked down to her and easily bypassed her. It became apparent how a person without possession of English went easily unnoticed. By fourth grade I refused to translate for my mother. I would, instead, sit off to the side in an uncomfortable, orange chair and watch her wrestle with a language that tore her throat and pained of

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shattered pride. Shame became synonymous with being Mexican, with speaking Spanish. Shame came when the women laughed, the ones who sat behind counters, who spoke to my mother, shouting like they were housebreaking some stupid, lazy dog. And when the words finally did emerge from my mother’s throat, they were dry and gray, a mouthful of ashes that floated meaninglessly to the four blank walls of an air-conditioned office. After a while I even refused to go inside those offices with my parents. I would prefer to sit in the car, in 110degree weather, enraged, suffocated, and embarrassed, rather than watch those people smile condescendingly at my father, who stumbled over his stubborn, heavy syllables and wrung the obscure vowels into the creases of his sombrero. At home, though, my mother brought us up on Spanish. She would rub it slowly into our chests until the sore throat was gone, until we could return to school the next day and struggle with the cryptic sounds of instruction. Spanish, then, was the soothing voice of my mother reciting poems and prayers to me before I fell asleep. It was the faint memory of my grandparents singing love songs in the coolness of their adobe kitchen. Spanish was the sound I thought the stars must make. And when I heard love in Spanish it was the angels in church wanting and whispering to each other from across the altar. English was functional, precise, and calculated. English was also Sesame Street, Bugs Bunny, Judy Blume, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Mickey Mouse, Big Macs, and movie stars. But perhaps, most importantly, English was the language of what really appeared to matter. English was the language of instruction, and when I sat in my school chair twisting my fingers into the shape of a cross under my desk, praying ten Ave Marias hard and determined so that the teacher wouldn’t call on me, she still would. Even God, His mother, and all the saints, it seemed, would ignore my prayers if I did not recite them in English. It would be easy to lie, to say that my elementary and middle school education was strenuous, but it really wasn’t. It is much easier to learn a language at a young age, to let its grammar seep into one’s unconscious. Unconscious, also, was my assimilation. The people I most respected at that time were my teachers — Ms. Reynolds, Ms. Tite, Ms. Fairbanks, Ms. Sexton, Mr. Cox, Mr. Kruse, and Mr. Applegate — and they were all white. I associated my parents with a different kind of knowledge. Theirs was the one of manners, of educación; of “yes, sir,”“no, ma’am,”“thank you,”“may I,” and “please.” My teachers had the knowledge of books. There were written sources behind their reasons. They were the progeny of Shakespeare, Washington, da Vinci, Lincoln, Kennedy, the Declaration of Independence, Custer, the Alamo. Their ancestors had so valiantly defeated the Indians for us; they had traversed a frozen Delaware for us, sailed the Mayflower, and walked on the moon for us. How in any way could

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they not be right? And us, the Indians, the Mexicans, the poor white trash, what did we have? From what glory had we sprung? My pride was in my country, in my founding fathers, in the great nation of English. Mexican, my Spanish accent, was my burden, and I was expected to rise above it. By the time I was in first grade I was reading at or above the level of my English-speaking peers. It tormented me to wonder why my parents couldn’t do the same. My mother, especially, caused me some anguish those first years in school. I wanted her to be heard, to act as confidently as she seemed to at home. I needed her to have conversations with my teachers instead of nodding her little, grateful smile to the praise and advice I knew she only half understood. My sister and I were learning English and speaking it more often in the home, and my mother happily encouraged it. She would save what money she could and subscribe to children’s magazines and book clubs. Kids from our trailer park would come over to play and would end up, instead, with a book in their hands. She was never jealous or afraid that we would lose our Spanish, that we would someday forget how to speak to her. If she was concerned to even the slightest degree, she must have kept it well concealed in order for my sister and me never to think twice that the acquisition of English could cause some sort of rift between us. The memories left from those days are slight bruises, small nips of growing pains. Perhaps if I had grown up in a segregated ghetto of East L.A. or in a small barrio of South Tucson instead of the rural farmworking community of Poston, Arizona, things might have been different. Perhaps if I had been born to different parents instead of the ones who drilled it into my child consciousness that we should work our minds hard in school and that the body could last only so long: Work your mind hard now so you can save your body later. An A was rewarded with great praise from my teachers, an ice-cream cone from my mother, and an occasional smile from my father. He considered B’s disastrous and required ample explanation. B’s were followed with loud litanies, what seemed like endless lectures. “Look at me. Look at me,” he said. “Me only go to fourth grade, but you think I be stupid? You think your father stupid? No, I work hard; I have my house, my car, my job. You do better next time.” Sometimes my sister and I would laugh, thinking it all trite exaggeration, but eventually we came to accept the reality of it all, especially after the summers that we would spend in Mexico, or, when we were older, the summers that we would work in the fields. My father wanted us to understand the concept of hard labor, so he arranged with one of his friends to have us work in the fields, cleaning cotton and packing melons. My mother cried and asked him not to

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make us go, that maybe we could get a job in town, we knew English, we did well in school. But my father’s mind could not be changed. He woke us up one morning at three thirty so we could be at the fields by four. During those long, summer weeks I learned to appreciate the great dignity in the job of the field-worker. It is immensely physical, the hours demanding, the pay substandard, and the status obsolete. I realized how honorable and necessary those jobs are, but I could also discern how such jobs also act as holding bars, restrictive chains that grip down the hopes of the spirit and encourage quiet acquiescence. Perhaps it is not the jobs themselves that are oppressive; perhaps it is the poverty that they perpetuate that is, in the long run, more destructive. I became aware that it was not pity that I experienced when I saw Mexican and Native American workers out in the fields; rather it was anger. I was angry that a fifty-five-year-old woman was still out there, in the fields, back bent and doubled over her old spade, so disheartened that none of her children had escaped the same fate. I was angry at the wages, the tepid drinking water, the stinking portable toilets. Angry at the ignorant kids who would drive by the fields yelling, “¡La migra! ¡La migra! ¡Córrenle! ¡Allí vienen!” (“Immigration! Immigration! Run! They’re coming!”). And these proud, hardworking people would run for cover into the nearest dried-up irrigation ditch. At times pure instinct would drive me into wanting to run with them, but in the briefest seconds I would recognize that I would never need to share their fears. I was there only to learn a lesson, and their fate would not be mine.

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The summer before my freshman year I spent preparing at college. My younger sister spent the summer back home working in the packing sheds sorting melons. I realized how different our two worlds had become when I came home from that summer and noticed, when I hugged my sister, how her thick braid smelled of sweat and the trailer of soup and stale lard. For two months my roommates ceaselessly complained that the air conditioner in our dorm room wasn’t cool enough, while my mom worked in a windowless factory where the swamp cooler broke down routinely, my sister had only the luxury of a shade over her work, and the only thing that protected my father was his longsleeved jumper and green John Deere baseball cap. As my roommates constantly protested the lack of space and privacy, I was in complete awe that my dorm room encompassed the same living area that my whole family shared for so many years. When my sister and I reunited at the end of the summer, she could sense my discomfort. After she hugged me, all she could say was that if my head were a melon she could only fit six to a box. I was treated as a guest by our


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neighbors. I was the stranger, the one who had changed, become lighter from staying indoors. And I suppose I acted like it. I became something of a tourist, knowing that I didn’t have to stay there, that I could observe and then relegate the experience to mere memory. I found the manner in which the adults wanted to make me more comfortable, turning the metal electric fan toward only me, so strange. They pointed me out to their children, asked me to talk to them, thought maybe they’d do better in school. I remember those little girls now. Most of them are either married or separated, but they all have children, their men all work in the fields, and they all live in run-down trailers exactly like the one I grew up in. In a few days none of it was to matter. It was mid-July in rural northwestern Arizona. The melon crop was just about to rot over, and the waves of flies and the stench of cantaloupe skin shriveling up in the dry, desert air extended for many acres. But I don’t remember really wanting to leave. My mother, with all her coupons, had stocked me with at least a two-month supply of shampoo, soap, toothpaste, cleaning supplies, and twelve brand-new pairs of Hanes cotton underwear from Kmart. She had bought me some canned food and was packing it carefully into a large cardboard box. The box was stamped on its sides with “usda.” I could only imagine the complete sets of Hugo Bosca luggage the other girls had, compared to the brown garbage bags where my shorts and jeans and shirts were packed. My mother must have picked up on something and, although she was hurt and saddened, she understood; without a word having been said, she repacked the cans into plain, brown paper bags from Safeway. I spent the last, sleepless night in my twin bed, with my back against the plywood wall of the trailer and my sister’s head in my lap, where finally I must have fallen asleep, stroking her long, brown hair with my nervous fingers. The day my family dropped me off at the dorm, my sister had on her favorite pair of purple denim shorts that were barely held together at the seams by shredded thread. She was wearing her favorite T-shirt, an ugly, bleached-out lilac one with holes everywhere. I was embarrassed by my father, the swagger in his walk, the braggart’s confidence his Stetson gray felt cowboy hat exuded. It was an attitude that didn’t compare, in any way, to the easygoing smiles of the other fathers, the sherbet-colored polo shirts they wore, the tennis shoes, the Dockers slacks and Ralph Lauren shorts. And there was my father in his cowboy boots, his eyes so sad, defensive, and watered-down. My sister left without saying a word. She wanted me to admit that I was embarrassed by her: “You’re so stupid. Clothes don’t matter. What should you care what I’m wearing? At least I’m clean.” And my beautiful mother, full of pride and contentment, put my clean sheets on the bed, folded my few clothes away into the drawers, and held on to me. She didn’t

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have to remind me to be good, to have good manners, to do well in school. She just had to hold me for a while longer, just a little longer she implored my father who was becoming impatient and could only say, “I know you do good cosita, you smart girl, you do good.” He slipped me two fifty-dollar bills and told me to call whenever I needed more money. The rent my family paid for the lot in the trailer park was a hundred dollars; my room was at least double that amount. The room was cool, empty, and, at least until my new roommate was there, it was all mine. There was a tremendous freedom in walking down to the student union and actually buying lunch. Bagels! What a marvelous, beautiful, delicious invention. I couldn’t finish my sandwich. Halfway through I wondered when my parents were to eat the white-bread-and-bologna sandwiches they would eat somewhere off the side of the road. It was then that I realized, fully, the expense it was for them to have me at the university. Once my first fall semester of college began, everywhere I turned it seemed as if waves of lily-white people would come flooding at me. In my smaller classes, by some rare coincidence, I would be the only Chicana student. I kept wondering where the 15 percent minority population the school boasted of was hiding itself. I compensated for my lone ethnicity by trying to prove myself to my classmates and my teachers. I overstudied, overwrote, and overrevised everything. It seemed that the whole school had this marvelous vocabulary of expression and experience, and my inadequate small-town education would never measure up. I was terrified of not being up to par with the other students. I never said anything in class and would instead sit in the back row, sheltered behind my long hair from making eye contact with my instructor. I remember being especially preoccupied with doing decent work in my freshman composition class. When conference time came around, I was absolutely petrified. Sitting there in the freshness of my instructor’s anticipation, I could only think to push the paper into her hands and search frantically for something to focus my stare on. She was young, optimistic, and kind. “It’s lovely, Maribel, simply lovely,” she said. I mumbled an incredulous “thank you” and stumbled out of her office. From the back of my mind kept pounding the sentiment: “It’s Mexican, Maribel, it’s Mexican. That’s why she likes it. That’s why you wrote it. Just remember to throw in a couple tortillas, the color bronze, and scatter a few rosaries about, and you’re there.” I felt irresponsible, foolish. As if I were disappointing, mocking someone or something as great as the remembered shadow of my mechanic father who

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melted under the hoods of cars. My father, who once took me to Mexico and made me listen to his people’s stories: “Pay much attention, big birdee, they’re verree importante, someday you write about them, don’t forget.” He was there when I wrote, and his presence wouldn’t allow me to make a freak show of his pride. I saw my parents everywhere in dark, hurried glimpses around campus. The woman who cleaned the toilets in my dorm was Mexican. The man raking leaves outside was Mexican. The whore on the corner was Mexican. The scoured drunk on the street was Mexican. The most recently captured murderer on the six o’clock news was Mexican. My warm, precious mother was Mexican, and my strong, pensive father was Mexican. Being Mexican, it seemed, had worked to some advantage. Especially when I wrote. In junior high and high school, English had always been my favorite subject. In my writing (especially the pieces my instructors admired the most) my Mexicanness would almost always come up. I would abuse this topic to the point of absurdity, where it became some blunt edge for the anger I harbored toward my identity. I was using the name again, just to get that A I knew was waiting if I wrote about the splendors of the Sonoran Desert, the Taruhumara Indians my father grew up among, or the fact that my childhood friends had all had quinceañeras (fifteenth birthday celebrations) and never even bothered to send me an invitation because I associated mostly with Caucasian people. My teachers, I believe, would praise my paper for its content. They would overlook my ambitious, adjective-strewn writing and say,“You have an obligation to write about these places, these people; not everyone has the chances that you do.” This sentiment was echoed in my father’s voice. I found it easy, then, to vent my frustrations on paper, as if I had been granted permission to write about the fact that my mother had never learned English, that I came to favor the heavy-metal urgency of Metallica over the romantic ballads of Agustín Lara, that I sat alone for hours at a Mexican dance while my dark-skinned, younger sister danced endless corridos in the arms of a Mexican boy. I always possessed this horrid feeling of inadequacy for not being white, for not being Mexican enough. I had decided, since an early age, that I would “fit in.” It was mostly embarrassment that drove me to it. Last week my father called me. He was drunk; his speech was slurred; he had been crying and was alone. “You were happy, right m’ija? You never need nothing, ¿verdad?” “Sure.” “Dime pues, what did you need that you didn’t have?” “A house.”

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“You have a house.” “Pero papi, es una trailer, está vieja, y sucia. How can you live in that trailer? It’s falling apart.” “No, usted no sabe lo que es sufrir m’ija. Usted tuvo todo.”1 My father pauses, takes a drink. “¿Qué ha escrito m’ija? Aver cuénteme.”2 Notes 1. “You don’t know what it is to suffer. You had everything.” 2. “What have you been writing, Daughter? Tell me.” La Verdad es Muda There must be a way for these words to serve my mother, A phrase for each year she measured hours by needle and thread. There must be a word for all those nights dinner was broken Over the counting of teaspoons and nickels for the sake of a book. That my moon begins to ripen and drip Is of no real consequence. It is always the same inescapable moon. Metaphor won’t cut it at the market, no one will care That I long for that place marked by my mother’s arms. Of my entire family I am the only one to have seen the ocean Yet who am I to limit the blueness of their own skies? Once these poems have had a good starving — If they can someday collect the garbage Make bread, plow and till the fields Once they have endured shame and silence Learned to walk without shoes If they have been lost and remembered, Until they bleed on their knees, breastfeed a child — Once they have fallen on their face Consoled the drunkard and forgiven the wayward, If they prove to be supplicants, martyrs, traitors, saints Once these words are as useful as an onion, an atom, or a fly, And if, and only if, they can someday, Mother, Make you tea, rub your feet, and keep you company, Until that day, I remain, a symbol muted, a mark defeated.

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Olvídate de todo, menos de m´ı You must remember summers Cross-eyed saints and red-singed skies An ant retired into the Crook of your knee A boy behind A white cart Piña sandía melón Paletas dulces aguas frías Remember that you held the naked cable, Tied to the post, and made a bridge for me. There was the whine of the washing machine My arm pulled and bloodied By the roller, how you pushed The button to reverse and you Must remember the broken arm Swung at my side and never healed; The doctor, the waiting room, We could not afford. And the roads stretched in summer Lingered into a mirrored curtain of air That hung by the heat of shadows. Those summers my hair Fell long and to the waist. How you cried with the machete And pieced it lock by lock Onto your virgin’s plaster head Nana, there is the radio on the stoop. The hollow pipes of your harmonica. Play for me those melodies of sand Sing for me a waltz and bead it Note by note onto the sky. Remember, it wasn’t always cold like this There were dust-devils and baths of wind People waving as they came in from the fields Summers that I remember Only the chair sat in the corner.

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Of Milk and Miracles Nursing, the Life Drive, and Subjectivity kather ine sutherl and [29], (23) I am an academic by trade and a mother by vocation. Before I had babies, I thought that I could slip myself neatly out of my academic work to construct a gender-free voice of intellectual authority. This was before I knew the tremendous physical implications of working pregnant, lumbering around campus in search of bathrooms, the need to vomit or pee interrupting my lofty thoughts and causing me to lapse into my body. This was before I knew the blood and pain of childbirth, and this was before I knew my first daughter, who, immediately after birth, hovered for weeks near death in intensive care. I have known for a long time that bodies are representations, performing elaborate rituals of signification in even their most intimate moments; what I came to know from breastfeeding my daughter is that these ritual performances originate in flesh that is overdetermined but still miraculous. In a selective, perhaps eccentric reading of the history of breastfeeding, there emerges a marginal but historically persistent construction of lactation as the origin of subjectivity; in the personal narrative of nursing my infant back into the world of representation, lactation became performance, origin, and miracle in equal parts. I believe that these histories — the academic and the personal — may be combined to invigorate a subjectivity that is neither grammatical nor rigorously gendered. But how to include the personal text? The inclusion of personal narrative here caused anxieties ranging from personal to typographical and involved some editorial debate but, in the end, simply interrupts the academic discourse much as my private thoughts and life intrude in my professional world. The subjectivity I want to explore here does not emerge primarily from the crises of separation that dominate most psychoanalytic narratives; rather, it

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emphasizes intimacy, mutuality, and resolution. True, the symbolic utopia of the nursing pair is interrupted repeatedly, initiating crises of separation. But what if subjectivity were reconstructed in a context where the connections were foregrounded, not the separations? If, as psychoanalytic discourse commonly argues, separation produces the mirror stage, language, gender, existential angst, and so on, what kind of subject emerges from the plenitude of the mother’s breast? And how is the mother’s subjectivity revised with each contraction of the let-down reflex? Toril Moi writes in her introduction to Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater” that “due to the demise of the cult of the Virgin, and of religion in general, we are left without a satisfactory discourse on motherhood,” but then she adds that “Kristeva herself has not really followed up her own ‘programme’ for research into maternity.” 1 “Programme” is the wrong word, certainly; it suggests an inflexibility immediately contradicted as maternity flows from the mother’s breast to fill the infant and as the sweet smell of baby fills the mother. “Scent of milk,” writes Kristeva, “dewed greenery, acid and clear, recall of wind, air, seaweed (as if a body lived without waste): it slides under the skin, does not remain in the mouth or nose but fondles veins, detaches skin from bones, inflates me like an ozone balloon.” 2 Existing simultaneous to herself in an atemporal body is nothing short of miraculous for the human subject; nursing, which precedes separation of child from mother, child from herself, is in this sense a miracle. Then again, even the intimacy of nursing has a highly temporal, political history of representation. Lactation and breastfeeding, like all bodily performances, are political. As Linda M. Blum writes,“Breastfeeding provides a wonderful lens magnifying the cracks and fractures in our construction of the late-twentieth-century mother. . . . Breastfeeding is easily romanticized; yet, at the same time, the present social context makes breastfeeding extremely difficult for many women.”3 Breastfeeding has often been seen historically as a social or even political obligation. The 1991 foreword to The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, published by the largest lactation support organization in the world, La Leche League, quotes Rousseau: “Would you restore all to their primal duties, begin with the mothers; the results will surprise you.”4 In A History of the Breast, Marilyn Yalom points out that “the Rousseauist idea that woman was by nature a giving, loving, self-sacrificing, contingent creature was to form the basis for a new ideology of idealized motherhood,” as epitomized in the representation of the emerging French Republic as a bare-breasted woman nursing her citizens with a politically nourishing flow of nationalist sentiment. 5 From prehistoric goddess statues to postmodern surgical implants, breasts have always produced more meanings than milk, meanings that often involve race and class as much as gender. As

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Yalom observes, “[American] statistics from 1987 showed that approximately 60 percent of white mothers nursed their babies in the hospital, as against 50 percent of Hispanic mothers and 25 percent of black mothers.” 6 Interestingly, according to Chris Mulford, “Canadian women initiate breastfeeding at higher rates than do women in the United States, but early supplementation is common, and only 10% are still breastfeeding at a year.”7 There is much to be said about the politics of nursing — and Yalom says much of it in A History of the Breast — but a more recondite and, to me, more interesting topic is the repeated historical construction of nursing as communication or bodily conversation in the archaic sense of “conversation,” which, like “intercourse,” includes ideas of both sexual and verbal exchange. For example, in The Womanly Art, one mother describes the let-down reflex as the communication of love: “I felt the overwhelming release of love which, to me, is what the let-down truly is.”8 Nursing is often configured as discursive; both milk and language can be “expressed.” Closer consideration of this metonymy of communication and nursing suggests that rather than describing nursing as discourse, we might do better to consider discourse as nursing. “Express” means “to squeeze out”; though a metaphor for speech, it applies literally to lactation. Such a breast-based model of speech works well alongside psychology that rejects phallic models in favor of breast-based models of discourse, as does the work of Melanie Klein. In such a model, speech does not emerge from the gap manifested in the wake of separation, where the infant howls for the breast, but rather emerges in the connected moment of the “expression” of milk. Indeed, the infant’s howl occurs within the mother’s body to the extent that it triggers let-down, causing her to express an involuntary sign of fullness. An infant cries in the hallway outside my first-year class. My body does not discriminate, and I look down, midlecture, at two large, wet spots on my shirt. The class seems . . . amazed. I know I am. I leak, therefore I am.

This is a bodily conversation of mutual need and mutual satiation; this is a subjectivity of mutual constitution. It is a miracle, too, in that it transcends the fragmented oedipal world of lack and separation. Even when these bodies are not attached, they manifest themselves on or in each other; the infant’s cry is written on the mother’s shirt. They are physically connected even when they are not touching, and it is not language that links these two subjects. Milk expresses or communicates in this instant, not words. And even though a moment lapses between the cry and the wet shirt, the milk is always already there, inside, not waiting for any sociocultural influences to decide its form. Unlike language, the

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idea (milk) is pre-formed more than it is performed. The milk is swallowed as air is breathed, with no knowledge of time or death, no consciousness that it could be withdrawn. My husband and I walk from Easter Seal House to the hospital grounds breathing the sweet smell of wet grass, knowing that even this small pleasure is withheld from our daughter while the ventilator lifts her chest, drops her chest, in a shockingly unnatural rhythm. She weighs eight pounds. Her fingers clutch my hand instinctively, like the claws of a small bird on its perch. Is it possible to recognize death, even this close up, before you have lived? We are afraid to love her, but we decide to anyhow. We have no choice, really. She is fighting to stay here with us; we have to make it somewhere worth staying. Every day my husband whispers to her about something she does not yet know, something worth knowing: our dog, chocolate, rain and grass, his love, well worth knowing.

The knowledge that Melanie Klein used her own children as subjects for therapy and advocated prophylactic analysis might make her work seem dubious today, but her theory, which revolves around the breast and breastfeeding, is fascinating. Fearlessly challenging the psychoanalytic establishment, she produced work that seems astonishingly progressive in a postmodern world for three primary reasons: first, she saw infants as having fully human subjectivity (for lack of a better term); second, she saw that women’s bodies were as significant as (or more significant than) men’s bodies to the construction of subjectivity; and third, she recognized that a linear model of temporality was inadequate and, arguably, basically masculine. These characteristics of her work emerged largely from the difference between penises and breasts. The phallus, in Freudian and post-Freudian theory (and in very simple terms), signals a series of separations: of children from adults, through totemism; of girls from boys, through penis envy; of plenitude from lack, through taboo; and of mind from body, through the mirror stage. In Kleinian theory, separation is still important, but considerable emphasis is also placed on reparation and gratification, which emerge from the connections between parents and children and are symbolized primarily by breastfeeding. “The first gratification which the child derives from the external world is the satisfaction experienced in being fed,” writes Klein. “Analytic work has shown that babies of a few months of age certainly indulge in phantasy-building. . . . The object of all these phantasies is, to begin with, the breast of the mother.”9 But how does this theory apply to a child or mother who cannot nurse? I sat by my daughter’s side for six weeks in intensive care and witnessed her mouth stretched into a horrifying grimace by a respirator. I ached to feed her with an ache beyond any other desire to touch another person that I had ever felt. None

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of this could be spoken; the poverty of language is made immanent by grief. But she knew me, and she knew her father. One night her eyes remained open for the hours that parents are not allowed in icu, and she stared, immobilized by a paralyzing drug that conserved her energy, into a light, because it is never dark in icu. Vaseline was squeezed into her eyes so that they would not dehydrate, and she stared beyond representation, outside of the cave, directly into the light of too much knowledge, until her father and I arrived. He stroked her forehead gently and whispered, “Close your eyes, baby; close your eyes,” until she did, only minutes after we got there. She was six days old. “That’s amazing,” said the nurse, “but, of course, she knows you. She knows your voices from the womb.” What does it mean to “know” language in this context?

The Womanly Art suggests that“[your baby] has been hearing your voice since about six months before he was born, so talking to him in soft, loving tones is especially soothing. For the time being, you are his world.” 10 Klein imagines a similarly idyllic scene of nursing: “He will often have a little play at her breast after feeding, he will take pleasure in her looking at him, smiling at him, playing with him and talking to him long before he understands the meaning of words. He will get to know and to like her voice, and her singing to him may remain a pleasurable and stimulating memory in his unconscious.” 11 This particular scene involves a breastfeeding mother, but play, song, and talk do not necessarily exclude bottles and fathers; it is the development of speech in the context of food and love that is significant here. What is most interesting in Klein’s work is perhaps not so much the sex of the mother — a man could substitute as mother when he feeds his child, though only in a temporary and partial sense, much as the analyst may perform a parental role during transference. The really interesting point here is that the nursing mother (father) is material and literal in a way that Freud’s father (exclusively male) is not. The actual nourishing of the infant at the breast matters, in Judith Butler’s sense, in that it is both material and important. Arguably, then, the major difference between Freud’s and Klein’s theories emerges not just from gender difference but from their respective attitudes toward bodies in general. Freudian theory centers on prohibitions against parental skin and touching; indeed, Freud worked to “cure” patients who described sexual molestation, arguing that they had merely, in his determination, had particularly visceral oedipal fantasies. The abstraction of flesh (especially sexualized flesh) to fantasy is essential to Freud’s oedipal complex; indeed, the oedipal complex might be understood to represent a complex of separations — body from mind, adult from child,“truth” from “fantasy.” On the other hand, Klein sees the sensual intimacy between parent and infant (especially at the breast) as essential to the initiation of infantile subjectivity.

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The Freudian subject is alone and without, in both senses, its body; the Kleinian subject is with and within the parent and herself simultaneously. One might say that Freud strips subjectivity of its skin, while Klein marks subjectivity directly onto the skin. My daughter has scars. She suffered from a postoperative infection. Major surgery performed on a two-day-old infant is serious enough, but the emergence of a drug-resistant bacteria in the E. coli family facilitates semiotic slippage from serious to critical. The infection began and thus ended in the suppurating incision across her belly, a wound that had to be left open, that is, unsutured, to heal as it was packed daily with disinfected gauze, at first two inches into the gaping, six-inch-long injury. (Here I have paused to hold a ruler to the space between finger and thumb for accuracy of memory measured in the air.) The wound healed inside out, and flesh grew into the meaningful hole to become the visible ambiguity of a terrible scar — a trace of death, a mark of her will to live.

The life drive is a form of love. As Juliet Mitchell writes in her introduction to The Selected Melanie Klein, “Klein’s basic model is that the neonate brings into the world two main conflicting impulses: love and hate. . . . Love is the manifestation of the life drive; hate, destructiveness and envy are emanations of the death drive. The life drive and death drive are two innate instincts in conflict with each other.”12 When we arrived at intensive care, my daughter was splayed naked, like a human sacrifice, on a raised incubator heated from coiled, orange elements cantilevered above her. She was surrounded by specialists, surgeons, nurses, respiratory technicians, with tubes seemingly extruding from every point of her body. Where was Star Trek’s virtual doctor with his magic, healing wand? The pediatric intensive care doctor announced her imminent demise with gentle authority. The “grief counselor,” appallingly dressed entirely in black, encouraged us to “make arrangements.” But our daughter lives and loves and is loved.

Kristeva argues (with acknowledged debt to Klein) that the mother’s body “mediates” the infant’s drives: “The mother’s body is . . . what mediates the symbolic law organizing social relations and becomes the ordering principle of the semiotic chora, which is on the path of destruction, aggressivity and death. For although drives have been described as disunited or contradictory structures, simultaneously ‘positive’ and ‘negative,’ this doubling is said to generate a dominant ‘destructive wave’ that is drive’s most characteristic trait: Freud notes that the most instinctual drive is the death drive.”13 Freud (and Kristeva) name “death drive” what Derrida has called “the violence of the letter”: the drive to articulate, to make finite. Derrida writes that

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“death is the movement of differance to the extent that that movement is necessarily finite.”14 Even in “Stabat Mater,” which poetically invokes the mother in a history of the cult of the Virgin, Kristeva emphasizes loss and separation rather than unification: “Motherhood is the fantasy that is nurtured by the adult, man or woman, of a lost territory.”15 But is our mother always already a lost territory? After I understood that my child would die, I called my mother out of her yearend business meeting and said, “Please come, Mom. I need you here.” I watched her walk across the arrival area at the airport, longing for her, and when she held me at her breast, I wept. “Thanks for being here for Lauren, Mom,” I said, and she answered, “Lauren’s mother is already here, honey. I’m here for my baby.” And in one breath she made me a mother who like her, I hope, can give her daughters gifts within and without words.

All this talk of death. What of miracles? What of the drive to live and love? Even ponderous Derrida admits to the miracle of my daughter’s life, observing that “death by writing also inaugurates life.” 16 Why? Because something has to be alive to be killed, even by writing. When medical expertise spoke our daughter dead, only then did miraculousness beyond speech become manifest, if still invisible. All this talk of death. “Fuck off,” I said to the grief counselor (the violence of the letter). “My daughter is still alive in the next room!” The woman was mortified. How could I be so rude? “Hasn’t she read Kubler Ross?” my husband asked once she had gone. “Isn’t anger supposed to come before acceptance? She can’t be very good at her job.” Still alive, knowing only pain, still driven to live.

According to Klein, the life drive and death drive are first experienced by the infant at the mother’s breast. The life drive and love are symbolized by the “good breast,” that is, the breast that satisfies the infant’s needs. In “Weaning,” Klein writes that “only one part of . . . satisfaction [in being fed] results from the alleviation of hunger . . . another part, no less important, results from the pleasure which the baby experiences when his mouth is stimulated by sucking at his mother’s breast.” Klein describes this pleasure for the infant not as passive but as “expression” emerging from a sexualized orifice: “This gratification is an essential part of the child’s sexuality, and is indeed its initial expression. Pleasure is experienced also when the warm stream of milk runs down the throat and fills the stomach.”17 In order to keep my breasts full of milk in case my daughter lived, I had to go to the “mother’s room” in the hospital and express my milk five times a day. I would sit down at a piston-driven pump in a windowless room that had once been a storage closet. There were wooden screens between the room’s two pumps,

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so that we could hide our breasts from each other, I assume, and I had many surreal conversations with the upper half of women’s faces, their eyes mainly, which expressed many things beyond language.

In contemporary representations of breastfeeding there is tension between the rhetoric of nature and the rhetoric of science. For example, Mulford writes: “Childbirth, which in colonial times had been a domestic event in which women were the experts and the mother was in control of the social setting, now is viewed by many people as a potentially pathologic event for which a woman needs to seek the technological proficiency of a team of medical specialists. . . . Infant feeding, like childbirth, has drifted out of the sphere of domestic knowledge that once belonged to all women. With the advent of artificial feeding technology, infant feeding began to be viewed as a science.”18 Kristeva’s notion of the chora is appealing because it is prelinguistic, but ultimately it is more like a breast pump than a nursing infant. It is driven: “The drives, which are ‘energy’ charges as well as ‘psychical’ marks, articulate what we call a chora: a nonexpressive totality formed by the drives and their stases in a motility that is as full of movement as it is regulated.” The breast pump is also driven — by pistons. Kristeva’s chora is rhythmic: “The chora precedes and underlies figuration and thus specularization, and is analogous only to vocal or kinetic rhythm.” 19 The breast pump is violently kinetic, the rhythm mechanical, as is Kristeva’s chora, which forgets the irregular rhythms that precede and underlie figuration of the nursing, then dozing, then tugging, then murmuring infant. As Michelle Boulous Walker writes of Kristeva in Philosophy and the Maternal Body, “By avoiding reference to mothers, her maternal chora serves to silence women in the place of theory.” 20 Walker argues that Kristeva’s construction of the chora ultimately serves to construct male subjectivity, which distinguishes it from Klein’s maternally centered theories of the breast: “It is worth commenting on the different ways that Klein and Kristeva approach the question of the mother. Klein is primarily concerned with the child’s phantasized and actual relation with the maternal figure, while Kristeva concentrates on the mother’s relation with the foreign body of her pregnancy. For Kristeva, the mother’s experience serves as the model, extreme though it is, for the (male) subject’s radically split self.”21 Kristeva’s chora approaches the prelinguistic psychic world of the infant at the breast, but then it escapes into the discordant science of existential crisis. It fails to account for miracles. In “Reconstructing Motherhood,” Lynn Y. Weiner describes a more naturalistic construction of breastfeeding promulgated by La Leche League: “The La Leche League arose to defend traditional domesticity against the assaults of

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modern industrial life and to dignify the physical, biological side of motherhood. . . . Whereas the nineteenth-century version of middle-class ‘true womanhood’ emphasized moral purity and piety in a secular and industrializing age,” she continues,“the league, in the scientific twentieth century, emphasize[s] naturalism. Mother and baby [are] not so much icons of purity as symbols of nature and simplicity. But they [are] not just symbols. . . . [The league] implie[s] that an empowered motherhood defined by ‘female’ qualities [will] improve society.”22 Notions of biology and nature must be treated, like notions of science, with caution. When I was packing the wound one day after leaving the hospital, packing my daughter’s sacred flesh with sterilized gauze dipped in saline and twisted dry between sterilized clamps, the home-care nurse asked how I was coping. I burst into tears. “Are we feeling weepy?” she asked. “It’s biological, you know. It’s postpartum depression.” This was two months after my daughter’s birth; this was after six weeks of icu and two weeks on the wards. Weepy? Biological?

Kristeva places the equation between tears and milk into the historical context of the cult of the Virgin: “Under a full blue dress, the maternal, virginal body allowed only the breast to show, while the face, with the stiffness of Byzantine icons gradually softened, was covered with tears. Milk and tears became the privileged signs of the Mater Dolorosa who invaded the west beginning with the eleventh century, reaching the peak of its influx in the fourteenth.” She continues: “Even though orality — threshold of infantile regression — is displayed in the area of the breast, while the spasm at the slipping away of eroticism is translated into tears, this should not conceal what milk and tears have in common: they are the metaphors of non-speech, of a ‘semiotics’ that linguistic communication does not account for.” 23 Thus, nature, here in the form of tears/milk, “has a history,” as Butler puts it: “Nature has a history, and the figuring of nature as the blank and lifeless page, as that which is, as it were, always already dead, is decidedly modern, linked perhaps to the emergence of technological means of domination.” 24 So the weepy, biological me is also the cyborg strapped to the wheezing breast pump, measuring milk in milliliters. This is lactation reduced to a technical performance in the paternalistic context of the medicalized female body. Ironically, despite the technological invasion of the birth process and grassroots advocacy for the virtues of breastfeeding, despite all this attention to breasts, the advice of lactation consultants (women) was regarded with skepticism by my daughter’s doctors (men) — and also by health insurance companies, who were unwilling to pay the costs for pump rental.

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The breast certainly provides no absolute utopias, however; the breast/ mother becomes the first object of anxiety for the infant as the “bad breast.” (Though in my daughter’s case, I must say that scalpels, tubes, needles, and other phallic, hard, invasive objects might have caused the initial anxiety — or was she, through it all, just longing for my breast as I longed for her mouth?) In Klein’s theory, subjectivity moves through skin into representation as the baby “introjects” both the breast and mother, absorbing more than her milk: “Not only the mouth, but to a certain degree the whole body with all its senses and functions, performs this ‘taking in’ process — for instance, the child breathes in, takes in through his eyes, his ears, through touch and so on. To begin with, the breast of the mother is the object of his constant desire, and therefore this is the first thing to be introjected.” 25 Introjection is ultimately cannibalistic. “In phantasy,” Klein writes, “the child sucks the breast into himself, chews it up and swallows it; thus he feels that he has actually got it there, that he possesses the mother’s breast inside himself, in both its good and in its bad aspects.” 26 But when the breast is withheld, the infant feels that both the breast and the mother are lost forever, and that the infant has devoured her. This anxiety is then projected onto the mother, hence the “bad breast”: “The child feels, when the breast is wanted but is not there, as if it were lost for ever; since the conception of the breast extends to that of the mother, the feelings of having lost the breast lead to the fear of having lost the loved mother entirely, and this means not only the real mother, but also the good mother within. In my experience,” Kline continues, “this fear of the total loss of the good object (internalized and external) is interwoven with feelings of guilt at having destroyed her (eaten her up), and then the child feels that her loss is a punishment for his dreadful deed.” 27 So my daughter might be seen to have begun her life in a state of guilt and anxiety, believing I was withheld from her destructive and cannibalistic impulses — but I must reject this interpretation because it foregrounds the death drive and, indeed, does not explain her struggle to live. If, on the other hand, cannibalism is interpreted through the life drive (love), it may become sacred, as in the ritual of Eucharist, for instance, where consuming the flesh of the beloved and nurturing giver of life is a celebration of love and forgiveness, not death and guilt. Indeed, where expression (of milk, of language) transcends itself to become communion, male or phallic models of spirituality have historically been replaced by female, breast-based models, and these female models of spirituality link in vital ways to the life drive, not the death drive. One evening in the mother’s room, a woman whose child was on full life support sat in the next cubicle. She said that she was not giving up hope, that she didn’t

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care what the doctors said, all the while struggling with the pump. She held up the milk she had collected; it was an odd orange color. “Is this normal?” she asked. Then she looked down. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “My nipples are bleeding!” Stigmata. My husband was waiting just outside the door of the mother’s room. “I hate the mothers of the brain-dead babies,” I told him. “They’re such a downer.” We laughed hysterically. “Jesus,” my husband said, “I can’t believe you said that. I can’t believe we laughed.” But if milk and tears are the same fluid in a shifting semiosis of body liquids, perhaps I had expressed every drop of the milk of human kindness through my tear ducts and breasts until I was empty, empty. I am not Mary. When our friend’s daughter died from a stroke caused by her chemotherapy, months after we had left the hospital, he came to us because we had lived in intensive care, and we had glimpsed the place even further away where he lives now. “Did God or Jesus or the universe really need to kill a thirteen-year-old virgin? Did they need her more than I do?” he asked. When another friend’s son died, I brought her bananas and juice. “Jesus,” she said. “More fucking food!”“I know,” I said, “but when Lauren was dying, all I could eat for weeks was bananas.” “That’s right,” she said. “You understand. You understand.” Can anyone else understand the crudeness of grief, the cruelty of my laughter? Probably only those who have crushed overripe bananas against their dry palates day after day, willing to die, willing to live.

It is not coincidence that many people, even nonbelievers, unconsciously hail Jesus in moments of extremity. In Christian mythology, medieval models of a maternal God and a lactating Christ supplant the more typically cannibalistic and vampiristic rituals of Eucharist. In this context, invoking Jesus is the same thing as calling your mother out of a meeting to say, “I need you here.” As Caroline Walker Bynum writes, teachings of the Christian church have historically been linked to the metaphor of nursing: “As all medievalists are by now aware, the body of Christ was sometimes depicted as female in medieval devotional texts . . . partly because the tender, nurturing aspect of God’s care for souls was regularly described as motherly. Both male and female mystics called Jesus ‘mother’ in his Eucharistic feeding of Christians with liquid exuded from his breast.” She continues,“In the moralized Bibles of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries . . . miniatures and panel paintings showed Christ exuding wine or blood into chalices or even into hungry mouths and drew visual parallels between his wound and Mary’s breast offered to suckle sinners.”28 In fact, despite claims of secularism, even The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding often reads more like a moral treatise than a nursing manual because of many maternal testimonials — not surprising, as the idea of La Leche League first

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arose at a church picnic. 29 Weiner writes that “the seven founders of the league were Roman Catholic, white, middle-class women who had become acquainted in two ways: through activism in the Christian Family Movement (cfm), an ecumenical Christian organization, and through a common interest in natural childbirth and breastfeeding.”30 The organization’s name is taken from a Catholic shrine in “St. Augustine, Florida, dedicated to the Mother of Christ under the title ‘Nuestra Señora de la Leche y Buen Parto,’ which translates freely,‘Our Lady of Happy Delivery and Plentiful Milk.’ ” 31 This name, incidentally, was chosen by the obstetrician husband of one of the founders, who often gave his patients medals from the shrine when they gave birth.32 The Womanly Art contains many images readily identified with the Madonna and child. La Leche League might be seen to provide a quasi-religious community for women who feel excluded from established Christianity. Such contemporary constructions of breast-based spirituality have antecedents, perhaps the best-known example being the Showings of the fourteenthcentury English mystic Julian of Norwich, which consist of sixteen “showings” or revelations of God’s love. In the Showings, God is represented as a mother: “The deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother.” 33 Three reasons are given that God is a mother: first, Christ is born of Mary, “our Mother, in whom we are all enclosed and born of her in Christ”; second, God has made us sensual and become sensual him- or herself through Christ, or “become our Mother sensually, because we are double by God’s creating, that is to say substantial and sensual”; and, third, God is merciful and practical, as “our Father wills” but “our Mother works” and “the mother’s service is nearest, readiest and surest.”34 Like Klein, Julian of Norwich celebrates the flesh as much as the spirit (or subjectivity), viewing sensuality and the flesh as the legitimate source of love, life, and the sacred, all forms of reparation, and not merely as the source of sin, death, and the fall, all forms of separation. As I said earlier, I am not interested in simply substituting one metaphor of discourse (breast or milk) for another (pen/penis or seed). I am interested in that which transcends discourse but can only be described within the confines of discourse: the subjective experience of the miraculous, which is an experience not of separation but of reunification. In this, I echo not only Klein but also Julian of Norwich, who understands expression to emerge from the breast: “The mother can give her child to suck of her milk, but our precious Mother Jesus can feed us with himself . . . with the blessed sacrament, which is the precious food of true life. . . . The mother can lay her child tenderly to her breast, but our tender Mother Jesus can lead us easily into his blessed breast through his sweet open side, and show us there a part of the godhead and the joys of heaven, with

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inner certainty of endless bliss.”35 This description of a nurturing Christ can, on one level, be seen simply as a premodern representation of plenitude and selfactualization. However, it is the element of the sacred in this text that interests me, as well as the sense that the sacred emerges from the agency of the nursing infant — here, the supplicant who accepts the milk of Christian love. This could also be the infant who has experienced only pain, physically and psychically, but who chooses to stick around nevertheless — a choice that is nothing short of miraculous in that it betrays a will to seek unification with materiality and others even in the face of death. The infant may understand the absence of the breast to be punishment for having harmed or devoured the mother and, indeed, may grieve that loss, but the infant also exhibits very early what Klein calls “the desire to restore, which expresses itself in numerous phantasies of saving her and making all kinds of reparation.” 36 This is subjective agency at an infantile level: the infant is not a passive blob of need in this model but rather a person who exerts choice, who is, in fact, defined by choice, the choice to be unified with and not separated from the parent. Separation is involuntary, but restoration is willed. Elsewhere, Klein argues that adults maintain this desire to restore. For example, when grieving the loss of a loved one, the adult projects pain and anger and then introjects an idealized version of the lost individual/object in an act of reparation. 37 Thus, we never speak ill of the dead. In her biography of Klein, Phyllis Grosskurth identifies a Christian element to this scheme, writing that Klein’s “later theories on constitutional envy, the primary importance of the mother, and reparation bear close parallels to the doctrines of original sin, the Immaculate Conception, and Christian atonement.”38 Five days before Christmas, the pediatric dialysis machine broke, and our daughter became the youngest child in Canada to use an adult dialysis machine. She was not expected to survive the procedure a second time. And then four days before Christmas, we arrived at icu to be greeted by the pediatric intensive care doctor at the door. “She’s a rose,” he said, madly grinning, and then told us that her kidneys had begun to work the night before. Another intensive care specialist approached us later. “I was one of the ones arguing to let your daughter die,” she said gravely. “I can’t explain why she lived. Medicine can’t explain why she lived. It’s a miracle.”

The Christian model emergent in Klein’s work is also evident in Hegel’s dialectic and Heidegger’s threefold entity of time (both models that involve substitution and transcendence), as well as in Derrida’s description of Heidegger and Hegel: “The line represents only a particular model, whatever might be its privilege. . . . If one allows that the linearity of language entails this vulgar and mundane concept of temporality . . . which Heidegger shows to be

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the intrinsic determining concept of all ontology from Aristotle to Hegel, the meditation upon writing and the deconstruction of the history of philosophy become inseparable.” Derrida continues: “The enigmatic model of the line is thus the very thing that philosophy could not see when it had its eyes open on the interior of its own history. This night begins to lighten a little at the moment when linearity — which is not loss or absence but the repression of pluri-dimensional symbolic thought — relaxes its oppression because it begins to sterilize the technical and scientific economy that it has long favoured.”39 A phallus and its pleasures are linear and do not nourish. The breast begins to lighten a little as the mother sits nursing, again and again, 2 a.m., 4 a.m., as the night begins to lighten a little, the infant’s eyes closed on the interior of her own history.

The problem with all these models is that they, like Kristeva’s chora, emerge from a modernist worldview, a view in which temporality is supreme, and miracles may not be acknowledged, may even be disdained as anti-intellectual or unscientific. As David Spurr writes: “There is a void at the center of [Western] consciousness that must be named or given an image in order that it be contained. The terror of this void produces the fugitive inauthenticity that Heidegger ascribes to modern existence, a constant fleeing in the face of death. Derrida as well has written that the image, or the imagination, ‘is at the bottom the relationship with death’ — death as the abyss at the center of representation which is spanned by the structures of imagination in the most precarious way.”40 This must be what Kristeva means by “the psychotic sore of modernity.”41 But does it really go without saying that temporality, separation, and the death drive must be predominant in the imagination and representation? Or is death just the ultimate modernist fetish? Spurr writes that “the history of modernity has defined itself as moving simultaneously in two directions: the expansive forward movement of technological development and, along with this, the confrontation with a metaphysical nothingness which signifies the finitude of the human condition.” 42 Is it too simpleminded to recognize this view — which regards gender/culture as that which is emptied to become “metaphysical nothingness” with every act of sex — as a masculine one? Sex fills the female body with other bodies, with pointedly nonmetaphysical somethingness, with lovers, babies, life. At the very least, could not the drive for life and reparation be understood to be different from but equal to the drive for death and separation? According to Klein, the introjection and projection of the good and bad breast (or the mother, and later the father) is an ongoing negotiation in the infant’s increasingly defined subjectivity. Ideally, this process occurs in a well-

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adjusted child whose relationships with his or her parents are the foundation of successful socialization. The parents become, in Klein’s analysis, “something within the personality having the nature of kindness and wisdom; this leads to confidence and trust in oneself and helps to combat and overcome the feelings of fear of having bad figures within one and of being governed by one’s own uncontrollable hatred; and furthermore, this leads to trust in people in the outside world beyond the family circle.” 43 Juliet Mitchell argues that scientific theory relies on a past/present model of time, different from the inner/outer model Klein constructs: “Freud’s historical imagination examines the present . . . and from it reconstructs a hypothetical past determinant. For Klein the past and present are one.” 44 The death drive is the drive to finitude and linearity. But sometimes the past determinant has to be invented after the present, not in an abstract sense, but in practical terms, in the body.

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My daughter forgot, during her six weeks in intensive care, how to suck.

As Grosskurth writes,“Freud tends to describe a model of the mind with clearly differentiated stages of development, while Klein’s view of the mind is of a dynamic process in which a number of emotions and mental processes are operating simultaneously — love and hate, projection and introjection, splitting, phantasy interacting with reality.”45

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But a baby can be taught to suck again.

Grosskurth continues, “[Klein’s] problem was not simply to express herself clearly or to cope with a language not native to her.”46 You place your finger gently in the infant’s mouth, and you tickle the roof, and her tongue comes up to touch your finger, and as you move your finger back on the roof of the mouth of forgetting the tongue follows, and she is sucking.

Grosskurth concludes, “When a number of complicated feelings are being experienced simultaneously within the infant’s bewildered ego, the result is a mosaic of turbulence; but the linear structure of language permits contradictory impulses to be described only sequentially.”47 In her essay “The Origins of Transference,” Klein regards the division of past from present as a psychic wound that must be healed: “It is only by linking again and again . . . later experiences with earlier ones and vice versa, it is only by consistently exploring their interplay, that present and past can come together in the patient’s mind.”48 Linking or stitching together this psychic gap between past and present leaves a terrible scar, of course, but one that contains all the expressive beauty of ambiguity in its ragged contours.

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When people see my daughter’s stomach, they stare and quickly take in a breath; they can see that they are witnessing an awful history, but it is not clear what history, exactly. It is a straight line, but it has a geography of lumps and twists and pits and shadings, a bodyscape of undiscovered significance. “What happened?” the children always ask (while their parents subtly lean in, curious but too polite to admit it), and my daughter, who is five now, makes up a story. Once she said that bugs and worms were in her stomach and had to be taken out (still some room for Freud here), but then she said kindly, “Don’t be frightened. It’s okay now.” We have told her that this line on her body is like a line of text in her storybooks, but of course it is so much more than that. It is a story of profound deprivation and miraculous restoration, a critical story in the construction of her subjectivity that she does not consciously remember because it happened prelinguistically for her, pretemporally even (the lights being always on in icu), and so it cannot be a story at all. It seems most likely that this is precisely where, or rather when, miracles occur: in the nonlinear, atemporal wound between past and present. The miracle is only known, however, by the scar.

In “Weaning,” Klein points out that “in so far as the baby never has uninterrupted possession of the breast, and over and over again is in the state of lacking it, one could say that, in a sense, he is in a constant state of being weaned or at least in a state leading up to weaning.”49 Always already weaned, you and me both, as we try to make our bond in this place, where I am nursing you with intravenous lines wrapped around us, and the doctors say, “Give her a bottle; it’s easier,” and the lactation consultant says, “No bottles; let her suck as long as she can and then inject the breastmilk down her nosetube,” and you learn that sucking and fullness go together, and I learn that your sucking brings a fullness to my breasts that the machine could not.

And this, finally, marks a powerful difference between Melanie Klein and all that antimaternal psychology into which I am always stumbling. Klein understands that it is not only the baby who needs to be filled, it is not only the baby’s desires that matter; the mother needs to be filled with milk and desire, too, for “if she can enjoy it [breastfeeding] thoroughly, her pleasure will be unconsciously realized by the child, and this reciprocal happiness will lead to a full emotional understanding between mother and child.” This is not martyrdom or a sacrifice of one to the other, but “a full emotional understanding.” Klein is sure that babies are clever (“babies have altogether much more intellectual capacity than is assumed,” she writes), and I think we can assume that she thinks mothers also have altogether much more intellectual capacity than is assumed. 50 But then, what I am talking about is not intellectual; in fact, it is intellectually embarrassing, that is, miraculous experiences. Partly, of course, I mean that

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experience — life in a body — is always a small miracle. As Thomas Laqueur has written of his brief tenure as a medical student, “For all my awareness of how deeply our understanding of what we saw was historically contingent — the product of institutional, political, and epistemological contingencies — the flesh in its simplicity seemed always to shine through.”51 But I mean more than that. I mean that in the experience of miracles there is much that cannot be explained and probably never will be, and that is also part of experience and probably always will be. Breast-based models of subjectivity seem better able to accommodate the inexplicable than phallic models because the breast feeds the infant — and thus subjectivity in general — with life and love. Surely miracles, like the breast, work to repair ruptures between silence and speech, the dead and the living, the infant in the womb and the infant born. And do you know what else? The penis does not necessarily have to be a sign of separation and solitude. Too much is made of its stiffness, its explosions, and its detumescence and death. Kristeva writes that “those particularities of the maternal body compose woman into a being of folds, a catastrophe of being that the dialectics of the trinity and its supplements would be unable to subsume.”52 We could imagine men this way, too. More could be made of the softness of the penis, its folds, like labial folds, around the foreskin, its fluidity of form and excretion, its miraculous interventions in the maternal work of reparation. My lover loving my baby entirely separate from but entirely connected to me. You always want to stuff your fingers into my mouth while I nurse you; you want me to suck, too. You taste salt and sugar; I taste God-knows-what from the fingers of a child learning to crawl. You cannot speak yet, and I cannot speak with your fingers in my mouth, but we have things to teach each other, you and I, knowledge to share like a feast that has been divinely blessed. You smile at me dumbly, and I smile back, and we know what we mean. Notes This piece is dedicated to my daughters, Lauren and Robin. 1. Toril Moi, introduction to Julia Kristeva’s “Stabat Mater,” in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 161. 2. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 171. 3. Linda M. Blum, “Mothers, Babies, and Breastfeeding in Late Capitalist America: The Shifting Contexts of Feminist Theory,” Feminist Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 291. 4. La Leche League International, The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, 5th ed. (New York: Penguin, 1991), xxii. 5. Marilyn Yalom, A History of the Breast (New York: Knopf, 1997), 111. 6. Yalom, A History of the Breast, 143. 7. Chris Mulford, “Swimming Upstream: Breastfeeding Care in a Nonbreastfeeding Culture,” Journal of Obstetric, Gynecologic, and Neonatal Nursing 24, no. 5 (1995): 466.

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8. La Leche League, The Womanly Art, 56. 9. Melanie Klein, “Weaning” (1936), in Love, Guilt, Reparation, and Other Works, 1921– 1945 (New York: Delacorte Press, 1975), 290, emphasis added. 10. La Leche League, The Womanly Art, 81. 11. Klein, “Weaning,” 300. 12. Juliet Mitchell, introduction to The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Mitchell (New York: The Free Press, 1986), 19. 13. Julia Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” in Moi, The Kristeva Reader, 95, emphasis in source. 14. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 143. 15. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 161, emphasis in source. 16. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 143. 17. Klein, “Weaning,” 290. 18. Mulford, “Swimming Upstream,” 465. 19. Kristeva, “Revolution in Poetic Language,” 93, 94. 20. Michelle Boulous Walker, Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence (London: Routledge, 1998), 144. 21. Walker, Philosophy and the Maternal Body, 146. 22. Lynn Y. Weiner, “Reconstructing Motherhood: The La Leche League in Postwar America,” Journal of American History 80, no. 4 (1994): 1358. 23. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 173–74. 24. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993), 4. 25. Klein, “Weaning,” 291. 26. Klein, “Weaning,” 291. 27. Klein, “Weaning,” 295. 28. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One, ed. Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaff, and Nadia Tazi (New York: Zone, 1989), 176. 29. La Leche League, The Womanly Art, 391. 30. Weiner, “Reconstructing Motherhood,” 1360. 31. La Leche League, The Womanly Art, 393. 32. Weiner, “Reconstructing Motherhood,” 1360. 33. Julian of Norwich, Showings, trans. Edmund Colledge and James Walsh (Mahwah nj: Paulist Press, 1978), 285. 34. Julian of Norwich, Showings, 292, 294, 296, 297. 35. Julian of Norwich, Showings, 298. 36. Klein, “Weaning,” 294, emphasis in source. 37. Melanie Klein, “Mourning and Its Relation to Manic-Depressive States” (1940), in Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein, 146–74.

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38. Phyllis Grosskurth, Melanie Klein: Her World and Her Work (New York: Knopf, 1986), 84. 39. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 86, emphasis in source. 40. David Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire: Colonial Discourse in Journalism, Travel Writing, and Imperial Administration (Durham nc: Duke University Press, 1993), 107. 41. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 162. 42. Spurr, The Rhetoric of Empire, 107. 43. Klein, “Weaning,” 295. 44. Mitchell, introduction, 27. 45. Grosskurth, Melanie Klein, 195. 46. Grosskurth, Melanie Klein, 195. 47. Grosskurth, Melanie Klein, 195–96. 48. Melanie Klein,“The Origins of Transference” (1952), in Mitchell, The Selected Melanie Klein, 210. 49. Klein, “Weaning,” 295. 50. Klein, “Weaning,” 300, 303. 51. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 14. 52. Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” 182–83.

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It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness A Stretch of the Imagination nancy reincke

[48], (42 The English department of which I’m a member has a lecture series called Writers and Critics. Along with invited speakers from off-campus, the series features the work of members of the department. The committee asked me to give a presentation at the end of April 1995 about my research in the area of global feminism. Most generally stated, I work on developing ways of reading and talking about literature that contribute to our consciousness of “the global context of our lives,” to borrow a phrase from Charlotte Bunch. 1 And as Bunch suggests, much of this work of developing “global consciousness” involves making connections between the lives of women around me and the lives of women who live at great distances from me, both geographically and experientially. I would like to tell you the story of how I wrote the paper for that presentation, the process, as all writers and critics know, being inextricable from the product. The beginning of my paper will strike many as familiar. It began with the title, since the title was required for promotional purposes four months before the paper was required to be read. I took my title from a now oft-quoted African proverb: It takes a whole village to raise a child. I figured this title gave me several options for discussing the general topic of how our lives are being shaped by forces of globalization. In the beginning, then, I had a paper with a name but no body. Having come up with a title and thus some breathing room before I would be required to produce anything further on this particular project, I put this paper on a shelf. I had to write another paper that was due to the editor the first week of March. I spent all my February weekends sweating out that paper. On Sunday, February 26, I give myself a fifteen-minute break and call my mother. My mother isn’t scheduled to go to work that afternoon. She works

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as a ward clerk at the hospital in Burley, Idaho, a town of ten thousand, but lives across the river in Rupert, population five thousand. I ask about her health. She has a sore throat and has been taking an antibiotic. She tells me that her friend Gerri is moving back in with her abusive boyfriend. Gerri has been staying in my mother’s spare room, and I tell my mother that she should make sure the asshole boyfriend doesn’t come around my mother’s place. My mother agrees. She tells me that her own ex-boyfriend Duane got picked up on a dui, driving under the influence. My mother is pleased about this. I ask if she has seen my sister’s niece. She hasn’t, but tells me that Rosa, my sister’s mother-in-law, was fired from her job at the Rupert hospital for allegedly slapping a patient. My mother doubts this story; she thinks the hospital doesn’t want to have to pay Rosa so much. Rosa Gonzalez has been working there for a long time. Neither my mother nor I seriously considers the possibility that Rosa will appeal the firing; we both know how far a Mexican American woman would get with something like that in Rupert, Idaho. Mother tells me that Rosa has a new job at the Burley Care Center. She probably feels lucky just to have a job. I make a mental note to ask my father if he knows anything about Rosa’s story. My father is the director of the Rupert hospital board. My mother asks how I am. I say busy, as usual. Things will be better when I get this paper written. Cryptic. I don’t want to have to explain my academic paper to my mother. She doesn’t push it, used to our one-way conversations. I hung up and went back to work on that other paper that was about sexism and racism and one Vietnamese American woman’s life. I worked down to the wire and faxed it to the editor on March 7, canceling my morning class in order to meet my deadline. Then it was catch-up time with teaching and time to start thinking about my global consciousness paper. The paper for which I had a name but no body. A few days later as I read my morning newspaper, I noted the following: at dawn on March 17, 1995, under unusually heavy guard, the government of Singapore executed Flor Contemplacion. 2 The Associated Press stories said that Contemplacion was a forty-two-year-old Filipino maid (someone with more linguistic sensitivity would have written “Filipina maid”). The Singaporean government had convicted her of the murders of a four-year-old boy named Nicholas Huang and of another Filipina maid named Della Maga, age not reported. Nicholas and Della were killed in 1991, and Contemplacion was sentenced to death in April 1994. One story reported that Contemplacion had confessed to the murders but claimed to have been tortured. Another story said

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that her lawyers advised her to confess but plead not guilty by reason of insanity “in hopes of a lesser sentence should she be found guilty.”3 Reasonable doubt about Contemplacion’s guilt was raised by another maid, Emilia Frenilla, who used to work next door to Della Maga. Frenilla came forward to say that she had overheard conversations suggesting that Nicholas had drowned in the bathtub during an epileptic seizure and that his Singaporean family had killed Della in a fit of rage and then framed Flor Contemplacion. Frenilla made these claims on tv talk shows in Manila, where she had been flown by Philippine politicians. Her affidavit was rejected by the Singaporean government. Abby Tan, writing for the Christian Science Monitor, pointed out the timing of the Philippines’ elections in the elevation of Flor Contemplacion to the status of national symbol. 4 President Fidel Ramos, running for reelection, pledged a month’s salary to a scholarship fund for Contemplacion’s four grown children. Ramos sent his wife to join the crowd of mourners at the airport when Contemplacion’s coffin arrived in Manila. Tan argued that Filipino emotions are easily aroused by reports of the mistreatment of Filipinos in richer countries, such as Singapore, where economic necessity forces them to work but where the Philippine government has neither the resources nor the will to protect its citizens. Tan wrote that there had been no public outcry when Contemplacion was convicted and that, while Contemplacion’s fate “tugged at Filipino heartstrings,” the death of Della Maga was not even mentioned. Certainly the photos that ran with the story tugged at my heartstrings, particularly the photo of other young Filipinas in Singapore crying on each other’s shoulders as they received the news of Flor’s execution. After I read these news reports, I knew that my global consciousness paper had a body — the body of Flor Contemplacion. Another Sunday afternoon, another phone call to my mother. Bad news: her hours are being cut back at work. Everyone’s hours are being cut back where she works. All the workers, that is. I don’t know about the managers. The change the hospital plans to make is this: Instead of having three ward clerks cover each twenty-four-hour time period, they will reduce the number of clerks to two per day, each working a ten-hour shift. This will leave four hours during the day in which no clerk is on duty. They aren’t planning to lay anyone off, which means each clerk will work fewer days per week. My mother’s hourly wage is $5.77. With each paycheck, my mother takes home about $350, roughly $700 per month to live on. Plus what I send. It sounds to me as if her hours are going to be reduced by about a fourth, if not more. I tell her I will send her the difference every month, not to worry about it. My mother says she wishes she

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didn’t have to take my money. She asks me how I am. Busy, I say. I’m working on another paper. My mother thinks that I must work really hard. Well, spring break is coming, I say. We hang up. I make a mental note to talk to my father about my mother’s situation. My paper was still in the nonmaterial stage, although it now had a body. But with the body had come doubts. Lying in bed at 5 a.m. worried about having something to say in public, I had an uneasy struggle with my imposter syndrome. Who was I to talk about issues of global feminist import — a small-town Idaho kid transplanted to small-town Iowa who’s never been out of the country unless you count Canada. Economically, racially, sexually — the differences between Flor and me couldn’t be greater. How is it possible for a woman like me to forge any kind of genuine political identification with women like Flor Contemplacion or Della Maga as long as I continue to be a woman like me, which seems pretty likely, at least in the near future? But then, in a way, that’s what my paper would be about: me continuing to be a woman like me, that is, employed. I decided that this would be a paper about work, a paper that didn’t conceal the labor that went into producing it. It could be a paper that contemplated the kind of work I do and what my work has to do with the kind of work that Flor Contemplacion and Della Maga did. While their jobs compelled them to be silent, my job compels me to speak, to profess. I have to write to stay employed. To write, I have to have something to write about. As a member of the professional middle class, I have considerable autonomy in deciding what that something will be. I am told to write but not what to write about. Which brought me back to the bodies of the Filipina maids. In contemplating this paper and the nature of my work, I flashed back to a conference in which I had recently participated. I had been speaking about global feminism in the context of literature about the Vietnam War. A fellow academic in the audience responded bluntly. She professed that there was no way that women in the so-called First World could find common cause with women in the so-called Third World. The implication was that I was either idealistically deluded or cynically exploitative. Time was up for the session, and so our exchange ended there. Her comment came back to me in the early mornings as I worried about my paper and the complexities of speaking from a position of privilege about people who don’t have the privilege of telling their own stories in their own words. I worried, of course, about complicity, something people in my profession have been talking about a lot lately. How could I write about the bodies of Flor Contemplacion and Della Maga in a way that didn’t only exploit them for the

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purposes of my own career advancement? In a way that somehow genuinely contributed to my professed project of better understanding how First World citizens can imagine common political cause with women such as Flor and Della? I know from my study of antiwar literature of the Vietnam War period the profound difficulty of keeping the suffering and needs of others in mind when our own bodies are at ease. Denise Levertov writes of this dilemma in “Modes of Being.”5 She attempts to stretch her imagination from her own comfortable confines to the tiger-cages of South Vietnam where “a woman / tries to straighten her / cramped spine / and cannot.” Levertov confesses to “all but” failing in this endeavor and asks, What wings, what mighty arch of feathered hollow bones, beyond span of albatross or eagle, mind and heart must grow to touch, trembling, with outermost pinion tips, not in alternation but both at once, in one violent eternal instant that which is and that which is . . .

As Levertov’s poem suggests, even under the urgent conditions of war, connecting lives lived at such distances is a real stretch, so much so that we can feel naive even trying, fear the label of “liberal humanist,” seek refuge in the tougher-edged rhetoric of academic Marxism. Certainly, I’ve had the arrogance to use such labels. I think about the harshness of my critique of other writers, among them Vietnam veteran and magazine editor William Broyles Jr., who in 1984 sat across a Hanoi table from a grown-up Phan Thi Kim Phuuc, the young Vietnamese girl whose image was immortalized in the famous 1972 Life magazine photograph. Although he had seen her napalm scars in the flesh, Broyles was unable to connect the dots that linked her life to his, that suggested how he might be complicit somehow with what happened to Kim Phuuc: “As I listened to her story I realized how the terrible epiphanies of one person’s life, those moments when the torturer tightens the rope for the final time, when the canisters of napalm slowly tumble toward the pagoda filled with children, always happen while other people are going about their daily routines, in the many unremembered details of ordinary life. All that link the two worlds are memory and imagination, but even they can’t really bridge the chasm.” 6 I’d been critical of Broyles for failing to look at his

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own complicity with the “daily routines” of oppression as closely as he looked at Kim Phuuc’s scars, but I realized my world is closer to his than to hers. Broyles and I are fellow workers in the consciousness industry. 7 Lying in bed struggling with my imposter syndrome, I cataloged all the ways I benefit from the forces that victimize the Flors and the Dellas and wondered if I would have the courage to write about them, how far I could bear to expose myself rather than others, and whether or not the wings of my own imagination could stretch far enough to touch something of Flor Contemplacion’s life. A Saturday. My father calls. We joke around for about ten minutes. I make fun of academics, and he makes fun of accountants. He’s calling because he just finished doing my mother’s tax return. Last year, he sent money to me to put in a retirement fund for my mother. He apologizes because he can’t send as much this year. I ask if he heard that my mother’s hours are being cut back at work. He says no. I tell him that I want him to help me make up the difference. He says he will. We make arrangements as to how the money will be sent to me so that I can send it to her. I ask him who my mother works for, and he tells me that the name of the company is Intermountain Health Care and that they are headquartered in Salt Lake City. They are competing with the hospital across the river in Rupert, duplicating services, driving up prices, building a large new hospital complex. My father and I joke around for another five minutes. I say something nasty about Newt Gingrich; he says something nasty about Hillary Clinton. He says he’ll send me a check, and then we hang up. I forget to ask him if he knows anything about Rosa and the alleged patient-slapping incident that got her fired. I tell my partner, Kathy, about the phone conversation. She makes fun of my family because my parents live twelve blocks apart in Idaho yet my father routes money to my mother through me in Iowa. And I go along with it, not telling my mother because somehow having her feel dependent on me seems better than having her feel dependent on my father. But since her ridicule strikes too close to my own doubts, I retaliate against Kathy by saying something mean and hurtful about her family. Then I go back to my day job as a feminist. Later that week I went to the library to look up Intermountain Health Care. The reference librarian helped me search but could find no information on them. She explained that they must be a privately owned corporation and therefore not obligated to publish the kind of information I want: who the owners are, their profits, the salaries of their executives, an address where I could write and protest their labor policies.

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I decided to write about Flor Contemplacion in conjunction with Jessica Hagedorn’s 1990 Dogeaters, a novel set in Manila during the years of the Marcos dictatorship. 8 Hagedorn was born in the Philippines and now resides in the United States, working as a writer and performance artist. I reasoned that she would be able to give me the global village perspective, that she would have insight on things like global capital and how its consolidation and circulation shape ordinary people’s lives, that she would provide compelling and vivid images that would pull my imagination outward from my immediate communities and help me feel connected to women like Flor and Della. Besides, I’d been wanting to read this book, and this paper provided a good occasion for doing so. During spring break, I pulled Dogeaters off my shelf. In the cover photo, Hagedorn’s hair is spiky, her eyes outlined in black, her mouth set in a defiant non-smile. She looks hip, tough, knowing — well-qualified for the job I had assigned her. I started reading Dogeaters and found it to be a quintessential global village novel: a hybrid text for representing hybrid realities. Hagedorn juxtaposes a multiplicity of discourses from colonialist history to radio soap operas to jingles advertising TruCola, her symbol of the penetration of Philippine culture by multinational commodities. She mixes dreams and nightmares, fantasies and realities. Her characters speak in English, Spanish, and Tagalog. The narrative voice shifts between third person and first person, with a middle-class female character named Rio ultimately emerging as the dominant voice. The novel gives us glimpses into the intersecting lives of a cross section of Philippine society from politicians to prostitutes, although the border between these two identities is impossible to define. A roman à clef, Hagedorn’s fictional portrayals of Imelda Marcos are only outdone in campy outrageousness by Imelda’s own self-presentations on news shows I’ve seen. Flor Contemplacion’s story and how it had been used to advance the political interests of the Philippine president would fit seamlessly into Dogeaters. As I read Dogeaters, I underlined all the passages that refer to maids. Their lives are lived in the in-between spaces of Hagedorn’s narrative, just as they are lived in the in-between spaces of public culture, their voices unheard and their bodies unseen in the corridors of power. Although they sweep those corridors. Several of the privileged but disempowered female characters feel more connected to the women who work as maids than to the members of their own families, although this emotional identification never translates into political identification. The body of my paper was starting to materialize. But I was doing some more tossing and turning in the early hours, haunted by another body that I could no

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longer ignore — the body of my mother. Her specter hovered as if it wanted to join Flor Contemplacion and Della Maga in my paper. Annoyingly, and true to my mother’s spirit, she didn’t demand to be included but just sat there, meek. This was all Cherríe Moraga’s fault. I’d been teaching Loving in the War Years, Moraga’s unflinching analysis of how sexism and racism live in each of our bodies. I’d been reading Moraga’s call for a poetic language that can revivify rhetoric: Within the women’s movement, the connections among women of different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been fragile, at best. I think this phenomenon is indicative of our failure to seriously address ourselves to some very frightening questions: How have I internalized my own oppression? How have I oppressed? Instead, we have let rhetoric do the job of poetry. Even the word “oppression” has lost its power. We need a new language, better words that can more closely describe women’s fear of and resistance to one another; words that will not always come out sounding like dogma. 9

I’d been trying to enact in my teaching the heavy responsibility Moraga puts on those of us who are privileged to understand that the oppression of others hurts us personally: “I have come to believe that the only reason women of a privileged class will dare to look at how it is that they oppress is when they’ve come to know the meaning of their own oppression. And understand that the oppression of others hurts them personally.” 10 It was hard for me to imagine how Flor Contemplacion’s and Della Maga’s deaths hurt me personally until I considered how their destinies were somehow connected to mine through my mother. But the thought of writing about my mother literally made me flinch. Moraga is right, of course. It is much easier for me to fall back on what she means by rhetoric: the formulaic academic language that I’ve been trained to perform in my writing and in the classroom. I knew where writing a paper of that nature would take me, the predictable conclusions I would reach, the usual suspects I would accuse: patriarchy and capitalism, other words that have lost their rhetorical power. I also knew the greater likelihood that such a paper would be approved by most of my colleagues. Doing “the job of poetry” would mean changing my own mind rather than the minds of others, confronting the “frightening questions” that expose the sources of my own privilege, imagining a different way of forming these thoughts into words. It would mean acknowledging, as Moraga does, the extent to which my mother’s story is part of my story. My sister Leanne calls from Boise. We talk about our mother, Leanne giving me the latest. In order to qualify for unemployment, my mother has to go out

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and apply for two jobs per week, a demeaning ritual. Leanne and I scoff that in three weeks she probably will have applied for every job there is in the RupertBurley area. Leanne tells me that my mother can’t prove it but she thinks that her age (fifty-seven) and her religion are working against her in getting a job. The supervisor at the Rupert hospital is a Mormon, and he gives the jobs to other Mormons. To fuel our disgust with the village that raised us, I repeat the story to Leanne about what happened to my mother in the divorce eighteen years ago. Her lawyer — a friend of my father’s, since all the professional men in a town that small associate with each other — told her that it wasn’t a good idea for a wife to go after her husband’s business as part of the settlement. So what my displaced-homemaker mother got was half of the equity in the house my parents owned, parceled out in monthly payments of $250 over about seven years. She got nothing from the business into which all the money went when I was growing up. Leanne and I contemplate the economic disparity between our respected and successful father and our dependent and downwardly mobile mother. We don’t, of course, question how much of the money that our father paid for our college educations might have rightfully belonged to our mother, how much of our own financial independence has come as a consequence of our mother’s dependence. Nor do we question how the natures of our own working lives insistently compel us to identify more with our middle-class father than with our working-class mother. That week I looked up the address for the unemployment office in the Des Moines phone book. I went to the office in the suburb of West Des Moines rather than the office downtown. I picked up the forms my mother would have had to fill out and read all the pages that the clerks had written read on. I found a blue sheet: “Job Finding Tips for Mature Workers.” The sheet suggests that job seekers do a careful personal inventory. The first question to answer is: “Why do you want to work?” The government has a sense of humor, it seems. At the end of the helpful advice, the flyer says, in a perky voice, I’m sure: “One final word: Do not be disappointed if you don’t get the first job you apply for — it’s a job to get a job — and each effort provides a learning experience to help you the next time. Remember an older person can do anything he or she is qualified to do. Take a positive approach and tell the employer what you can do. Sell yourself!” I decided not to send this flyer to my mother. By this point in the writing of my paper I’d read Dogeaters and had lots of passages about Filipina maids underlined. I knew most of my audience wouldn’t have read Hagedorn’s novel, and I was reluctant to flatten out the complexity of her narrative by summarizing her book, an impossible task at any rate. Better

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to use a book than to retell it. This is what I decided to take from Dogeaters for my own paper: Hagedorn’s hybrid form; her ficitionalizing of “actual persons, living or dead”; her analysis of complicity; and one image. The image is of a weepy character named Baby Alacran, daughter of the oligarch. Isolated in her bedroom in her big house, she grieves over the death by assassination of the opposition senator. Baby thinks about all of the servants who come and go, attending to her psychosomatically diseased body:“She imagines they must mourn the dead Senator, and wonders if he is their hero. She is ashamed of feeling connected to them, and somehow feels unworthy. She tries, once again, to think of something else.”11 Baby picks up the remote control and turns on her favorite daytime tv show, Maid in the Philippines, thus switching from the socially prohibited form of sympathy with actual workers to the socially encouraged form of sympathy with mediated images of victims. Among that day’s contestants is Lorna, who is supporting her parents and four siblings back home in the countryside — four impoverished siblings who want to “enter college.” “ ‘Tell us what you’re going to do for us in the talent competition,’ the host inquires with professional concern. The female contestants, all servants, are judged by the audience on the basis of their sad stories and showbiz talents.”12 Flor Contemplacion was working in Singapore to support her husband and four children. To my knowledge, she never got the opportunity to tell her own story. Even in court, her lawyers gave her a different story to tell. I’m a low-level worker in the consciousness industry, and, to the degree that I have the autonomy to do so, I’ve defined my job as looking for ways to read and write that address the relationship between the Flors and the Babys of the world. So in writing my paper I did my job. I read articles about the global economy, about the forces that contribute to Filipinas being forced to migrate away from their homes to work in more affluent countries. I read, for instance, the analysis offered by Philippine novelist Ninotchka Rosca.13 The traffic in women began when Spanish and U.S. colonialism created the poverty and weakened the ethical norms of the Philippine people to the extent that many resorted to selling their daughters as a way of surviving. Marcos — praised by George H. Bush in 1981 for his commitment to democracy — bankrupted the national treasury, devalued the peso, declared martial law, and procured enormous loans from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to create a tourism infrastructure and a zone of maquiladoras (foreign-owned factories). In the 1970s, Filipinos themselves became an export commodity, working primarily in the Middle East as construction workers and required by presidential decree to turn over 70 percent of their earnings to their government. In the 1990s, with the construction boom over, Filipinas have replaced Filipinos as the major export

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of their nation. The women work primarily as domestics, but a large proportion are also forced into the sex industry, both at home and abroad. The policies of the global capitalists promise to create even greater misery for Filipinos in the future, forcing up to 100,000 rice and corn farmers off the land so that flowers can be grown for export. Flowers and Flors. I read about the forces of competition in the U.S. “medical-industrial complex,” forces that are responsible for my mother’s shrinking paycheck and lengthening work shifts, for the necessity to go out and “sell herself.” The global pool of desperately poor workers “exerts a downward pressure on wages and working conditions” for U.S. workers. 14 I read about strategies people are proposing for addressing this phenomenon, including the ideas of Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, the authors of Global Village or Global Pillage. Brecher and Costello suggest what they call a Lilliputian strategy in which all of us little people tie down the giant multinationals with a network of small pieces of thread: a net to contain the economic predators, a safety net for the rest of us. 15 These pieces of thread are regulations and practices that would force multinational corporations to be responsible for and responsive to the local communities whose wealth and labor they extract. What we have to put in place are mechanisms of “upward leveling” — “raising the standards of those at the bottom and thereby reducing their downward pull on everyone else.”16 It’s a stretch for those of us in the middle to believe that “raising the standards of those at the bottom” will benefit us in real ways. Brecher and Costello argue that “the linking of self-interest and common interest is the starting point for all collective action.” 17 This makes sense to me, especially the part about selfinterest and common interest. I have but a very vague idea of the kind of oppression experienced by women like Flor Contemplacion or Della Maga or even by my own mother, but I have a highly developed sense of self-interest. My middle-class education has seen to that. I have just enough knowledge of human nature (i.e., self-knowledge) to trust the motivating force of self-interest more than the force of empathy. As Hagedorn suggests with Baby Alacran and her remote control, I have too many options for changing channels when someone else’s story makes me feel sad. Yet with every check I make out to my mother, I experience how much the forces that devalue her labor affect my own life, how her oppression might hurt me personally, in material as well as emotional ways. If I really force myself to think about it, I can begin to see myself as a worker too, a worker who may have common cause with other workers. How my self-interest connects with Flor Contemplacion and Della Maga has something to do with so many women in villages from the Philippines to Idaho being perpetually trapped in cycles of economic dependence, always the

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workers, rarely the owners. But first I must turn my self-interest away from those upon whom I am dependent. Reflecting on Flor’s untold story, I wondered about another woman whose story hasn’t been told: Nicholas Huang’s mother, the woman in the middle. Did she offer any resistance to the murder of Della and the framing of Flor? Was she a willing accomplice? Was she forced to go along with the plot? How did the death of her son affect her own status? Another Sunday afternoon, April 16. The deadline for my presentation is looming. I’m depressed because Kathy and my dog Winnie went home early to give me time to work on my paper. (I have a commuter relationship so that my partner and I can both work at jobs for which our PhDs entitle us.) Why not add to the depression? I call my mother. She tells me that the new work schedule is now in effect. My mother worked a thirteen-hour shift the previous Friday. As expected, the four-hour gap when no clerks are on duty is a fiction. Sick people came in, and my mother had to stay and do their paperwork. And overtime is figured on a weekly basis, not a daily one. Saturday night she went to a no-alcohol dance at someone’s barn near Twin Falls. She went with her friend Gerri and a nurse from work. I ask if the nurses’ hours have been cut back too. She says, well, they must have been because her nurse-friend had worked an extra-long shift the day before too. The nurse hadn’t been able to get to sleep that night, worrying about what kinds of mistakes she might have made with patients, what, in her weariness, she might have missed. I tell my mother that this is happening to nurses all over the country. They are being replaced with “assistants” who have no comparable training and will work for a fraction of what hospitals have to pay nurses. 18 I ask my mother if she saw on the news that nurses made a march on Washington on March 31 to protest this development. She hadn’t known that all this was going on, that what was happening to her was part of a larger pattern that the corporate mouthpieces call “downsizing.” I ask my mother how her finances are. She reassures me that she has enough money put aside to pay her rent next month. I say,“Mother — it’s not ‘rent’! You own your house. It’s your mortgage payment.” But even as I say it, I know that my mother is right and I’m wrong. She has a clearer sense of her place in the world than I’m willing to acknowledge. She knows that she is one of the world’s renters, not one of its owners. And the ownership my mother does have is laced not with a sense of accomplishment but with a sense of loss. Certainly neither of us wants to think about where the money for the house came from: the life insurance money paid to my mother when my sister Karen and her husband, Dario, were killed in a car accident.

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There’s an update on mother’s friend Gerri, who is going to stay the night at my mother’s house again. Gerri’s asshole boyfriend has locked her out of the house that Gerri bought with him, putting down five thousand dollars of her own money. I can’t think of anything to say besides,“What an asshole.”We hang up. Then it was time to actually write my paper, to translate the mental work into words on the page. I had a folder full of notes, clippings, articles, reviews; a novel with lots of passages underlined; a travel guide to the Philippines with a photo of “Dancers at one of the many girlie bars on the Ermita strip”; a poster with the global village aphorism. I also had my work in the consciousness industry cut out for me, clarified for me: the work of making concrete in our language and in our imaginations the relations that tie us all together in global networks of interdependence, the work of making women’s work visible, including my own and its connection to the work of other women. As Adrienne Rich has written: “Our theory, scholarship, and teaching must continue to refer back to flesh, blood, violence, sexuality, anger, the bread put on the table by the single mother and how it gets there.” 19 It was time to sit down at the computer, that amazing technological advancement that makes it possible for multinational corporations to move their operations all over the world at the merest hint of a labor demand, the machine that makes it possible for me to produce more faster. I needed to piece together my own Lilliputian portion of the safety net that Brecher and Costello call for. My paper was coming along, two days until my presentation on Wednesday afternoon. It had been a long day in my office listening to the hum of my Power Mac, probably full of circuit boards pieced together by Filipinas working in maquiladoras. When I got back to my apartment that evening, there was a package from my mother: half a dozen of the cotton dishrags that she knits and always gives as gifts and the pay stubs I had asked her to send to me. The note read, in part: “Hi, Nancy, I worked 13 hours yesterday so I was tired today. When I went to Dr. Green in Twin the nurse took notes while he was talking to me. She sent the notes home with me. I made you a copy.” The nurse’s notes read, in part: “1. Rectocele. 2. Atrophic Gastritis. Recommend gastroscopy annually — to prevent possibility of cancer. Vit. b12 supplement every month.” The idea of my mother with cancer fills me with dread. More precisely, the idea of me taking care of my mother, of caring for my mother’s body. I understand where the guilty, middle-class desire for servants who take care of the bodies of our babies and our ailing parents comes from and how we can be so willingly manipulated by the idea that an underpaid caretaker drowned our child or slapped our

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bedridden mother. Like Baby Alacran, I try not to think about it. I try not to think about the body of my mother, chronically in poor health. Six months ago she couldn’t swallow, a condition that had been progressing for several years, probably, although we can’t prove it, because her doctors didn’t listen closely enough to her symptoms, diagnosing “nerves,” a common diagnosis for women of her age and in her situation. As her throat constricted over the years, her weight finally fell below a hundred pounds. She had to get her throat stretched. Caught up in writing my paper, I thought about the metaphorical possibilities in that one. The following day, as she emptied my office trash, Carrie (the woman whose job it is to clean up after me) remarked that she had seen the posters advertising my presentation. She regretted that she wouldn’t be able to go to it, and I reassured her that I understood. Carrie commented that she sees my name up on posters around campus all the time in connection with one thing or another and seemed to be impressed by this. I made a jokingly condescending attempt to explain that my name on posters around our provincial campus isn’t worth much in the marketplace of ideas, but then I began to dimly realize that it does have meaning to Carrie. Like my mother, it is unlikely that Carrie will ever write her own story, put on paper her analysis of how the personal is political in her life; if she did, she certainly would not receive a hearing on a college campus. It is important to her that some women do speak out, profess ideas. Her job doesn’t give her that opportunity. Now, I wish I had told Carrie what my paper was about and asked her opinion. The thought didn’t occur to me then. Her opinion has no bearing on my job evaluation. Instead, I dressed up and raised the global consciousness of my colleagues and a dozen bright students. My audience made provocative and helpful comments in response. My presentation took about as much time as it would have taken my mother to earn $5.77. I went home and started thinking about revising my paper for publication. My tenure committee was going to be more interested in my product than in any personal-growth process I used to produce it. In fact, I suspect they would prefer a thoroughly fetishized commodity, no women’s bodies with untold stories haunting my essay. I wish I could give my paper a happy ending and report that my mother found a new job with great benefits working for a labor union organizing health workers. She did find a new job, actually, but it lasted only a month before she got laid off. Now she works sporadically for a temp agency, and her unemployment benefits have run out. I wish I could report that the process of confronting my own complicity in the systems of oppression that limit the choices for women

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like my mother and Rosa and Flor Contemplacion has made me a better ally to them, but I still have a lot of work to do on that count. Thanks to global feminism, at least I have the privilege of making that work part of my job description. The process of writing my paper began with my need to have something to say in order to perform and keep my job. In Cherríe Moraga’s terms, it began with rhetoric. I started to “do the job of poetry” only when I genuinely began to desire to hear the stories of the women I was writing about and to imagine how their stories intersect with my story. I try not to delude myself that I can ever totally avoid the kind of appropriation inherent in writing about the lives of women who inhabit worlds so distant from mine, but perhaps I can at least work through my sense of complicity — “How have I oppressed?” — to a sense of solidarity — “How have I internalized my own oppression?” 20 The effort to stretch my imagination to encompass the lives of women distant from me brought me back home, just as when you stretch a rubber band it snaps back to sting your own hand.

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I call home. I tell my mother that I’ve received the photocopy of the report she sent me. In order to qualify for Vocational Rehabilitation programs, my mother has had to undergo a “psychological evaluation.” I understand that the psychologist, a fellow professional, is just doing his job, but the report infuriates me with its clinical language and unacknowledged, class-related power to define. The psychologist writes that my mother “arrived on time and in a very good state of grooming and hygiene. This woman is quite cooperative and pleasant. . . . Mood today is grossly within normal range, however she appears to be emotionally quite reserved or subdued and she admits to some stress related to her unemployment and finances running out.” While I perform a fuming Foucauldian critique of the patronizing discourse, my “cooperative and pleasant” mother’s note accompanying the report makes no comment on the summation of her life. Instead, she writes that she likes Teresa, the Vocational Rehabilitation worker who referred her to the psychologist:“She quit work a few years ago because of a low b12 level, so she can relate to the fatigue problem.” If I am really honest with myself, I have to admit that part of what stings in the psychologist’s report is the occasional revelation embedded in the misrepresentation: “She states that she is ‘not happy or unhappy,’ but does admit that sometimes she is very tense and tends to worry.” I appear in my mother’s history as the “daughter in Iowa . . . helping her with her house payments.” The daughter in Iowa who could help relieve some of that worry if she tried. I ask my mother if she received the last check I mailed. She says yes. As always,


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she says she wishes she didn’t have to take my money. I tell her not to worry, that I can afford it. I suggest that she is entitled to the money I earn, that she and so many other women of her generation have been deliberately dispossessed of their rightful share of the wealth. Of course, she has been thinking about her situation and tells me that she likes to think that her staying home when I was a child contributed to my ability to succeed economically. Her generation of mothers sacrificed their financial security for the sake of my generation of daughters. While not precisely the words I would have chosen, I say “yes, I think you’re right” and flinch a bit when I sense her relief and the power I have to define her reality with my confirmation or denial. I wish I could write a check to my mother giving her some of the power that comes with my job as well as some of the money. Since I can’t do that, maybe I can do a better job of being a daughter. Notes Except for my family members and public figures, the names of people who appear in this essay have been changed. I’d like to thank Debra Marquart for her encouragement in the early stages of writing this essay. I’d also like to thank my friends and colleagues Kim Ports, Nancy Romalov, and Carol Spaulding for their advice in the final stages. 1. Charlotte Bunch, Passionate Politics: Feminist Theory in Action (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 329. 2. Associated Press, “Singapore: Woman Must Die,” Des Moines Register, March 16, 1995, and “Singapore Hangs Maid Despite Pleas,” Des Moines Register, March 17, 1995. 3. Philip Shenon, “Filipinos Protest Singapore Death Sentence,” New York Times, March 16, 1995, a8. 4. Abby Ian, “Singapore’s Justice Upsets an Asian Friend,” Christian Science Monitor, March 17, 1995, 5. 5. Denise Levertov, “Modes of Being,” in The Freeing of the Dust (New York: New Directions, 1975), 98–99. 6. William Broyles Jr., Brothers in Arms: A Journey from War to Peace (New York: Knopf, 1986), 56. 7. Hans Magnus Enzensberger uses this term in The Consciousness Industry (New York: Seabury Press, 1974). 8. Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (New York: Pantheon, 1990). 9. Cherríe Moraga, Loving in the War Years/lo que nunca pasó por sus labios (Boston: South End Press, 1983), 54. 10. Moraga, Loving in the War Years, 54. 11. Hagedorn, Dogeaters, 157. 12. Hagedorn, Dogeaters, 157. 13. Ninotchka Rosca, “The Philippines’ Shameful Export: Mrs. Contemplacion’s Sisters,” Nation, April 17, 1995, 522–25.

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14. Richard J. Barnet, “Lords of the Global Economy,” Nation, December 19, 1994, 755. 15. Jeremy Brecher and Tim Costello, “Taking on the Multinationals,” Nation, December 19, 1994, 757–60. For a fuller discussion of the forces of globalization and of strategies of resistance, see Jeremy Brecher, John Brown Childs, and Jill Cutler, Global Visions: Beyond the New World Older (Boston: South End Press, 1993). 16. Brecher and Costello, “Taking on the Multinationals,” 758. 17. Brecher and Costello, “Taking on the Multinationals,” 758. 18. Suzanne Gordon,“Is There a Nurse in the House?” Nation, February 13, 1995, 199–202. 19. Adrienne Rich, Blood, Bread, and Poetry (New York: Norton, 1986), 154–55. 20. Moraga, Loving in the War Years, 54.

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This section of the volume is an extension of the preceding one. Every act of writing about oneself inevitably requires writing about those who are close to the author, both in proximity and emotion. In most of the selections that make up the preceding section — most notably those by Maribel Sosa, Katherine Sutherland, and Nancy Reincke — parents, siblings, children, partners, and spouses permeate the narratives of self, not only providing the context in which identity is formed but also influencing how the writers tell their stories. William Zinsser writes of his experience as a memoirist that he felt half paralyzed by the family members about whom he was writing and who he felt were “looking over his shoulder, if not actually perched there” and how now, when he reads other memoirs, he wonders “how many passengers were along on the ride subtly altering the past.”1 In this section we turn to accounts where those others who are “along on the ride” actually occupy the front seat, becoming the main subject of the narrative. The writers’ deep personal knowledge of these subjects affords them insight into their subjects, yet this knowledge brings with it questions of power, privacy, and privilege. As Sidonie Smith notes, all collaborative projects “raise complex questions about who speaks in the text and whose story is being told, about who maintains control over the narrative and by implication over the purposes to which the story is put.” 2 These questions are as true when writing about family members as when writing about more distanced subjects. Memory is individual, and each participant recalls the same event in his or her own way. Moreover, turning family stories into published material may alter the resulting narrative, just as in physics the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle predicts that observing an event alters the event itself. What happens, for example, when a family member’s well-known story suddenly shifts in the process of recording it? Has the story been altered to give a more accurate account than the family lore, or has the subject self-edited the story to obscure something that might be seen negatively by the writer or by future readers? What happens when the relationship between writer and subject creates boundaries regarding what can be shared? Writing about the relatively unexplored area of autobiographical ethics, Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson note that this topic “includes a host of issues about how and what subjects and audiences know of each other and how they comport themselves,” among them“the ethics of self- and family-revelation, . . . the positioning of audiences during and after the subject’s lifetime, [and] the

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subject’s relation to biographical accounts and extratextual evidence.” 3 The writers included in this section explore these issues, describing and analyzing not only the lives of family members but also their own vantage point in this “ride” in which it is often hard to tell who is driving and who is riding along. The first piece, Roseanne Sneed’s “Two Cherokee Women,” is about four generations of Cherokee women whose lives straddle the period during which the Cherokees were forced to give up their traditional ways of life. These generations include her great-grandmother Tsa li di, a woman known for her traditional medicine and who was born in a cave in the Tennessee hills after federal troops ordered the Cherokees to resettle in Oklahoma; her grandmother Lucyann, who was among the first generation to be required to be educated in white schools and to be given English names; her mother, Mary, whose life was also marked by tension between a traditional childhood with her parents and her mandatory schooling at a government boarding school; and, of course, Sneed herself. In telling these stories, Sneed — who was an undergraduate at the time she wrote this piece — participates in the line of women storytellers that she celebrates, keeping alive the memory and life details of the women who have influenced her. This piece also gives voice to 150 years of tremendous loss for the Cherokee people, as in each successive generation the conflict between Cherokee traditions and white assimilation becomes greater. In “Like a Bamboo: Representations of a Japanese War Bride,” Debbie Storrs likewise seeks to fill in a gap in the historical record, in this case in the scholarship of war brides and interracial marriages. In doing research on this topic, one that reflects part of her own family history, Storrs found that the voices of the women themselves were rarely present, or, if present, inadequately analyzed. In telling her mother’s story, Storrs examines the ways in which her mother’s narrative of her life as a war bride was shaped by narrative frames as well as by the larger social and cultural contexts in which her life was embedded. Thus Storrs’s article not only provides the voice of one war bride but also analyzes how such stories are a kind of self-construction that involves both conformity to ideological narratives and resistance to those narratives. Like the bamboo that she uses as a metaphor for her experience, Storrs’s mother is both bent by cultural forces and resilient in the face of those forces. Storrs also examines how her mother-daughter relationship both facilitated and constrained her mother’s narrative; how, in effect, the intertwined roles of mother, daughter, researcher, and subject themselves frame the resulting narrative. Like Storrs, Connie Broughton uses her essay, “Filming Nana: Some Dilemmas of Oral History on Film,” to examine the difficulties and possibilities inherent in using family members as research subjects — in this case for a doc-

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umentary film on the Idaho mining town of Burke. Broughton summarizes her dilemma: “Making a film using oral history provides plenty of problems in itself, but what happens when the subject of the film is not only someone you love but also someone whom you know doesn’t have a strong attachment to the truth?” The filmmaking process Broughton narrates involves a complex navigation between her relationships with her grandmother (the subject) and her husband (the filmmaker) and her sense of responsibility as a historian and writer to represent the history of Burke as accurately and fully as possible. Added to this complexity is Broughton’s awareness that as she and her husband, Irv, edit the film, they, like Nana, are editing the version of history that will become the public story of Burke. Rather than be dismayed by the loose tethering of memory to historical “fact,” Shawn Michelle Smith’s selection turns this untethering into a creative process. In her art piece “Fragments from a Family Album” (both on the cover and in this section), Smith highlights the ways in which family photo albums, the repository of family memory, are imagined and created rather than factual and documentary. Liberating images from her family’s original albums or films, Smith manipulates them so that they tell new stories and highlight relationships that are hidden in the images’ original format. In her essay “Potties, Pride, and pc: Scenes from a Lesbian Mothers’ Group,” Anne Aronson, the last author in this section, also writes about reinvention — in this case, the ways in which she and the other members of the lesbian mothers’ group to which she belonged in the early 1990s were in the process of redefining family, parenting, and gender. Using a snapshot approach, Aronson presents episodes from the mothers’ group, beginning with the initial gathering of eight lesbian couples anticipating births — all of which coincidentally produced sons — through their evolving community activities of retreats and monthly potlucks. But more than being just a description of this particular community of mothers, Aronson’s essay uses these scenes to illustrate components of lesbian community, including the tensions and complexities that exist when it was parenting and not politics that brought these women together. Further complexity arises when these women have to invent for themselves “what it means to be lesbian mothers, and, even more specifically, lesbian mothers with sons.” In the daily episodes that Aronson presents, she illustrates how these mothers work to navigate this new terrain while simultaneously pressing for reforms in how American society defines family. Given the dilemmas involved in writing about one’s family, one might question why writers return so often to this subject matter. They do so, in part, to record for posterity lives and voices of subjects who add to our understanding

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of the past and present. But writers also write about their families in order to understand themselves better. As Toni Morrison writes of her family, “These people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life.” 4 Thus the relationships between writer and subject, between Zinsser’s driver and passenger, are crucial to these pieces. These relationships not only connect past to present through narrative; these relationships are also the (often bumpy) road on which writer and subject travel. Notes 1. William Zinsser, introduction to Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. Zinsser, rev. ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 6. 2. Sidonie Smith, “Who’s Talking/Who’s Talking Back? The Subject of Personal Narrative,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (1993): 399. 3. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, “Introduction: Situating Subjectivity in Women’s Autobiographical Practices,” in Women, Autobiography, Theory: A Reader, ed. Smith and Watson (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 39 4. Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Zinsser, Inventing the Truth, 195.

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Two Cherokee Women

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[First Page] [71], (1) Women are usually ignored in the history of any nation or civilization. I have a great interest in seeing this corrected. Women are so vital to any civilization, not only for the obvious capabilities, such as giving birth, but also because they have done so much for the foundation and settling of all societies. Women have done half the job, if not more. I am telling the story of the two women who have most greatly influenced my life and have made me emphatically proud to be a woman. They have lived through many difficulties, and in the end they seem all the greater for it. My mother has always been a great storyteller. The following account is taken from all the stories that my mother has told me since I was very young. These stories are very important. They have been ingrained in my mind and will always influence my life. I am proud that they are the women in my life. Our family has a strong oral tradition. I am proud that, because of it, my mother and grandmother can tell my family history. When my great-grandmother was born, most of the Cherokees had been forced from their homes by the federal troops of Andrew Jackson and resettled out in Oklahoma. My ancestors who remained in their homeland had to hide out in the hills. Those driven west suffered over what is now called the Trail of Tears. Many of the Cherokees died from disease and exposure on their trip west. But those who stayed behind had other hardships to deal with. My greatgrandmother was born up in the Tennessee hills in a cave. Her name was Tsa li di. By the time the federal government had returned some of the land as reserve land to the Cherokee people, Tsa li di had married Climbing Bear, whose brother


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was the Cherokee Keeper of the Stories and who was very traditional. But the people had to eventually move down from the mountains to try to live a little easier and freer. Most Cherokee families lived in the mountains still, they just didn’t have to hide out anymore. Climbing Bear and Tsa li di produced five daughters. They lived on the Qualla Reservation, which is located in the Smoky Mountains of western North Carolina. The reservation lands were always surrounded by white people. They had been after Indian land all along. That is why the Cherokees were forced to move to Oklahoma. The freedom for the Indian people was gone for good. They could no longer live as they pleased. Schools and churches set upon the families to rid them of their heathen ways. Their daughters had to go to the Quaker school. Here they received their English names. These were to become their permanent names. My grandmother became know as Lucyann Davis. I guess my grandmother grew up in a terribly confusing period. She was pulled on by a very strong force from the large white population that surrounded the Cherokee people. There were missionaries from the Baptist Church and teachers and matrons from the Quaker school. The stores and other developments were controlled by the whites. The Cherokee people had controlled everything before the troops moved in and herded them off. Lucyann could find happiness around her home with other Cherokees, but they were constantly being pulled out of this kind of living and shoved into white schools and pressured to forget their Indian ways. Her father was a very traditional man. He raised his daughters in strict Cherokee custom. The Cherokee language was always spoken. For the most part, Climbing Bear kept his daughters out of schools. He also did his best to keep the Baptists away. These influences crept in anyway. When Lucyann was about fifteen years old, she had a terrible accident while on a trip with her father to a grinding mill. While he and the miller were off talking, Lucyann’s shawl became tangled in the wheels and her arm was pulled under it and mangled badly. The pain and shock kept her unconscious for days, and when she came to she found herself in the Baptists’ hospital. After the accident, her father took her home to treat her and cure her with Cherokee methods and medicines. The missionaries heard about the accident and forced their way in and carried her off to the hospital despite her father’s protests. They virtually stole her away. They also amputated her arm. Climbing Bear felt that his way could have saved her arm if they had been left to themselves. Nevertheless, Lucyann was told by the missionaries that they had saved her life.

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A few years later she married my grandfather, William Blaine Smith. He had grown up in a more assimilated family. He spoke English and was not traditional in his religion or his lifestyle. They had three daughters and one son. They lived in the heart of the Smoky Mountains on the mountain called Mingo. My grandmother had finished the sixth grade in the Quaker school when she married my grandfather. He only went to the third grade, but he liked to boast that he finished school in three years! Lucyann delivered all her children at home. For Anna, Rose, and Samuel, their grandmother was midwife. She would pull the baby out and use what they had in the house to aid the birth. She would secure the umbilical cord for burial. Many tribes have this custom. It is believed that this will give the new person a home. They now belong with that land where it is buried. My mother, Mary, was delivered by her father on February 3, 1915. Her Indian name is Aiyasti, which means the Spoiler or tearing things up. It belonged to her great-grandmother. On the day she was born it was too cold for her grandmother to make the long walk through the mountains, so her father assisted. All of Lucyann’s babies were breastfed. She never went dry until after the death of their baby Samuel. Only six months before the baby’s death, which was caused by his clothes catching on fire when he played too close to the fireplace, William Blaine died at the age of twenty-four. Samuel had only been two. My grandmother lost her mind for nearly a year. She was unable to care for her children, much less the farm that they were left with. One by one, the few animals died. Anna was taken to boarding school, and Rose was living in a foster home. Lucyann lost so much so quickly. My mother stayed with her and suffered neglect and fear as she watched her mother pine away tearfully over her sorrow. It took many months for her to get hold of herself again, but she did. My mother was about five years old by then. My grandmother must have been only about twenty-two. Lucyann remarried. Her second husband was Owen Wolf, a full-blood Cherokee. He was a traditional Cherokee and he spoke no English. He and Lucyann had a son named Jeremiah. Mary, my mother, had some very happy times with them. My grandmother, Lucyann Wolf, always had to do a lot of work. Having only one arm didn’t seem to slow her down any. No matter how late she got to bed at night, she rose early at the same time each morning. They couldn’t afford a clock, and she, like other Cherokee families, could pretty well tell the time of day because of the sun’s position. It became so instinctive that even on a rainy or cloudy day when the sun didn’t shine, she knew. She allowed my mother, Mary, to sleep until breakfast was ready. Lucyann

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would get out of bed when her husband, Owen, got the fire going in the fireplace in the front of the one room of their house. After dressing, she would sit for a while, warm herself, and then with a small shovel would dip up live coals and carry them outside to the little kitchen house and kindle a fire in the cookstove. She would bring in a bucket of fresh water to cook with. Owen had devised wooden pipes to bring water to the kitchen door from their stream. She used hardwood in the stove to cook their meals. Breakfast usually consisted of fried hog meat, biscuits and gravy, and oatmeal that they sweetened and poured grease over. Always Owen had a pone of corn bread that she baked in a covered oven with hot coals on top. He wouldn’t eat biscuit bread. They all drank coffee three times a day. For the children, she would fill the cup two-thirds full of milk and then fill the rest with hot coffee. Right after breakfast, Lucyann would order the dog, Shep, to go bring in the cow from the pasture to the milking place. She and Owen had a little farm going. She would milk, strain it, and one of the young ones would carry the jar of milk to the cold spring around the hill, where it could be kept cold in summertime. Usually there was daily churning to be done. If Mom tired of her chore and ran off to play, she would get a good scolding when she was found. The children would get scolded mostly, but they would get switched if they were especially mean. In the summertime there were all sorts of berries to pick. The sweat bees and gnats were awful in the humid weather, but after the hot work the children would get to go a mile down the mountain to the Ocona Lufty River to swim. They’d catch minnows and swallow them so they could be good swimmers. Some days they’d go crayfish hunting and get buckets of the crayfish, which they called crawfish. This was a delicacy. There were two gushing streams on their land. They’d turn over the rocks and the things would crawl out with their eyes and pincers wide open. Sometimes when Lucyann had killed a chicken, they’d use the entrails as bait for the crawfish. This was great fun for them. When the children worked hard and were good, they were always rewarded. They had to hoe corn all day sometimes. They had work to do every day and were rewarded with leisure time, which was easy to fill with the things they found in the woods and streams around where they lived. They had three meals regularly: early morning, noontime, and late evening. Usually when food from the store was short they’d eat mostly native foods. These consisted of several varieties of mushrooms, fish, crayfish, groundhog, rabbit, coon, and muskrat. Owen hunted or trapped most of the time. They also ate snowbirds and bear meat. Lucyann spent a lot of time doing the old Indian-style cooking. With all the corn they grew, she dried a lot and stored it

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for winter use. She also made hominy and grits. What she didn’t put away she would pound into meal. The Cherokees always kept a mortar and pestle for this. In the springtime they’d get the nests of hornets and yellow jackets, while the insects were white fat worms. These they would drop into boiling hot grease. They would immediately be succulent, crisp tidbits. They would salt them and eat them with delight. Before they were allowed to eat their first batch of new corn on the cob, the green corn worms would be gathered and boiled into a soup. The children would be made to drink it until they vomited. Then they were told that they could eat all the corn they wanted and they wouldn’t get sick. If they got diarrhea, Lucyann would make a syrup of Jerusalem oak, or catnip tea. Their grandmother had had a reputation for being a conjurer, a word that was picked up from the whites. It meant she could make medicine or was somewhat like a shaman. My grandmother had learned this, but through the years and because of the influence of her first husband, who was a half-breed, she had let it dwindle down to making the necessities for curing minor illnesses. In the summer they drank tea made from sassafras and spicewood. Lucyann would also can all kinds of native berries in the summer. She would can huckleberries, blackberries, strawberries, elderberries, and raspberries. She also canned fruits like apples, crab apples, plums, peaches, and grapes. They raised corn, beans, pumpkins, squash, cabbage, onions, artichokes, melons, tomatoes, and turnips. They dried all they could and saved the seeds from the crop for the next season’s garden. Chestnuts, black walnuts, hazelnuts, and butternuts were plentiful around their house. They gathered these and dried them for winter use. Lucyann did all the washing for her family at the creek. She would boil the white clothes and beat the dirtier ones on a block with a paddle that they called the battling stick. The children were given baths once a month in a tin tub. Mom remembers this as a very fun time. They slept on the floor, each child having her own old feather bed that she could haul to any corner of the house to sleep on. In the winter all the children piled into one bed. Lucyann would heat large rocks and wrap them in rags to warm their feet. Snow would blow in through the cracks of their log cabin, onto the beds. They were snug and warm and didn’t get sick very often. The cats and dogs slept right on the bed with them in the winter. When terrible storms would come up, they would be afraid the cabin was going to blow away. Owen could conjure too, and he would go outside when it got too bad and the storm would cease after a while.

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t wo cherokee women

Lucyann made them clothes on her old Singer sewing machine. She would also make quilts. All of her time she was kept busy. She was responsible for keeping her household running, from raising the garden to preparing all the food. She worked hard even into her old age. She was a very small woman but very strong both physically and mentally. Most of their time was spent around their house and farm. Occasionally they would go to town, which took all day. They went to town to buy the necessities that they couldn’t raise on their own. When they went visiting neighbors or relatives they were told how to behave. When they ate they were expected to eat heartily to the point of making noise so the people would know that they enjoyed it and appreciated it. Indoors, the children had to sit still and not disturb the elders. Children, especially the girls, were taught not to speak unless they were spoken to first. It was a virtue for Cherokee girls to be quiet in their ways. The Cherokee people had strict codes of behavior, which all good parents passed on to their children. After my mother was seven years old, she spent only her summers this way. She was taken, against her will and her mother’s will, to a government boarding school by truant officers. These officers traveled through the Cherokee hills looking for children who were not attending these schools. The school was mandatory, so the people had no choice. My mother’s childhood with her parents — picking berries and swimming in the river — was interrupted by the harsh reality of the whites who controlled life around her. My mother remembers a big white German woman standing over her and the other little Indian children. They were not allowed to speak Cherokee. If they did they’d get their mouths washed out with soap. Many of them had rarely heard English, let alone spoken it. If they didn’t learn English, I guess they were not supposed to speak. They were forced to eat foods that were strange to them. She thought the macaroni noodles were fat white worms, but they were crammed down her throat anyway. She gagged and vomited and was sick from eating them. Her bed, with its stiff white sheets, was awful to her and hard to get used to. She ached for her dirty, ragged feather bed that she could drag to any corner of the house, wrap up with her dog, and sleep as she pleased. The white matrons were always making the children scrub themselves hard. It seemed they were trying to get them to wash off some of their darkness. My mother remembers them switching her hands when she held them up for inspection. They would make her go wash them again. My mother has beautiful dark hands. My mother spent many years in government schools. These schools did all

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they could to make Indian people ashamed of their culture. It has been a very successful tactic used by the United States government to destroy Indian people, to turn them against themselves and their families. When my mother reached adolescence, she hated to go home for the summer anymore. She hated their poverty and what she now saw as a dreary existence that was nothing but work. She was ashamed of her mother, with her backward way of life. My mother stayed away from Cherokee and her mother for many years when she was out of the elementary grades. She was sent to Oklahoma to finish high school. From there she went on to New Mexico to college for one year. She even lived with a wealthy family from Seattle, who sent her to charm school and promised her an education. [77], (7) But the love she had for her mother, in spite of the shame she had, was too strong to keep her away. She decided to go back for a visit and to tell her mother of all the good fortune that she had encountered from that white family. Lines: 91 to Although she had every intention of returning to Seattle when she left, her ties ——— with her home proved stronger than the possibility of a career with people who * 247.0pt really were strangers after all. She stayed in Cherokee to begin her life with ——— her family and acquaintances and make the best of what opportunities were Normal Pag available there. * PgEnds: Pa [77], (7)

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Like a Bamboo Representations of a Japanese War Bride debbie stor rs

[78], (8) My mother, Yoshiko, searched her English vocabulary for a way to describe how she felt after almost thirty years of marriage to my recently deceased father, a retired U.S. serviceman. She helped me visualize the difficulties she experienced in her life: “It hasn’t been easy sometimes. My life feels like a bamboo, you know there’s a lot of skin, like layers? I feel like every time, all the layers are being peeled away and I’ve got nothing left. That’s the way I feel. Like a bamboo, you know what I mean, right?” I wasn’t sure but nodded anyway, digesting her description of my father peeling away her life energy. Misinterpreting my silence, she assumed I didn’t understand her use of the bamboo metaphor and searched for a more culturally familiar food object. Drawing quickly on a pad, she sketched an artichoke and explained: “You know, the vegetable you like, that’s an artichoke, right? Yeah, he makes me feel just like that. You take one leaf out at a time.” She mimicked the act of pulling an artichoke leaf out, one by one, and scraping the flesh from the leaf with one’s teeth. I shuddered at the imagery. She continued: “Pretty soon I feel like I have nothing left. Pretty soon even my soul is sometimes taken out. The bamboo is the same thing. One skin goes over another skin goes over another skin. That’s what it’s like.” My mother’s use of bamboo as a metaphor for her life experience struck me as capturing the duality of oppression and resilience in her. The Japanese make resourceful use of bamboo for household items, including broom handles, walking canes, painting brushes, and weaving material. 1 My mother was referring to the sheaths which bamboo sheds that are used for wrapping food and making sandals, among other items. The shedding of the bamboo is like the stripping of my mother’s sense of self, often to the depths of her soul, that is a common theme in my mother’s life stories. Yet bamboo and its sheaths

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are valuable and strong; its strength and flexibility explain its many uses and value. Like the strength of the bamboo, my mother’s sense of self is strong and autonomous, even as the harsh realities of life test its resilience. In this paper I explore the dynamics between the agency and American and Japanese cultural frames, or ideologies, that have shaped my mother’s subjectivity. My decision to collect my mother’s life stories grew from my dissatisfaction with the research on war brides and interracial marriages. In the research literature I found that even when women’s voices were central in the form of stories, they were not analyzed; often they were entirely absent from studies of international marriages. My mother’s interest in sharing her life stories derived from her motherly duty to help her daughter as well as from her hope that her stories would prevent other women from experiencing similar adversities. My focus on my mother’s own agency is informed by feminist theorists who challenge the common views of women as passive by highlighting women’s acts of resistance within systems of oppression. 2 Given women’s multiple positions within social relations and systems of inequality, the crucial task for feminists is to describe and explain women’s subjectivities as shaped by complex processes of compliance and resistance, choice and constraint, strength and weakness. 3 My mother’s location in gender, race, class, and nationalist social relations in the post–World War II era shaped and developed her sense of self. This paper focuses on how this historically contingent mix of social relations shaped my mother’s responses and her sense of self. Methodology Feminist and other scholars have emphasized how people construct the self partially through stories. 4 For example, Keya Ganguly speaks of identities as “fabrications” that are “both invented and constructed” through narratives. 5 Narrators construct a sense of self, for themselves and others, through the telling of stories based on selective memory and the organization of particular life events. This construction can itself be viewed as a form of agency as individuals craft and share their life stories. Further, the crafting of one’s self through narrative is a collaborative process extended by the researcher who analyzes, organizes, and presents a narrator’s stories. In other words, narratives are twoway constitutive relationships between the narrator and the researcher. 6 When the relationship between narrator and researcher is an intimate one, the account produced benefits from even more concentrated coordination, making the account more plausible and the identities created more salient. 7 My mother’s stories were told to me, and our relationship framed her stories. Indeed, the life stories I collected can best be described as exchanges or dialogues,

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and because of our mother-daughter relationship our conversations were immediately personal and intimate. As Judith Stacey notes, however, “the greater the apparent mutuality of the researcher/researched relationship, the greater is the danger.”8 Family members may reveal to each other intimate details of their lives that they would not reveal to other researchers. Although I made it clear to my mother that my interest extended beyond simply understanding her life, our flowing conversations felt like personal moments of disclosure that made it all too easy to forget that there was a research agenda beyond our sharing. Our relationship also shaped the nature of her narrative in other ways. Feminist researchers question and problematize issues of authority and ownership, which I found complicated by my relationship with my mother. As much as feminist researchers attempt to collaborate with subjects, ultimately there is a power imbalance. As noted by Stacey, self-reflexivity on the part of the researcher fails to eliminate the inherently unequal relations between researchers and narrators. 9 In our situation, my mother’s authority as parent often superseded the authority that most researchers have over subjects. Yet, while my mother had significant authority in the life-story-collection process, the final decision making concerning editing, interpretation, and publishing was mine. I found no clear or simple solution to these problems. I decided to be explicit about my role in the construction of my mother’s narrative and to encourage my mother to participate in each step of the research process, but my encouragement was initially met with resistance. Upon reflection, I now realize this resistance was due to the structural constraints that prevented her involvement. For example, my mother’s refusal to possess a copy of the transcribed interviews reflected the lack of privacy she experienced while my father was alive. Her fear that he would discover them limited her early involvement beyond sharing her narratives. Even after his death, the structural constraints of her life continued to pose a barrier to her fuller participation in the research process. The period immediately following my father’s death was one of difficult adjustment for my mother, both psychologically and financially. Even though she had more freedom in her personal life, she was faced with the financial and emotional hardships that many widows face. These hardships consumed much of her time. Today, several years after my father’s death, my mother’s life has become more manageable, and as a result she has participated much more in the production of this paper. She read a draft of the manuscript, provided photographs to accompany the text, and requested several changes and/or clarifications. Although her collaboration has increased, it would be misleading to characterize our roles as equal. One continuing limitation to her full collaboration is language. Even though my mother speaks

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English fluently, she experiences some difficulty reading and writing English. The writing style of the manuscript posed something of a barrier to her full participation. This was evident in the way she read the manuscript, skipping over sections that were difficult for her to understand, focusing instead on the sections in which her stories were central. Upon reflection, the decision to interview my mother in my native language, English, rather than hers, Japanese, is a reflection of the power imbalance between researcher and narrator. Aware of the potential for exploitation even with my mother’s consent, I console myself that the research can be of value to others. Furthermore, the nature of my mother and father’s relationship, coupled with my position as daughter, significantly influenced the collection of my mother’s life stories. My mother’s emphasis on my father as the dominating force in her life was a significant component of her narrative. During the collection of her stories, my role as daughter merged with other roles I have played in our relationship as well as my role as researcher. Because we shared many common experiences as women living within a traditional patriarchal family and social system, she often viewed and treated me as her ally. I felt like a friend and confidant when she disclosed her realization that her marriage was not what she had hoped for: “I realized and I knew after I came to America, not even two years later, I had made a big mistake. This marriage is gonna be a big mistake.” At other times she spoke to me as the daughter of the man she had married, periodically reassuring me that his inability to be a good husband did not necessarily mean that he was not a good father: “He was a good father though, he always has been. Especially when you were little. He was always so proud of you kids.” On more than one occasion she apologized for sharing her negative feelings concerning my father: “I dislike him more and more, and I know I’m talking about your father. I’m sorry.” At one point she worried that her disclosures would threaten family solidarity:“I know someday you’ll be mad at me, but that’s the way I feel.” While our shared status as women shaped how she framed her narrative in terms of gender domination, our intertwined roles as mother and daughter prevented her from fully exposing the limitations of her husband and my father. Thus, although our familial relationship facilitated her candidness, it also shaped the boundaries of what was permissible to share. At the time of our interviews, my father was alive. My father was deeply suspicious about my interest in my mother’s life. I concluded that his concern was due to his fear about what my mother would reveal and how that knowledge might alter my perception of him. My mother, on the other hand, was both flattered and excited by my interest in her life. I arranged to have my mother visit me for a week, which allowed us to have long hours of private discussions. Amid

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the sounds and smells of cooking she freely shared stories of her childhood, adolescence, and marriage. After the week of intense dialogue and sharing, she returned home. Seeking more information, I arranged several weekend visits at my parents’ home to continue our dialogue. I found it more difficult to talk privately with my mother at her home, particularly given my father’s suspicions. She was clearly less free to share her stories in her home, often pausing to determine whether we were actually speaking in private. Although it was more difficult to find significant amounts of time to speak privately, we managed to find an hour here and there without the interference of other family members. Our conversations were often emotionally draining, and it was difficult to move from our emotionally intense conversations to interacting with other family members. Eventually I collected about twenty-four hours of taped conversations with my mother. To analyze the data I collected, I used the concept of narrative frames. Narrative frames, or “models of intelligibility,” assist members within a culture to organize and construct meaning through their life stories. Narrative frames include larger political-cultural conditions, including gender and racial ideologies, that can also constrain a subject’s self-understanding. 10 Popular and social scientific representations reflect and maintain such dominant cultural ideologies, affixing and restricting meaning for individuals.11 American and Japanese cultural ideologies of gender, race, and class limited the range of options available to my mother and forced her to make decisions that she later regretted, but at the same time my mother’s agency in resisting these norms took multiple forms, including anger, resistance, and endurance, as this article will show. My Mother’s Narrative Frame: “Like a Bamboo: A Life of Kuro” Teresa Williams cautions scholars about generalizations concerning war brides because of the diversity of their experiences, 12 yet common patterns emerge from the structural forces that facilitate and mediate interracial and international relations. Women married U.S. servicemen for a variety of personal and psychological reasons, but the fact that many did so during the postwar era suggests that social, economic, and historical factors played a role in these seemingly personal decisions. Changes in immigration law, the elimination of miscegenation laws, and U.S. military occupation throughout Asia facilitated marriages between Asian women and U.S. servicemen. 13 In many ways, my mother’s experience is typical of that of thousands of Japanese women who married American servicemen in the aftermath of war. 14 As a young woman, she met, dated, and eventually married a U.S. serviceman who, unbeknownst to her at the time, came from a working-class family. 15 The

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dating and marriage met strong objections from many members of her family; however, encouraged by her natural father to legitimize the perceived illicit relationship, she wed my father in 1958 at a Buddhist temple. Two years later they repeated their vows at the American Embassy immediately before their departure from Japan. Once she made the decision to marry an American gi, her adoptive parents shunned and later disowned her. None of her family members attended either of these ceremonies. My mother was born in 1935, the fourth-youngest daughter of her biological parents. She was adopted at age two by her mother’s married but childless sister. According to my mother, this was an act of love on the part of her biological parents. As in the United States, femininity is often associated with fertility in Japan. My mother’s stories of Japan suggest that, not unlike in the United States, [83], (13) a woman’s inability to bear children is stigmatized. The adoption arrangement alleviated this stigma and allowed for continued relations between my mother and her birth parents and siblings. My mother’s discussion of the adoption and Lines: 141 t her knowledge of this relationship indicated that there was no stigma attached ——— to adoption itself, at least within her family. In fact, my mother recalled stories 0.0pt Pg of her early childhood with delight and described them as the happiest years ——— of her life, despite the hardships of the war and her adoption. Because of the Normal Pag mothers’ kinship relations and because of the conditions of war, she spent sig* PgEnds: Eje nificant amounts of time with both her biological and adoptive families. As a child, she referred to her biological mother and father as “aunt” and “uncle,” but she recalled always knowing their true relationship. I remember being sur[83], (13) prised by this information concerning her adoption because I had known only one bachan, one grandmother, my mother’s biological mother. This curious omission and recent revelation of family history points to the constructive and discursive display of self that is constantly changing. My mother’s stories of adoption and later rejection set a foundation of liminality in her life stories. As a child she transcended family boundaries but never felt like a full member of either her biological or adopted family. My mother’s sense of not belonging, of being distant from both her land and her family, physically and emotionally, both begins and ends her narrative. This liminal place, of being but not belonging in both her home and host countries, is linked to her marriage to an American. One evening I sat at my parents’ dining-room table with my mother across from my father and brother, who were engaged in a discussion in which I had little interest. My mother and I had just completed several hours of interviewing. Silently, she handed me a Japanese-English dictionary and pointed to the word kuro: “hardships; trials; difficulties, adversity; trouble; to undergo hardships; to have a hard time of it;

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12.992 ——— Normal PgEnds: Yoshiko Nabeoka as a young single woman, posing in a traditional Japanese kimono, at age seventeen.

to contend with difficulties; to struggle with adversity; the grim realities of life.” Later, in private, I asked her why she had brought this word to my attention and she simply explained, “That’s my life; that’s what he has done to me.” It would be far too easy to interpret my mother’s personal relationship with my father as the only force that impeded her autonomy and sense of self. While his role in shaping her experience is at the forefront of her narrative, the primacy of her husband in her life is premised on cultural models of gender and the family. In both Japan and the United States, particularly in the time period in which my mother came of age, women’s primary roles were wife and mother. The primary mission of women even today in traditional Japanese culture is to marry and have children. 16 My mother’s stories emphasize her difficulties within her marriage, but to interpret them simply as a story of gender domination and resistance within a patriarchal family structure without taking racism and nationalism into ac-

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count would fail to capture her subject position as a transnational woman. Her narrative is replete with tales of difficulties that emerge from the larger cultural frames of race and nationality. The stripping away of self described at the opening of this article emerges from the dynamic interplay among cultural ideologies, subjective experiences, and representations larger than the experience of a single individual. Japanese Narrative Frames: Gift Giving, Pan Pan Girls, and Marriage War and postwar activities during three Asian wars shaped U.S. military servicemen’s view of Asian women. These servicemen came to view Japanese, Korean, and Indo-Chinese women as “exotic war booty,” 17 a view that was reinforced through Western cultural images in film and print of the Japanese women as “exotic, erotic creatures able to please men in special ways.”18 While sexualized, Japanese women were also viewed as desirable because of their alleged passivity, uncomplaining nature, and willingness to sacrifice themselves to the needs of men. 19 After the end of World War II my mother lived in the city of Osaka with her adoptive parents, who owned and ran a hotel and bar. U.S. servicemen in the Korean War routinely took leave in Japan, and the hotel served as a popular recreational site. One of my mother’s earliest memories of American servicemen was of those who stayed at her family’s hotel, to which they would bring prostitutes. She recalled: “They used to call me Babysan, Babysan. And they used to give me chewing gum and chocolate and all that stuff. I was about fourteen.” U.S. servicemen’s practice of extending gifts in anticipation of and in exchange for the affections of Japanese women was evident in my parents’ first date. In retelling the story, my mother reveals the complex cultural and personal reasons for her decision to date a U.S. serviceman despite her family’s negative reactions. Their first meeting occurred at an orphanage where her adoptive mother volunteered. My father and his squadron had been asked to volunteer at the orphanage’s Christmas party. The church recruited six young women, including my mother and her older sister, to serve as hostesses. Because she could speak little English, my mother never directly spoke to her future husband that day. Instead, another young woman who spoke English informed her that one of the Americans had asked if she could date. She was filled with both apprehension and delight. On the one hand, she knew that her family would not approve of her dating an American, yet Americans intrigued her. She explained to her friend that she was unable to date because she did not have the right clothing:

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I wanted to go, but I didn’t have any clothes. All I had was my school uniform. It wasn’t good enough to go out with an American guy. And my friend said, “No problem, I will help you.” So I went to her house with my school uniform on, and she let me use a real plain white dress with small polka dots on it. I waited for him. He came down, and it happened to be raining. And when I saw him I chickened out because I was afraid for my mother’s sake. I had seen those gis come to the hotel with all the prostitutes. They were not good girls. But I wanted to go out. And he was cute, too. He was skinny, tall, dark hair, and had beautiful eyes. So anyway, he came down, and I chickened out and started to think I should not do this. In my mind I wanted to go out, but something inside me really told me I should not. And then all of my troubles came out of this.

While offering the clothing dilemma to her friend as an excuse for not dating this American, the real issue my mother faced was her family’s response given the common practice of U.S. servicemen soliciting prostitutes. Like others in her culture, my mother assumed that only “bad girls” dated American servicemen. This narrative frame reduced all interracial relations between Japanese women and American servicemen to prostitution. Her excitement and attraction to her future husband was checked by her ominous premonition that, should she date him, her life would be full of troubles. This early story sets up the framing of her life story as a life of hardship. Trying to find a way to escape her commitment for the date, she explained, through her interpreter friend, that she must cancel the date due to the weather: I chickened out and told my friend that I didn’t have an umbrella and it was raining. I didn’t want to go. And he said,“No problem,” and he left. Then, I’ll never forget this, he came back with cheap white rain shoes, rubber ones. And a plastic umbrella. And he also brought a small brown sack. Inside the sack was Jergen’s skin lotion, instant coffee, and one lipstick. So I couldn’t refuse him anymore.

According to Western stereotypes, Japanese — and Japanese women in particular — are materialistic, so American servicemen should protect their resources from greedy women. For the Japanese, the presentation of omiyage, or gifts, must be accepted and returned with something of value.20 My mother’s decision to go on the date was tied to the meanings she associated with the reception of such gifts. For her, my father’s behavior and the gifts he presented created a sense of obligation. The unwritten social rule to reciprocate gift giving prevented her from rejecting his request for a date. Like the Japanese narrative frame about gift giving, the Japanese characterization of U.S. servicemen and Japanese women’s relationships as illicit forced her to marry an American as a way of legitimizing their relationship. Once her family discovered her frequent outings with an American serviceman, she

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Yoshiko Nabeoka in Western dress, at age nineteen, in Japan.

was informed that she was no longer allowed to engage in the relationship. She continued to see her future husband in secret, although her sister often reported their encounters to her adoptive mother. Finally, my mother was sent to the country to visit her biological mother and father during spring vacation in an attempt to discourage the relationship. There, she met with the same reaction. Her biological parents were worried and displeased: My real mother was angry with me and said that my adopted mom couldn’t handle me anymore. And my dad asked me what the hell was going on. And I told him I met a guy and I liked him. And they thought I was doing something bad. They said, “What are you planning on doing?” I said, “I’m going to marry him.” He hadn’t even asked me, but I just said that.

The announcement of their marriage failed to console her biological mother, who was concerned about the shame such a union would bring to her family. The small, rural town where her biological family resided had very little direct

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contact with Americans. With the war fresh in their minds, their daughter’s decision to marry an American was akin to marrying the enemy. Her father’s response, on the other hand, reveals how such a marriage was preferred over what others might perceive as illicit activities: My dad said, “Well it doesn’t make a difference if [he is] American or Japanese. As long as she’s happy and she loves him. She should marry. Besides, if you stop her, she’ll end up working as a bar girl or as a cabaret dancer.” That’s what my dad said.

Illicit activities referred to sexual relations outside of marriage as well as prostitution. The organized prostitution conducted under Japan’s Ministry of Health and Welfare facilitated the characterization of the relationships between servicemen and Japanese women as prostitution.21 Called pan pan girls, women who could not find employment in the aftermath of the war were often left with no employment options except official prostitution. Paradoxically, these women were required to register as prostitutes and, in doing so, forfeited any possibility of marriage to an American gi.22 Thus, my mother’s biological father supported the marriage, not because he embraced such unions, but because he wanted to avoid the public perception of his daughter as a pan pan girl. Her adoptive parents failed to see marriage as a solution. They simply informed her that she would not be able to continue to date an American, and they attempted to limit her activities. The cultural framing of my mother’s relationship as potentially illicit and shameful combined with her desire to continue to see her future husband led to her decision to leave her family home. She moved into her older sister’s house, and her biological father encouraged her to marry quickly. In less than six months, my parents were married without the presence of her family: “None of my family was there. And so we got married. I met him in February and we married in July. That fast. I really didn’t know him that much. I thought I liked him, but I never did love him.” Thus the marriage was joined, not on the basis of love, but in response to the narrative frames of her culture. Rejecting the characterization of their relationship as an illicit sexual one required her to legitimize it with a legal bond, regardless of the lack of emotional intimacy. An additional factor that heightened her family’s negative response to her marriage to a U.S. serviceman was her rejection of an arranged marriage. Historically, Japanese marriages were arranged with the assistance of the nakodo, or go-between, particularly when individuals lived in distant districts. While this practice was diminishing even during my mother’s youth, most families still mediated marriage decisions. 23 In my mother’s case, her adoptive family

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attempted to arrange a marriage with her second cousin, assisted by a paid gobetween: A nakodo would help to have people get married because they would check on how long they went to school, what kind of family, how many kids, what the family has, what the parents do, all that kind of stuff they check into. And the families have to be a pretty close, they have to match mostly. They have to be a good family. And my adopted parents, they told me in my future I was going to marry my second cousin because they had a lot of property and money and stuff, and they didn’t want to give it to a stranger and wanted to keep it in the family. So they made me wear my kimono, and I went with my family to a restaurant to meet him and his family. And I told them later, “no way.”

Her family’s attempt to arrange a marriage to restrict the loss of family resources reveals how women’s sexual and domestic autonomy was limited. While all cultures are concerned about regulating sexuality in some fashion, generally sexual prescriptions are heavily placed on women. As Avtar Brah notes,“Women occupy a central place in processes of signification embedded in racism and nationalism.” 24 Women become symbols and guardians of race, nation, and class through their ability to bear children and their cultural responsibility to nurture them. My mother’s relationship to an American serviceman violated racial, national, and class boundaries, shaping her consciousness. Narrative Frames of Race and Nationalism: The Sen’ Soo Hanayome My mother’s marriage cast her into a group, the sen’ soo hanayome, or war bride, that came under the scrutiny of social scientists. Scientific inquiry concerning this growing cohort reflected, rationalized, and legitimized racial ideologies. Even before the growth of the war-bride cohort, science had characterized interracial unions negatively, based on ideologies of racial difference and purity. Beginning in the nineteenth century, scientists developed racial taxonomies, hierarchically arranging and differentiating racial groups according to presumed biological, physical, psychological, and intellectual capacities. 25 Early scientific views that races were separate species produced beliefs that racial mixing would lead to morally and physically inferior racial types. 26 In addition, the perceived threat to white supremacy that might occur as racial boundaries were blurred produced a negative response to interracial marriages. Given these beliefs, a number of practices were established to limit such unions, including laws, direct violence, and general social condemnation. Despite these practices, relations between U.S. servicemen and Asian women flourished in the context of military occupation. Attempts to legitimize these relationships were difficult because many state laws prohibited interracial mar-

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riage, and U.S. immigration policies prevented servicemen from taking a Japanese wife and dependents to the United States. However, changes in immigration law in 1946 made it easier for U.S. servicemen to marry their Japanese fiancées. 27 At the time they exchanged vows, my parents’ marriage was illegal in many states in the United States. Again, the illegality was based on the American narrative frame concerning racial purity and white supremacy. Japan had a similar narrative frame. Given this context, their marriage was met by both extended families and societies with disapproval. In addition to the sanctions on their interracial marriage, my parents experienced the rejection of their mixedrace children.28 My mother found the disapproval most difficult to bear when it came from her Japanese family and American in-laws. Following her marriage and relocation to the United States, my mother, sister, and I lived with my father’s extended family while he was on active duty. In addition to living with daily insults about her food preferences and other cultural practices, deeper insults concerning her children troubled my mother: We had to live with our in-laws in Colorado. And every time I used to cook my rice, his brother-in-law didn’t like the rice smell and would call my rice maggots. It was so insulting, and I used to cry every time he said that. I finally left there after your aunt called you guys “damn half-breeds.” I didn’t understand what that meant until one day her neighbor in the next trailer asked me why I was staying there. She said, “Don’t you have anywhere else to go?” I said, “No.” She said, “Call your husband’s other brother in Wyoming.” She told me that they had no right to call my children half-breeds, and I had no business staying there. And she told me what half-breed meant. She explained it by talking about dogs mixing together. And I started shaking, and I cried, and that night I called his other brother in Wyoming and told him to come get me.

Her story of how my siblings and I were called half-breeds reveals the American concern over racial purity and the distaste of those who blur racial boundaries, even within the family. While Americans and American scholars were concerned with the issue of maintaining racial boundaries and purity, the same could be said of the Japanese. The Japanese have historically viewed non-Japanese as intrinsically different and inferior peoples. Although the Japanese hierarchically evaluated black and white outsiders with a preference for whites, both shared the common status of being gaijin, or outside persons. 29 My mother’s characterization of her family of origin’s perception of Americans captured this difference: “Americans to them were different. They had different eyes and white skin. To us, they were so much like strangers. And especially in Ishikawa where most people

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had never really seen an American except in the newspaper or in pictures.” In the perception of the Japanese, the fundamental difference between themselves and the non-Japanese shapes their ambivalence toward and, at times, outright rejection of interracial marriages. Although the Japanese and American narrative frames concern racial purity, nationalistic tendencies also stigmatized international marriages. The realities of war and subsequent defeat of the Japanese understandably led to heightened Japanese hostility toward international relationships with Americans. When the war started my mother was living in the city of Osaka with her adoptive family, but she was sent back to the country to live with her biological family because it was assumed that rural areas would not be as ravaged by war as the larger urban areas. She remembered the rations and bombings from her childhood: We had a bokugo [bomb shelter] in our backyard. We had a big hole and over the top was a roof that was made of wood, . . . and so when we were bombed, we went down there and didn’t come out. A siren would come on and that would tell us when an airplane was in the air. Even in Ishikawa we would see the b-29s. . . . I’ll never forget it. They would just come down at us. . . . We had a lot of rows of cherry blossoms and I used to stand there and cry. I was so scared my legs were frozen and I didn’t think I could run. You could see and hear the airplanes coming down, coming down. And you could actually see the man sitting in the plane. They would come down and you would hear ba-ba-ba-ba [sounds of a machine gun firing] and then they’d go back up.

Her family’s daily life was also altered by the absence of her biological father, who served in the war. In fact, her family believed that her father had died in the war after a long period passed with no word from him: After the war was over my father didn’t come back. We didn’t hear from him for a long time. We thought he was dead already and we even had a funeral. Then, two years later, he came home. He had gotten hurt, and they had put him in the hospital. The Americans had taken over, and they had been taking care of him in a different hospital, and that’s why we hadn’t heard from him. After he had gotten well enough, they sent him home. And I remember that day. I was doing something in the house and I heard my mother scream. And I turned around and in the entryway there he was, standing there, like a ghost.

Although alive, her father had lost an arm and a leg in the war. Given the recent memory and aftermath of war, it comes as no surprise that my mother’s family did not embrace her decision to marry an American. When I married him I guess I was the black sheep of the family because I married an American. And nobody in my whole town had married an American, and a

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lot of them had never even seen American people. And here I had to marry one. And I think my mother thought more of the family rather than me. She thought more about the shame I brought on my family. Naturally, there were a lot of hard feelings about Americans after the war was over.

The whole family experienced the social stigma of interracial and international marriage. While her family initially rejected the marriage, the legacy of statesanctioned prostitution posed an equally shameful interpretation of their relationship. In her family’s eyes, the best resolution would be an end to contact of any kind with U.S. servicemen. Unable to impose this, however, the family was left with two potentially shameful situations — marriage or the perception of illicit relations. As neither option was acceptable, and unable to dissuade their daughter from marrying an American, the family responded with rejection. My mother recognized this through her characterization of herself as the “black sheep” of the family, although the ostracizing she experienced from her natural family waned over time. The narrative frames that each culture provided my mother limited her actions and propelled her into a marriage of discontent. Pan pan girls, the sen’ soo hanayome, and my mother’s narratives are all representations of Japanese women within cultural frames. Frames of race, gender, and nationality limited my mother’s sense of self and maintained relations of domination, although not without being contested. It is to the agency of my mother, who resisted this domination, that I now turn. Japanese Agency: Shaming and Shikata ga nai At the basis of collective norms are narrative frames, composed of ideologies and representations that facilitate individual conformity. The Japanese phrase shikata ga nai, or “it can’t be helped,” indicates cultural norms over which one has little control. 30 In my mother’s life, the cultural representation of the pan pan girl and the association of servicemen with prostitution had the potential to shape her as such. To escape this representation, she was left with little choice but to marry. However, her story about refusing to marry her second cousin in an arranged marriage, despite cultural norms, illustrates her independence and individuality. This same autonomy reemerges in her life in the United States as she struggled against the representation of herself as a subordinate female outsider. Later in her narrative she wondered what her life might have been like had she married the man whom her family had chosen: Did her decision to resist the arranged marriage and later to marry as a compromise between shame and autonomy destine her to a life of suffering? This notion of suffering in part stems from shikata ga nai: failing to follow

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cultural norms and social conventions led to a life of little choice but endurance of suffering. But endurance itself is a form of agency that, when recognized as such, helps to reveal a more complex representation of women’s lives. Through her endurance of the suffering partially imposed by shikata ga nai and the decisions she made in response to representations of Japanese women, my mother, like countless other women, illustrates the twin modalities of self-construction that incorporate both cultural forces and individual autonomy. Class and Mobility: The Japanese Narrative Frame of American Wealth In the context of still-strained family relations, my mother left her home country and followed my father with great expectations about her new home in America. Her expectation of American wealth and prosperity grew from a Japanese narrative frame shaped by the larger sociopolitical context of defeat and military occupation. One of my mother’s early disappointments in life in America, influenced by this narrative frame, was her perception of socioeconomic decline in her marriage. Despite her expectations of the wealth of Americans, her experience in this new land was of downward mobility and hardships: I had no idea he came from such a low-class family. I was so disappointed because I thought America was going to be like what I saw in the movies. I thought all Americans were rich. I thought all of them were. I never dreamed it was this bad.

Like countless other immigrants, my mother idealized America as a land of wealth and opportunity. The moment she arrived she discovered her error: We flew from Japan to Alameda, California, and then took a bus to Wyoming. Boy, I thought America was just like I had seen in the movies. But he took me to a terrible place, Wyoming. It was all country. There was nothing but mountains and dirt. I was so disappointed. I came from a lot better family. I thought I should have known better. When I married him he had nothing but a uniform. He had one shirt and one pair of jeans. That’s all he had, but I didn’t realize then that he was that poor. I felt so cheated.

Although she had spent some of her childhood in the more rural town of Ishikawa, my mother spent considerable amounts of time in the large city of Osaka. Her adoptive parents were fairly wealthy business owners who provided her with amenities and unusual educational privileges. She, unlike many other young women of her era, completed high school and attended a twoyear business college. Her biological family, with whom she spent summers and vacations, owned their own business and significant amounts of land. Using her own mother’s educational background as a measuring rod for her family’s social class, she stated:

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My real mother came from a real good family. And especially to think she was born in 1895. She was a schoolteacher until she was fifty-two or so, and then she retired. But she went to school to become a high school teacher. And they had to have a lot of money to send a woman to school, they had to be of real high class.

The contrast between her privileged life in Japan and her new life of poverty in the United States encouraged feelings of betrayal. At some level, the betrayal was her own. Her failure to follow cultural expectations in Japan had resulted in a difficult life in the United States. My mother explained that she had no one to blame but herself, for she made the decision to marry my father; yet, even as she took responsibility for her early decision, she seemed aware that she was left with little choice. At another level she felt betrayed by her culture and her family of origin. Her decision to marry an American led to her ostracism from both her biological and adoptive families, at least early in the marriage. Her decision to stay in the marriage was in part due to the requirements imposed on her by her female family members. Her biological mother had been adamant that she should not marry an American and cautioned her about the finality of the decision: My mother said, “It’s your choice to marry.” My mother said, “If you marry you can come and visit home. But if you cry, and if something happens between you and your husband, my entryway is too high for you to climb back into.” That’s what my mother said. I always remember that. She said,“It’s your choice to marry like this so you have to work it out.”

Letters from her mother during her early marriage reminded her that her decision to marry was something she must endure and live with. Coming home to visit was permissible, but coming home to stay was not an option. Divorce was uncommon and shameful, and in many ways she had permanently tarnished her family name and was thus condemned to live out her fate. In her narrative, her marriage to my father was the source of her troubles, but the marriage itself was something she was unable to stop or escape. Ikigai: Narrative Frames of Marriage, Family, and Work Another disappointment in my mother’s life was her unfulfilled expectations of marriage. My mother characterized her marriage as a union dominated by patriarchal control that restricted her autonomy. The reality of her married life contrasts sharply with the narrative frame of marriage in Japan. Despite Western images of the Japanese subordinate wife, my mother constructs a woman’s wifely role as one of importance, with significant financial power in terms of decision making: In Japan the husband brings his paycheck home in an envelope to the wife. One

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of the wife’s responsibilities is to pay the bills, save whatever they can, but the wife gives the husband so much money a week. . . . That’s what a dutiful wife is. But never in my case. He gives me money, but just enough to pay bills.

Throughout her narrative, my mother described how her personal experience of marriage failed to meet her cultural expectations. My father maintained tight control over finances and, in her mind, she was prevented from fulfilling the role of a dutiful wife. Her expectation that a husband be a good provider was something that my father never quite fulfilled, which required her to work in a variety of jobs typical of many immigrant women. While some scholars argue that Japanese women identify family and children as their dominant ikigai, or “that which most makes one’s life seem worth living,” for many immigrant women work and family become merged, with the result that their roles as mothers and workers shape their sense of self and the meaning of their lives. 31 This was the case for my mother. Not only did she prove herself to white America through her diligence and hard work, but she provided amenities for her own children that she had personally experienced as a child and that she desired for her own family. Through her pain and suffering she partially closed the gap in status between her life in Japan and her life in America. My mother’s stories reveal how her experience as worker is intricately tied to her family role and how both are framed by the class contrast in her home and host cultures. For my mother, work allowed her to reject white Americans’ characterization of her as a foreigner, provided her an opportunity to fulfill her motherly duties, and gave her the means to minimize the class disparity she experienced. Yet her work and ability to provide for her family failed to bring her full autonomy because of the gendered and racialized nature of the work in which she was engaged. As was the case for countless other female immigrant workers, my mother’s inability to speak fluent English limited the kinds of jobs she was able to acquire. One of my mother’s first paid jobs was as a factory worker in an electronics plant in California. She was conscious of antiimmigrant sentiment and the often contradictory stereotypes that immigrants were both lazy and took jobs away from Americans. Underpaid and overworked, my mother attempted to counter negative narrative frames associated with immigrants by working faster: I looked in the paper and saw an advertisement for a factory. There were a lot of international people in Alameda, and I went there for an interview, and they hired me too. I spoke very little English, but they showed me what I had to do. In about two or three months they saw how fast my hands worked, I kept working faster and faster. There was a Filipino girl who worked real fast too. But I was faster than she was. I did twice as much work as other people. But it took me six hours to do

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what other people did in eight hours. They said they never saw a woman working so fast. In six months they put me in a job to inspect other people’s work. I’d look through a microscope and see the work that they did. Oh, my eyes hurt and felt funny. Every forty-five minutes you got to rest your eyes because it was such hard work.

While her work ethic countered the stereotype of the lazy immigrant, it reinforced the specific stereotypes of Asian immigrant women as docile, diligent, and skilled with their hands and led her to compete with other immigrant women on the factory line rather than to find solace with them. Ultimately, she expressed an inability to escape the multiple immigrant frames in the public sphere, even though she was a U.S. citizen. After years of working in manufacturing occupations, my mother decided to teach a Japanese art form, Bunka embroidery, in her home. Her clientele were mostly older, wealthy white women who, according to her, “had nothing else to do.” While some of her students took only a few classes from her, a larger group of women remained her students for as long as ten to fifteen years. The lure of the classes for the students was not the art of Japanese embroidery as much as it was the chance to socialize. The daily classes served as a sort of therapy session where women could come and talk about their private problems. My mother played the role of host, teacher, and counselor. Because of these roles, she never disclosed her life of troubles to her students and, according to her, they never asked. She mused about how her students often thought of her as their best friend, despite the unreciprocated nature of their relationship. While she did become close to a few of her students, the teaching was an economic relationship, and the classes she taught served these ends well. Despite the economic constraints placed on her by my father’s social class and patriarchal ideals, my mother constructs herself as an important asset to the family’s well-being through her paid labor. Through her sacrifices and suffering our family escaped some of the poverty she experienced early on in the marriage. The theme of supporting her family through her suffering also becomes evident in the way she acquired land for her family. My mother explains how one day a car she was riding in was hit by a school bus that had run a red light. She was taken to the hospital and stayed for two days, suffering from a concussion and neck problems. She sued the company and settled for a small monetary amount, which she used to buy vacant lots of land in a nearby developing town. Beyond the world of work, she found little respite in the private realm of the family, either in her marriage or in her relations with her husband’s family. Although forced to work with white clients, she protected her sense of self

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by overcompensating at work and by avoiding as much contact with whites as possible. However, she was often unable to avoid her white in-laws. In the following story, she recounts her early stay with relatives in Wyoming while her husband was on active duty: We had to stay with your father’s brother and sister-in-law. It was worse than living with strangers. They managed a gas station and a café, and she made me waitress, wash dishes, and work as a maid for no pay. They said they wouldn’t pay me because they were charging me to stay with them, for gas money, and for groceries. I tried to be nice and tried to have them like and accept me because I was Japanese. So I tried to help more. If I would have stayed in Japan, nothing like that would have happened. Never. I would not have suffered any of these kinds of things.

My mother’s stories about herself in America, already shadowed in shame by her marriage to an American, focus on producing a life to be proud of despite the hardships imposed on her. Stories of reducing shame in her life are at the root of her construction of self as a diligent worker, a good mother, and a dutiful wife. Even the experience of birth becomes a site of potential agency allowing her to differentiate herself from American women who, in her view, shamefully cried in pain: Even when I had a baby I didn’t scream. American people scream and cuss when they have babies. Not me. I never made any noise. All I would say was “Ta, ta, ta, ta.” People couldn’t hear me. I wouldn’t scream because to scream would be shameful. You should not, you bear your own kid, why should you cuss and yell? Oh, the American women would cuss their husband and scream. They scared me! All I did was to say “Ta, ta, ta, ta” really fast. And you know what the doctor told me? He said,“I think you would feel better if you yelled like the rest of the women.” I never did. He said, “You are the strongest one here. You are the bravest woman.” And I didn’t believe in having a shot either.

Despite the hardships and troubles she experienced in her life, my mother was not simply a victim of cultural narrative frames; at times, however, she shared stories of resignation. Like earlier Japanese immigrants, her narrative was peppered with a sense of shikata ga nai. 32 In the story above she argued that one should not only endure the pain of childbirth but also expect it. Likewise, in her larger narrative, women must expect pain because of their subordinate position within patriarchal society. Her acceptance of such cultural norms resulted in resignation that one’s life will be full of hardships. Yet she endured. Through her stories, my mother revealed in multiple ways her agency in responding to oppressive narrative frames. She discussed her subjective experience as a life of kuro, or a life of hardships, rather than one of

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gaman, which, according to Harry H. Kitano, is an important Japanese concept that refers to endurance and perseverance. 33 Gaman is to do one’s best in times of frustration and adversity; gaman is not to take aggressive or retaliatory action against one’s misfortunes. While gaman does not mean passivity, it does refer to the suppression of one’s anger and emotion. Contrary to the concept of gaman, my mother’s narrative reveals emotions and displays anger. She was angry at her home country and her family who cast her into the lot of the pan pan girls, and she was angry at her host country for its unreceptive welcome. She spoke of both at length. At times she directed anger toward those who created difficulties in her life; at other times she was prevented from expressing anger and thus contended with her hardships by elevating herself above others by doing more than what was expected. [98], (28 My mother expressed her anger in subtle and explicit ways. A key target for her anger was her husband, who remained, for her, the ultimate source of her Lines: 33 life of troubles. But, given her dependency on him and her lack of options, she retaliated and acted out her anger through actions such as buying “gifts” for her ——— * 23.799 husband that in reality were for the benefit of the whole family. At other times ——— her stories revealed a more direct expression of her anger. In the following story Normal she describes how she dealt with difficult students who, in her mind, demanded PgEnds: unreasonable amounts of time and felt racially superior to her: Oh, my work was so hard with these women. I had a lot of problems with them because some of them said they couldn’t understand my English. They are stupid. Little kids understood me! They are ignorant. A lot of people understood me so why couldn’t these women? But in ten years, I had to kick out two women. All they wanted was to have my full attention, and they kept telling me they didn’t understand. I couldn’t give them all of it because I had ten people in my class at a time and had to pay attention to each one of them. So finally I got fed up. I told them, “If you don’t understand my English, you’re wasting your money, you’re wasting my time.” I said, “Please leave.” I did that twice. It took me a long time to say that because it hurt. They made fun of my English, you know, so I did that, I told them to leave.

In this story, my mother explicitly rejected what she perceived as Americans’ disdain for immigrants. Rather than continue to expose herself to what she viewed as demeaning and demanding treatment by her students, she explicitly rejected the relationship, despite the economic ramifications. While she accepted that she has been forced to live a difficult life, subject to cultural ideologies both in her home and host countries, she did not acquiesce.

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Conclusion The self is a narrative phenomenon; stories are the means by which we create, in the moment, our particular version and sense of self through the omission, remembering, and articulation of experiences we offer to others and ourselves. While individuals have significant agency in the construction of their past and of the present, the constitutive nature of personal narrative is constrained by cultural narrative frames. My mother’s self-representation was shaped by narrative frames and by the larger social structural contexts in which she was embedded. My mother’s construction of self was also constrained by her relationship to me, at once the researcher and daughter, and by her role as mother, which at times limited her ability to share her full critique of my father. The constraint emerged as she carefully edited her stories, keeping in mind the possible effect of such stories on family harmony. Furthermore, reading my mother’s life stories calls for textual analysis, self-reflection on my part, and, as Ruth Behar advises, an “interpretation of cultural themes as they are creatively constructed by the actor within a particular configuration of social forces and gender and class contexts.” 34 In this process, researchers shift from listener to storyteller. I have provided in this essay my reading of my mother’s life stories as her construction of self in the shadow of larger dominant cultural representations. This has not been an easy task, as the process has raised a variety of emotional reactions for me pertaining to my extended family, my parents, and their marriage. While I was certainly aware of the troublesome dynamics between my parents, the stories my mother shared with me helped partially to explain and contextualize them. At the same time, this narrative is only a partial explanation of their marriage: my mother’s construction. My father’s stories were never formally collected. Shaping the representation of my mother’s identity is the gendered, racial, and nationalistic cultural frames she experienced within an interracial and international marriage. Like the South Asian Indian women Monisha Das Gupta interviewed, my mother’s life stories reveal an attempt to forge her “in-betweenness as a valid, creative cultural space,” a space where she forges a sense of self that both incorporates and rejects larger representations of women like herself.35 My mother framed her life as one of hardship and endurance, at once accepting her fate within the context of shikata ga nai, yet wondering whether living a life of hardships and enduring her condition was her true destiny. My mother contended that part of her endurance was her suffering of being alone: her adoption as a young child resulted in her distance from her natural family, and this separation was repeated with her marriage to an U.S. serviceman. The

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distance was not simply from her family but from her culture. She explained: “In Japan they say I was born under the star, maybe that’s the way I was born. I was born not to be close to my family or to my country. I’m close, but always so far away.” Never quite American, she also remained distant from her homeland. Her husband, while the key antagonist in her narrative, in many ways represented the distance of her host culture at large. Intimate stories of her patriarchal marriage were balanced by stories about the equally destructive racism and sexism she experienced in the private world of the family and in the public world of work. From her transnational perspective she also cast a critical eye on her homeland: pushed into a marriage of difficulties because of the association between U.S. servicemen and prostitution, she was forced to endure because of the shame she had brought to her family. Despite these hardships, she did not portray herself simply as a victim. She elevated herself above the shame that her home and host cultures imposed on her through her ability to endure difficult times. This relationship between agency and domination makes her early use of the bamboo metaphor particularly fitting. While my mother was unable to fully subvert relations of domination, like the bamboo, she was and continues to be resilient. Notes 1. Mock Joya, Things Japanese (Tokyo: Tokyo News Service, 1960), 391–92. 2. See Dolores Delgado Bernal,“Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles Blowouts,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 19, no. 2 (1998): 113–42; and Pierette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Overcoming Patriarchal Constraints: The Reconstruction of Gender Relations among Mexican Immigrant Women and Men,” Gender and Society 6, no. 3 (1992): 393–415. 3. Cynthia D. Anderson, “Understanding the Inequality Problematic: From Scholarly Rhetoric to Theoretical Reconstruction,” Gender and Society 10, no. 6 (1996): 729–46. 4. See Ruth Behar, “Reading the Life Story of a Mexican Marketing Woman,” Feminist Studies 16, no. 2 (1990): 223–56; Edward Bruner, “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 54, no. 1 (1987): 11–32; Mark Freeman, “Self as Narrative: The Place of Life History in Studying the Life Span,” in The Self: Definitional and Methodological Issues, ed. Thomas M. Brinthaupt and Richard P. Lipka (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 15–43; Keya Ganguly, “Migrant Identities: Personal Memory and the Construction of Selfhood,” Cultural Studies 6, no. 1 (1992): 27–50; George Rosenwald and Richard L. Ochberg,“Introduction: Life Stories, Cultural Politics, and Self-Understanding,” in Storied Lives: The Cultural Politics of Self-Understanding, ed. Rosenwald and Ochberg (New Haven: Yale University Press 1992), 1–18; and Deborah Schiffrin, “Narrative as Self-Portrait: Sociolinguistic Constructions of Identity,” Language in Society 25, no. 2 (1996): 167–203. 5. Ganguly, “Migrant Identities,” 30.

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6. Schiffrin, “Narrative as Self-Portrait,” 194. 7. Camilla Stivers, “Reflections on the Role of Personal Narrative in Social Science,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 18, no. 2 (1993): 408–25. 8. Judith Stacey, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991), 114. 9. Stacey, “Can There Be a Feminist Ethnography?” 114. 10. Rosenwald and Ochberg, “Introduction,” 1–2. 11. Gordon Mathews,“The Stuff of Dreams, Fading: Ikigai and ‘the Japanese Self,’ ” Ethos 24, no. 4 (1996): 718–47; and Dorothy E. Smith, Texts, Facts, and Femininity: Exploring the Relations of Ruling (New York: Routledge, 1990). 12. Teresa Williams, “Marriage between Japanese Women and U.S. Servicemen since WWII,” Amerasia 17, no. 1 (1991): 135–54. 13. The peak years of marriage between Japanese women and American servicemen were between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. Williams estimates 55,000 to 100,000 interracial and intercultural unions at that time (“Marriage between Japanese Women and U.S. Servicemen,” 138–39). 14. Michael Thornton, “The Quiet Immigration: Foreign Spouses of U.S. Citizens, 1945– 1985,” in Racially Mixed People in America, ed. Maria P. P. Root (Newbury Park ca: Sage, 1992), 64–76. 15. Bok-Lim C. Kim characterizes men who married Japanese women as working class or lower middle class, estranged from their own families, and “loners.” “Asian Wives of U.S. Servicemen: Women in Shadows,” Amerasia 4, no. 1 (1977): 91–115. 16. William R. Nester, “Japanese Women: Still Three Steps Behind,” Women’s Studies 21, no. 4 (1992): 457–79; and Kalman D. Applbaum, “Marriage with the Proper Stranger: Arranged Marriage in Metropolitan Japan,” Ethnology 34, no. 1 (1995): 37–52. 17. Elaine Kim,“Sex Tourism in Asia: A Reflection of Political and Economic Inequality,” Critical Perspectives of Third World America 1, no. 1 (1983): 214–32. 18. See Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 39; see also Aki Uchida, “The Orientalization of Asian Women in America,” Women’s Studies International Forum 21, no. 2 (1998): 161–75. 19. Spickard, Mixed Blood, 39. 20. Joya, Things Japanese, 662–63. 21. John Lie, “The State as Pimp: Prostitution and the Patriarchal State in Japan in the 1940s,” Sociological Quarterly 38, no. 2 (1997): 251–64. 22. Elfrieda Berthiaume Shukert and Barbara Smith Scibetta, War Brides of World War II (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 185–95. 23. About a fourth of all contemporary marriages in Japan are still arranged. In “Marriage with the Proper Stranger,” Applbaum describes a new form of go-betweens, pro nakodo, that is a modification of an old tradition. The key difference is that modern nakodos tend to be less familiar with families before the actual marriage arrangement

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procedures, have less contact with the couple after marriage, and typically consist of a two-person team. 24. Avtar Brah, “Re-framing Europe: En-gendered Racisms, Ethnicities, and Nationalisms in Contemporary Western Europe,” Feminist Review 45, no. 9 (1993): 16. 25. See Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview (Boulder co: Westerview Press, 1993); and George W. Stocking Jr.,“The Dark-Skinned Savage: The Image of Primitive Man in Evolutionary Anthropology,” in Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology, ed. Stocking (New York: Free Press, 1968), 110–32. Both Smedley and Stocking reveal the assumptions underlying racial taxonomies, including that human groups differed from one another in kind rather than type; that biological and physical characteristics were linked to cultural, moral, physical, and intellectual abilities; and that, due to these differences, races could be scientifically and objectively ranked. 26. Stocking, “The Dark-Skinned Savage,” 110–32. 27. See Williams, “Marriage between Japanese Women and U.S. Servicemen,” 135–54; for a discussion of immigration law changes, see 142–43. 28. For the long history and scientific rationale for rejecting mixed-race children, see Stocking, “The Dark-Skinned Savage,” 110–32. 29. Spickard, Mixed Blood, 42–44. 30. Mathews, “The Stuff of Dreams,” 718. 31. Mathews, “The Stuff of Dreams,” 721. 32. Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 211. 33. Harry H. Kitano, Japanese Americans: The Evolution of a Subculture (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1976), 109. 34. Behar, “Reading the Life Story,” 227. 35. Monisha Das Gupta, “What Is Indian about You? A Gendered, Transnational Approach to Ethnicity,” Gender and Society 11, no. 5 (1997): 588.

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Filming Nana Some Dilemmas of Oral History on Film connie broug hton

[103], (33) My husband talked for years about interviewing my grandmother, Anne Dunphy Magnuson, for a film he was working on about Burke, Idaho, the mining boomtown where she was born in 1898. 1 He was fascinated by her stories about Burke, which had been, unquestionably, a colorful town. Beginning in 1885, some of the richest and deepest silver mines in the world were worked in a canyon so narrow that the creek and the road together nearly covered the canyon floor, so narrow, as a Burke resident in the finished film says, that the dogs were forced to wag their tails up and down. Though many familiar frontier characters were part of the Burke story, the narrowness of the canyon and the depth of the mines put life in Burke on a different perspective than other western boomtowns. That perspective was what interested my husband, Irv, especially since people who had lived in Burke during its heyday were still alive and could still be interviewed. His preference as a filmmaker is for the talking head — the live person speaking his or her own words. He wanted me to research and write the script for the film, but I resisted the idea of a film about Burke. For one thing, the history of Burke was not exotic to me, and public interest in my birthplace has always seemed to be limited to its semi-open prostitution and single stoplight, so I wasn’t sure a film on Burke would find an audience. More significantly, Irv saw my grandmother as the central character of the film, and I couldn’t imagine basing a film on my grandmother talking in front of a camera. I didn’t think she would speak on film at all, and, if she did speak, I didn’t expect her necessarily to tell the truth. But Irv persisted. He badgered my grandmother, whom we called Nana. She responded with snorts and unladylike remarks. One day in 1975 he filmed her

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with me (in stylish wide-legged pants) on the site of her mother’s long-gone boardinghouse in Burke. Ten years later he announced that our holiday trip to Wallace, Idaho, the town where my parents live, seven miles down the canyon from Burke, would also be a film trip. Nana had agreed to be interviewed on film. I helped him load the film gear, telling him with every heavy metal case we heaved into the car that he was sadly mistaken if he thought Nana would behave for his camera. When we got to Wallace, my parents and brothers and sisters were equally negative. No one believed Nana would actually speak on film. She had been approached many times by reporters and producers to talk about Burke or about the early days of the Coeur d’Alene mining district, and she had always refused, saying they always messed things up and wouldn’t use her words [104], (3 right. Everyone but Irv was dumbfounded when we dumped the equipment in the entrance to Nana’s retirement apartment and found her waiting in a chair, hair done, makeup on, and dressed in a film-friendly pink blouse. We set up, Lines: 44 and my sister Jan was designated interviewer with a list of questions Irv had ——— prepared. Irv turned on the camera. Nana looked straight into its lens and began 0.0pt P to speak. ——— Jan asked her about when her parents came to Burke from Newfoundland. Normal Nana told about how her father and uncle had come first and then sent for her * PgEnds: mother, her mother’s mother, and her older brother and sisters. She told how, when her mother arrived, Burke was nothing more than a small circle of cabins. The family came by train, then steamboat, then by wagon. She told us that my [104], (3 great-great-grandmother had announced, when they headed up the seven-mile canyon to Burke, that they were headed straight to hell. She told us how the women made bread and did laundry for the single miners there. At first they wouldn’t take any money, so the miners would give the children gold pieces. At some point the women decided to go into business and built the boardinghouse where Nana was born. Except for an annoying click of her dentures, Nana was terrific. Her stories were lucid, detailed, believable. I should have been thrilled. As her granddaughter I was thrilled to have her on film. But now I was going to be the writer of a film on Burke, and as a budding historian I was worried. For one thing, on film Nana had changed some details of these old familiar stories. For instance, she had a juicy story about an Irish waitress who had been impregnated by an influential Wallace man. The story I remembered was replete with names and details. On film, she left out the names and seemed to be very confused about the details. Part of me was glad for that, thinking her self-editing meant she was telling only the truth, not gossip, but another part of me wondered if she

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had always been telling the truth and was now self-editing in order to present a cleaner image of the area. Ultimately, that story wasn’t a part of the finished film, so I could leave my questions with the film on the cutting-room floor. Making a film using oral history provides plenty of problems in itself, but what happens when the subject of the film is not only someone you love but also someone whom you know doesn’t have a strong attachment to the truth? For all the scholarly discussion about the crisis of objectivity, people who watch a documentary film expect the facts to be right, and the people who are filmed expect their words to be used as they were meant.2 So I approached this film with three great fears. First, even though I don’t believe in objectivity, I do believe that the appearance of objectivity is what gives projects like a film on Burke, Idaho, their weight. A documentary is supposed to be “true.” How was I to write a film that appears to be objective without merely pretending to be objective? Second, even if objectivity is impossible, an oral historian has a responsibility to try for

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the truth the person interviewed intended. So how was I to use other people’s words and lives respectfully? And third, how was I to mediate among my family’s feelings, my own feelings, and my job, which was to write, more or less, the film my husband felt he wanted to make and at the same time write it like a historian (which I was only learning how to be). With none of these questions answered for me, we began the film. Irv’s method is to interview people he thinks will be interesting and to film images that he thinks will fit in somewhere. After critical mass is reached, someone, in this case me, tries to find some larger order out of all the bits and pieces. Then he films more people and images to fill out the frame. The finished film is made up of former Burke residents talking about Burke. Their stories are illustrated and punctuated by contemporary footage of Burke and wonderful black-andwhite still photographs. This is a good and respected method of filmmaking, but it is not efficient, and it means the finished film is not so much “built” as it is “discovered.” Funding for this film came from our local public television station, ksps, and from the Idaho Humanities Council. Irv was asked by the funders more than once to make a film “like The Civil War.” The implication that Ken Burns, in making his documentary series on the Civil War, somehow invented documentary film or is the only exemplary documentary filmmaker is always hard to take, especially since our goal was to get people on film before they died, and the greatness of Burns’s film on the Civil War, I think, is the voices from the grave, so to speak, the letters and diaries. Furthermore, Burns is a fine filmmaker, but he certainly did not invent documentary film. What people who suggested we make a film like his really meant, I suspect, is that they would like a film as successful as The Civil War. Ironically, in 1993, just when I was unsuccessfully trying to write the first draft of the Burke film, I heard Ken Burns speak at a conference in Boston.3 The conference was called “Telling the Story: The Media, the Public, and American History,” a project of the New England Foundation for the Humanities in association with the Massachusetts Cultural Council and with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It was a huge conference, very crowded, and attended by big important historians like Alan Brinkley and big important filmmakers like Ken Burns, and little aspiring filmmakers and little aspiring historians like us. The program was devoted to the question of whether it is possible to make good history and good film at the same time, but the little aspiring filmmakers kept changing the focus to how they could get the same kind of financial support Ken Burns has gotten. Burns, to his credit, said he got his money by wearing a red dress slit up to here, pointing to his thigh. I came away with the impression that the real answer was to move

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to Washington dc or New York because real money wasn’t coming to Spokane, Washington. That’s really another issue, but it is germane to a film on Burke, Idaho. Film is a medium where money counts. The more money you have, the better the film can be. A really good one-hour film on Burke should cost just as much as a really good one-hour film on the Civil War, but a film on Burke would be pretty hard to sell to Mobil. Finances aside, the discussion between filmmakers and historians was timely for me. Burns pointed out that film is less like the essay a historian might write and more like music. He pointed out, essentially, that history was sung before it was footnoted, and Burns means his films to be like song. But historians were critical of Burns’s The Civil War. Daniel Walkowitz criticized the film, among other reasons, because Burns did not tell the contested story. The film was criticized for giving an impression rather than giving an argument. There was, of course, a lot more to the discussion, but this argument mirrored my dilemma. Should the film on Burke give an impression or an argument? Did a “historical” film have to contest something? In a limited market for documentary film, the success of a film like The Civil War weights it with far more importance than it can bear. Somehow Ken Burns’s vision of the Civil War becomes the vision of the Civil War. Well, that’s wrong, and if there were more films by more people with as much money as Burns had to make that film, we would see that his is just one vision, one story. But as things are, the historian has to criticize the film not just for its limitations but for its success. The success is that Burns made exactly the film he wanted to make; that’s not easy, and it’s not the film a historian or anyone else, including me, would make. I was sympathetic to Burns because the director of a film has to make his own film if it is to work. But I was also sympathetic to the historians because historians know that, because of the power of film, whatever film Ken Burns makes becomes history. Because there isn’t likely going to be another film on Burke, Idaho, I was about to — for better or worse — write a film that would define Burke. Knowing that other filmmakers and other historians and other film writers struggled with the same tensions I was struggling with was some comfort, but it gave me no answers. Whose side was I on — the historians’ or the filmmakers’? For the Burke film I was supposed to be the scholar, the historian; I was supposed to be the one telling the contested story. But I was only the writer. If you know anything about filmmaking, you know that being the writer doesn’t mean much. It is a director’s medium, and the director’s job is to make the film work, and a film works by impressions, by images, by sounds and colors. Those were the things Irv was thinking about, and, just like the historians at that conference, in making

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the Burke film I was resisting the kind of film that the filmmaker was making because I was thinking about the structure and balance and accuracy that would make the argument and not necessarily the images and sounds that would make the song. This conflict between argument and impression was not the only thing that made constructing the film so difficult. We had a mass of materials including straight history, newspapers, wonderful old photographs, and much oral history, and it all covered Burke from 1885 to 1997. The inclination in ordering material like that would be to follow major events — either in the mining industry or in the larger history of the nation. But we couldn’t see how to do that in an hour-long film, so, acting on a suggestion by one of our humanities scholars and advisers, Katherine Aiken, we ordered the material by different aspects of the community: the terrain, the dangers, the mines, the creek, and so on. Even then, my husband’s poetic nature came into conflict with my need for order, that is, some kind of large frame for the film. The answer came, I think, by accepting the personal nature of the project and putting the narration in his voice. We had always expected him to speak the narration because he is a fine professional narrator, but we eventually wrote the narration in his personal voice. We began, as I began this article, with Irv trying to get Nana to be interviewed and ended with Irv carrying her casket to her grave. We imposed Nana’s life on the life of the town, and Nana’s life became, in a general sense, the scope of the film. Irv’s personal voice also gave us permission to use natural, native historians in the film rather than professional ones. Instead of having a historian say that the development of the automobile was ultimately responsible for the demise of the town of Burke, we had Sophie Armbruster, who had lived there all her life, on film telling us that when people got cars they moved down the canyon to Wallace, where the weather was a little better. She didn’t study that up or read it somewhere; it was a fact of her life. But there are problems in using interviews with ordinary people. For one thing, they are not always articulate. We interviewed several people who simply couldn’t get the story out straight once the camera was on. And when you’re using your grocery money to pay for the film that’s going through the gate at one hundred dollars a minute, you can’t afford to be patient until they get it right. You don’t have the luxury of inexpensive audiotape, where you can sit and let it roll while people think. On the other hand, ordinary people are great in that they know the importance of regular life, and that infuses their stories with perspectives that you might not find written down on paper. One story my grandmother tells is about building the first church in Burke. According to her, they had been having a Sunday mass in the living room of my great-

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grandmother’s boardinghouse. My great-grandmother didn’t like that because people would stay around all day, and even stay for dinner (it’s a boardinghouse, right?), and my great-grandmother couldn’t get her work done. So she made my great-grandfather dig a basement for a church. The rest of the building was done by other people in the community, including carpenters from the mines. I’m sure no newspaper would begin a story about the new church by saying it was built so Mrs. Dunphy could bake her Sunday pies, but that is my grandmother’s take on the story, and it is not only as important as any other but probably more interesting. Working with oral history was frustrating at times because so much of what we filmed could not be checked. Ever since the film aired, I’ve been waiting for the letter that tells us all about the dreadful mistake we made, the lie we believed and broadcast. (It hasn’t come yet.) But by relying on oral history, the film demanded that we be — not gullible — but at least willing to believe, willing to accept the version of history that came from the people who were there. I had worried so much about how to present both sides of any contested issue, but there was, I thought, a rich, unsimple consistency in the stories and the impressions people had of life in Burke. I found that using oral history gave me the ability to juxtapose the mining engineer talking about fights in the street and Bill Dunphy talking about the Saturday-night drunk train and newspaper articles about Burke’s national reputation as a tough town, with Mamie Picard talking about the idyllic nature of her childhood in Burke. She had no fear, no worries, never saw fights, never felt any danger. What Bill Dunphy saw in Burke existed no more or less than what Mamie Picard saw, and I don’t think their differing memories are confusing to the audience. After the film was broadcast, one of my mother’s friends told her, “Irv and Connie can make a film about my family anytime.” The film did include my grandmother, my mother, my uncle, my second cousin, and music by another cousin and my daughter. My son ran sound, and my youngest child appears in the credits with a clapstick. My dad’s segment was cut after he pulled me aside and said, “I’m counting on you to get me out of this.” Philosophically, I see no difference between family history and “real” history, but I worried that a focus too narrow would not find an audience. Narrow focus did not worry Irv in the least. One segment of the finished film is about my great-aunt being hit by a train when she was a child. I saw it as an interesting, and a little maudlin, family story; Irv saw it as a metaphor for the dangers encountered and nurturance given to children in a mining town. He was the director, so he won. He may even have been right. Maybe I was really just worried that viewers would think I thought my family was so important that everyone should know that my great-

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aunt was hit by a train (and survived). This argument typified the tension I felt between being a historian privileging accuracy and linearity and being a filmmaker, an artist, privileging motion and emotion. Another piece Irv wanted to include was my grandmother talking about how federal agents had asked her, when she was working at the post office in Burke as a young girl, to tell them which miners were using more than one name. Some miners used more than one name because they were avoiding the draft during World War I; some were trying to beat a blacklist against union miners. Irv thought it was funny how innocently and easily she cast herself as a stool pigeon. I never was able to think it was funny. I don’t know how much of my distaste for that story comes from not wanting my grandmother to have pointed out those men and how much was from a concern that I not do to her what she had prevented other writers from doing — misusing her words. The question she was asked was, “Did the miners get mail under two or more names?” She said: Well, that was after they had the mines in Butte. And after they had trouble, they had a big strike in Butte. And they would be blackballed. And they’d had the list of the men who were troublemakers to blackball them. And they would come to Burke, and they would get [unintelligible] many many years later. And they would come to work, and they’d be getting mail under two or three names. How we knew that they were getting mail under two or three names, that was during World War I, the draft inspection officers came up there and they would ask. And Mr. Harris, the postmaster, said they got men that got mail under more than one name. But they said they were getting their partner’s mail that was on a different shift, and they couldn’t get down when the post office was open. But he’d stand there in the post office, and if a man asked for mail under more than one name, I’d nod my head. And then he’d go out and investigate him after he’d left the post office. But we weren’t allowed to give them any names out of the post office.

It was the last line that Irv thought was so funny. On film it seems as if she didn’t realize that a nod of her head was no different from actually giving them names. But I know my grandmother. She was not stupid; she knew. What her words do not make clear to me is whether she thought she was helping to find draft dodgers, or helping to maintain an antiunion blacklist, or simply doing what an officer of the law asked her to do. I didn’t want to use this segment without knowing more about her motivations, but she died before I thought to ask her to explain. I thought that without further explanation, using this clip would just make her look stupid without adding any real insight into blacklisting or draft dodging, neither of which we had time to explore anyway. I did not want to ambush my own grandmother (or anyone else in the film) by

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using her words to give meanings she did not intend. That seems to me to be an important ethic for the documentarian. Nana’s little speech on the post office was not edited in, so I won this battle; maybe I was right. I thought I knew something about making films when I started this project, but what I learned was that I had never learned to see and hear like a filmmaker. My vision for this film had more to do with control and order than it had to do with emotion and song. A friend of mine talks about how scholarship has given her a voice. I can see how a historian gets a voice by processing the voices of others, by taking letters, newspapers, diaries, and business documents and translating them, forming them into some kind of idea. The historian gets power from study and inclusion and method and from contestation. That’s what I started the film wanting to do — to delineate some contest of ideas or [111], (41) of differing interpretations. But the Burke film wasn’t my film. As the writer, I found the contest was in learning how to think both like a historian and like a filmmaker. And I found that, just like the technique of the historian, the Lines: 494 t filmmaker’s technique is to blend the voices, along with sounds and pictures ——— and colors. For this film the filmmaker wanted to celebrate Burke, to present the * 34.222pt people of Burke in their own voices, and in his own voice. The goal, I discovered, ——— was not to determine the “truth” by privileging one voice over another, but to Normal Pag express truthful emotions by respecting the“truth”of as many voices as possible. * PgEnds: Pa Notes My thanks to Barbara Williamson for helping me to clarify my ideas. 1. The film, titled Burke: The Story of a Frontier Mining Town, took about ten years to complete. It was supported primarily by the production company owned by my husband and myself, Mill Mountain Productions, and the public television station in Spokane, Washington, ksps. Bill Stanley of ksps was the executive producer. Additional funding came from a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, Coeur d’Alene Mines, Hecla Mining Company, Silver Valley Solidarity Committee of the United Steelworkers of America, Don Heidt, and Mary Callahan Zeller. The film was first broadcast in July 1997 on ksps. 2. For a discussion of objectivity and history see Peter Novick in That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and, more compellingly, Jane Tompkins’s essay “ ‘Indians’: Textualism, Morality, and the Problem of History,” Critical Inquiry 13 (1986): 101–19. 3. The conference took place April 23–24, 1993. All references to events of this conference come from my notes.

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Fragments from a Family Album

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[112], (4 Fragments from a Family Album grew out of my fascination with family photography albums and the importance of such records, both personally and culturally. Working from an album that chronicles moments in the life of three young girls (my mother and her two sisters) in tiny, fading images, I have manipulated details, enlarging and juxtaposing them in diptychs, triptychs, and composite grids. In so doing, I hope to highlight the strangeness of naturalized images of gender and to draw out moments of both beauty and frustration that resist the frames of “pretty pictures.” Some of the pieces are disturbing, as gestures and expressions disrupt the controlled effect of matching outfits and orderly poses. All of the images bear the traces of time: some are ghostlike due to fading and enlarged grain, and others bear the marks, scratches, and glue spots of decades of wear and tear. Together they provide testimony to the subtle trails of girlhood and to my own deep attachment to the girls-become-women who populate these albums, namely Jean, Judy, and Baby Sandy.

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Untitled Grid from Fragments from a Family Album, 1992–1996, thirteen 8-by-10-inch prints.

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Potties, Pride, and PC Scenes from a Lesbian Mothers’ Group anne aronson Scene I: It is a sunny, surprisingly warm early March day in 1991; sixteen women and two children are gathered in a living room in the Catfish Park neighborhood, considered by many the heart of the local lesbian community. Half of the women are sizably pregnant. It is one of those ill-fated potlucks in which everyone brings the same thing — in this case bagels and cream cheese. No one seems to pay attention to the bagels, however, as we move cautiously around the small living room, introducing ourselves to each other. We chat about how the pregnancy is going, who our health care providers are, what our families of origin think about the pregnancy, and whether we know the sex of the child. When we begin the more formal introductions, the theme is how we got pregnant. The stories are remarkably varied: some women went to clinics with their partners and were artificially inseminated with sperm from an unknown donor; others went to clinics without their partners; others used the sperm of a known donor but do not intend to involve the donor in the child’s life; one couple plans to include the child’s father in the family; some couples tried for years to get pregnant, while others succeeded on the first try; one woman even says that the pregnancy was an accident, a statement that baffles the rest of us. As we leave, we sign a sheet with our names, phone numbers, and due dates. The phone numbers and personnel have since changed, the due dates are long past, but my partner and I still keep that original sheet on the bulletin board in memory of the group’s inception.

This gathering was the first meeting of a lesbian mothers’ group that I have belonged to for the last four and a half years. The group started when a pregnant couple placed an ad in the local lesbian, gay, and bisexual newspaper asking if there were other pregnant lesbians interested in forming a birthing class. The seven families that responded to the invitation were all six to eight months pregnant. Six were having their first child; two families, including my own, already had one girl.

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After that first meeting, the group quickly hired a lesbian-friendly birthing advocate to teach us about labor and delivery. We met every two or three weeks in our homes for the class. Soon after the last session, the births came rapidly, sometimes only a few days apart. The families kept in close touch as each child — in every case a boy — was born. It became apparent that there was interest in continuing the group beyond the pregnancy/birthing period. We arranged a regular monthly meeting time. Four and a half years later, we are still gathering for monthly potlucks. In addition, we now go on semiannual retreats, weekends out of the city. Not all of the original participants in the birthing class are still in the group. One family left shortly after the class; another moved out of town about a year later. All the remaining members are white, currently middle class, and own homes. Each couple has been together for upward of eight years. Our ages range from the early thirties to the early forties. Some women are Jewish, others Christian, and others practice no religion. Despite our general demographic homogeneity, there are some significant ideological differences among group members. Our group did not come together because of similar political or parenting agendas; we fell together because of an ad in a newspaper. The major difference, as it turns out, is the degree to which various members have been involved in lesbian feminist communities. Some have long histories in these communities, histories that include, for example, establishing a local women’s coffeehouse in the 1970s, participating in the Seneca Falls women’s peace camp, and regularly attending the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. These women tend to live in the lesbian-dense Catfish Park neighborhood. Others in the group have had little contact with this strand of lesbian and feminist politics, tending to live in neighborhoods that are not particularly known for their gay and lesbian populations. Some of the latter subgroup came out as lesbians in the mid- to late 1980s and so missed the women’s coffeehouse movement altogether. Some were more involved in developing professional careers than in pursuing radical lesbian and feminist political agendas. Others pursued a more mainstream liberal political agenda or devoted their energies to race and poverty issues more than to lesbian politics. Because pregnancy rather than politics brought us together, political differences — especially as they pertain to parenting — are always present in the group, although not always acknowledged. It’s often hard for me to classify exactly what this group is. Sometimes when I need advice about day care, a homophobic workplace, or brands of wet wipes, it feels like a lesbian moms’ support group. When it’s time to order tickets for my daughter’s play and I ask group members if they want to come, it feels like

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an extended family. At other times it feels like a seventh-grade clique — for example, when we wrote personal ads to force ourselves to stay awake on New Year’s Eve. And it feels like a play group when the highlight of our gatherings is the inventive, complex interactions of our children. Most often, though, I like to think of our group as a community, although I am well aware of the contention around that word. I choose to understand community the way Shane Phelan does, as a set of processes rather than as a stable entity. In Getting Specific: Postmodern Lesbian Politics, Phelan identifies four processes that constitute lesbian community: first, lesbian community serves as a “breathing room,” a place we can go for distance from the hostility toward our sexuality; second, it makes lesbians more visible both to each other and within the society as a whole; third, it provides models, showing members and new entrants “how to be a lesbian”; and fourth, it provides a base for political action, for challenges to hegemonic social structures. 1 Phelan questions any theory of community that foregrounds the sameness of the participants. The responsible lesbian community will acknowledge multiplicity and difference, welcoming, for example, many definitions of what it means to be a lesbian. Such a community will understand itself in terms of its location in a specific set of circumstances and a specific history. And each of the four processes that constitute lesbian community will be informed by this understanding of specificity and difference. Phelan joins a host of other postmodern theorists who challenge the essentialism and exclusivism of communities — including many lesbian feminist communities — that irrevocably tie politics to identity and often erect rigid (i.e., “politically correct”) standards for what it means to be “true” to one’s identity. A self-reflective, evolving lesbian community, Phelan writes, “will not be afraid of the truth of its history, especially of the truth of the instability of lesbian identity. This forthrightness includes acknowledging that many women who have loved women also love(d) men or will love them in the future” (96). She would no doubt similarly critique any community that adhered inflexibly to more mainstream standards of behavior. Phelan’s theory seems particularly appropriate in analyzing our group because our somewhat haphazard inception brought together women whose roots are deep in the lesbian feminist communities of the 1970s and 1980s with those who identify more strongly with mainstream culture. Phelan’s four processes and her discussion of sameness and difference in lesbian communities help me frame many of my questions about the lesbian mothers’ group I have participated in for all of my son’s life. How, for example, does our group make it possible for us to survive, even thrive, as lesbian mothers in a homophobic Republican regime? How does it allow us to come

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out as lesbian families? How does it encourage the children to be secure in their identities, proud to be the sons and daughters of lesbians? How does it help us figure out how to be lesbians and mothers at the same time? How does it contribute to a disruption of the social order by redefining family, parenting, and gender? And as it engages in these processes, how does it insist on sameness or allow for difference? The scenes assembled in this article are chosen to illustrate the four processes of community that Phelan describes. They are an attempt to answer her call for specificity in defining lesbian community. Community is constructed in our lesbian mothers’ group at the level of individual conversations and interactions, not through manifestos or other declarations of our purpose and policies. Phelan makes this point: “Getting specific about community/communities” means addressing “not what needs to be done to really have community or how to live without it or with the recognition of its instability, but how we have and do construct the communities we live in, what discourses we are living within, their costs and hidden implications” (97).

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Finding a Breathing Room

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Scene 2: It is a retreat during the summer of 1995. The boys are four years old. We have chosen to camp at a county park only a few minutes from the center of the city. The campsite is isolated from the rest of the park, although an occasional hiker or dog walker passes by. The area for pitching tents is a large, circular field — flat, sheltered, private, free from debris. As soon as they arrive, the boys begin a game involving pirates, danger, lost treasure, and bears, a game they will sustain in one form or another for three days. Their minds are seized by the mystery of the woods; they disappear for long periods but then return, ever deeper in their imaginative play. At first we are wary of their disappearances, sending one mother or another out to track them down. Later, though, we relax, enjoying the fact that they are finally playing together without fighting for the first time in their lives. They seem to trust each other, to know each other’s quirks, to accept that certain boys have special friendships or awkwardnesses with each other. All of us — child and adult alike — bask in the safety of this space. As always, upon returning from one of these retreats, my son, Sam, talks nonstop about it. He asks when he will go camping with the “baby group” again. We are prepared to hear his request on an almost weekly basis throughout the year. He seems to yearn not only for the fun and excitement of camping but also for the intense bonding that takes place. For the three days of the retreat, his family is not only accepted but celebrated.


Scene 3: At one of our monthly potlucks, the boys are about eighteen months old, and the topic turns to day care. Most families in the group use day care at least

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p ot ties, pr ide, and p c on a part-time basis. My partner and I continually struggle to find day care that is not only safe, loving, and stimulating but also receptive to our different family structure. As the discussion turns to horrible encounters with prospective daycare providers, we realize we are not alone in the struggle. One woman, Carol, tells the story of how she took her children to visit a day care near her home one afternoon. “We had our eye on this day care for a long time because it is in our neighborhood and has a warm, homey look,” says Carol. “I was excited that they had an opening. When we got there, we began to look around, and I brought up how our family has two moms. The day-care provider suddenly started to look uncomfortable. Her eyes were kind of darting around the room.” “Did she say anything?” asks Fran, another group member. “She didn’t say anything, but I had the feeling a criminal had just walked in the room. A few minutes later I told her that we weren’t interested. Boy, was she relieved. She said, ‘That’s probably for the best. I wouldn’t want the other kids here making fun of your kids.’ The worst part is that I still have to pass this place almost every day.” Margaret chimes in with another day-care disaster story. She recently called a highly recommended provider and mentioned up front that her son has two moms. “After I said that, there was this pause. Then she said that her household was Christian. I thought that was enough, but she went on to say that she didn’t want any displays of affection in front of the kids.” The group exhales in a communal moan. Fran says: “I don’t know what she was worried about. You and Alison rarely have sex when you pick Owen up at day care.” “We used to kiss a lot at pick-up time, but we cut back when he turned a year old.” The group roars with laughter, enjoying a moment of imagined retribution against those whose ignorant words and behavior are just a breath away from our children.

These two scenes illustrate the first process in which lesbian community, according to Phelan, engages: it provides some protection from the hostility of a homophobic society. Our group certainly serves this function. Our monthly meetings are designed to create a world apart for our children, so that they can experience what it is like for their families to be accepted as totally familiar and legitimate. In particular, the semiannual retreats (appropriately named) have assumed the function of the “breathing room,” the temporary haven from adversity. For two or three days at a time, both children and parents are more or less protected from heterosexist images and homophobic politicians. Even when the “real” world penetrates the retreats, we experience a sense of invincibility in

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our numbers. One year, our campsite was adjoined to another where a loud, drunken family reunion was taking place. Our first tactic was to put our tents at the far end of our campsite to minimize noise. When this didn’t work, five of our staunchest members confronted the family; there were a few homophobic mutterings, but the noise stopped shortly thereafter. Phelan points out that lesbian communities “are not simply detachable from the social formations that surround them and in which we lesbians grow up and live much of our lives” (96). Our retreats are not separatist in nature; rather, they legitimize and bolster us as we reenter an often unwelcoming environment. The group also gives us respite from the dominant culture by providing us with a space in which to analyze and solve problems that often afflict us as lesbian mothers. The challenge of finding lesbian-friendly day care is one such problem. Perhaps more important than the group’s role as a place for discussing our woes, however, is its function as a fertile site of lesbian humor. The irony of homophobic terrors and misconceptions is brought to raucous light as we mock a day-care provider’s fear that we will make love in front of a dozen toddlers. Phelan points out that in its “breathing room” function, lesbian community can “provide a space for critical distance from . . . compulsory heterosexuality” (96). Humor is a most effective instrument in creating and maintaining that critical distance. Breaking Invisibility Scene 4: It is a gathering of the nonbiological moms shortly before the babies are born. Our conversation begins here, with our dissatisfaction in being called “non”: the other, the negative, the absence of something rather than the presence of something. But we don’t quite know what to call ourselves; language once again lets us down as it often does with lesbian, gay, and bisexual people. We talk about the attention the pregnant parent is receiving, the way the culture idolizes the pregnant woman. In contrast, we are largely invisible; even when people know we are parents to the baby, they don’t know what to say to us. Some of us fear that if we are recognized as parents, we will be seen in the “dad” role. One woman explains that some friends have indeed already joked about her being the daddy. We cringe, remembering a 1988 article in our local newspaper on a lesbian family in which the child called the nonbiological mother “mommy daddy.” We wonder what our children will call us. We also worry about the bonds created through breastfeeding. Will we ever experience the connection without that kind of physical contact? Will our children see us differently because we don’t have that history? One woman comments that her nonbiological status is painful but that she is pleased not to be enduring the discomforts of pregnancy. We end the session hopeful, knowing that we love the children just as much as the biological mothers do and that the kids will recognize

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p ot ties, pr ide, and p c our love. We also leave with the knowledge that we can talk to each other again as new twists in our path unfold. Scene 5: It is another monthly potluck, but this time our daughter, Rose, age nine, is unusually keyed up. Typically, Rose, who is six years older than the boys, hovers between young child, babysitter, and full participant in the grown-up conversation. Her position — in terms of both gender and age — is awkward, but she always leaves the gatherings energized and feminized, often identifying more closely with the grown women than the small boys. Today she has news to tell the group. Yesterday at her after-school day care, she heard a classmate of hers declare that lesbians were stupid. Rose marched right up to the girl and explained that her parents were lesbians and that they weren’t at all stupid. Other kids and the teacher supported her, and the unfortunate perpetrator ended up in a time-out. Rose’s news is met with torrents of support and pride. In fact, most parents are quite amazed that Rose handled this touchy situation so swiftly and unabashedly. The atmosphere changes from potluck to party. Scene 6: One of the families has just had their second child — miraculously a girl. To celebrate the event, they have invited about seventy-five friends and family members to a blessing ceremony. The celebration takes place in an open pavilion in a city park; it is a Saturday afternoon in July, and the park is busy with picnickers, Rollerbladers, and walkers. A large rainbow banner welcomes us to the pavilion, which is perched atop one of our city’s rare hills. The event is clearly meant to be a public celebration not only of a new child but also of the lesbian family and community of which that child is now a part. In the middle of the ceremony, I take a moment to pan the audience. There are numerous children under the age of five. In fact, there’s a constant murmur and motion as the children in the audience, the fruit of the lesbian baby boom, try to make the best of what must seem like a dull event to them. I also scan the adults and notice something odd; almost everyone looks familiar, even though I know I have never seen some of these faces before. I am, of course, recognizing myself in this throng of thirty- and forty-something lesbian mothers. They dress informally with sensible shoes and an occasional touch of tie-dye. Their faces are earnest, their voices subdued. At one moment it occurs to me that the women without children at this event may feel on the margin, an interesting reversal from ten years ago when I first became a lesbian mother. The gathering, I realize, is only a slice, possibly small, of the larger lesbian community. The homogeneity of the group is at once comforting and disconcerting. As we dance to a three-piece band — much do-si-do-ing, promenading, and kicking up our heels in a large circle — I am reminded of how white we are, of the many dances we are not dancing, the foods we are not eating, the talk we are not talking.

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In the second process described by Phelan, lesbian community makes lesbians visible to each other and to the society in general. In choosing to have families, our group members do much more than simply come out as lesbians. Some of us must also come out as nonbiological mothers; we encourage our sons’ and daughters’ desires to come out as the children of lesbians; and we publicly celebrate our families and communities. The group is vital in this process, as the example of Rose’s coming-out story perhaps best illustrates. Without the group to validate her family and her individual status within that family, Rose may never have had the courage to speak so self-assuredly and bluntly to her classmate. As she approaches the child who made the homophobic comment, she knows, probably without thinking about it, that her parents and the community of which they are a part will support and reward her. Similarly, when we meet as nonbiological mothers to express our sense of alienation and to strategize about how to make our total involvement in our children’s lives visible to friends, family, insurance salespeople, teachers, restaurant servers, doctors, and everyone else, we fortify ourselves both practically and emotionally for our daily struggles. Finally, when we put a rainbow banner on a hill in a busy city park to initiate a new member into our community, we not only talk about visibility, we enact it. In discussing how lesbian communities facilitate visibility, however, Phelan argues against a kind of visibility that highlights only a select group of lesbians: “Visibility should not be the visibility of ‘the lesbian,’ the archetypal lesbian, but must be the visibility of lesbians in our irreducible plurality” (96). Her point prompts questions about the rainbow banner on the hill at the blessing ceremony. Does it fly over the vast diversity among gays and lesbians? Does the general whiteness of the people attending the ceremony mirror a larger problem — the fact that most media examples of lesbian families in Newsweek, Parenting, and local newspapers are white and middle class? Is part of the strength and support we receive from our group a result of our economic and ethnic privilege? Undoubtedly the glow that sometimes surrounds our community is not only about celebrating lesbian families but also about seeing ourselves in each other’s eyes. Being a Lesbian, Being a Mother Scene 7: It is the group’s first retreat in the summer of 1992. We are all piled into a cabin for a breakfast of eggs, fruit, and, of course, bagels. It is a special day because it is Jack’s first birthday, the last of the babies to turn one. As blocks are tossed about and chewed, bottles administered, diapers changed, we all notice that redheaded Jack is standing firmly on the ground, attached only by a finger or two to one of his mothers. A hush is followed by an adoring cheer as Jack takes

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p ot ties, pr ide, and p c his first steps. We have shared a moment in his history. We have witnessed his transformation from baby to toddler. Scene 8: The boys are now three, and we are gathered for another monthly potluck. A familiar subject comes up — the potty. Only this time the theme is slightly different: it’s not about whether the little boys are using the potty, but how they are using it. One woman says that her son sits on the toilet; they have never taught him to stand. Another chimes in enthusiastically saying that there is now a movement among men to sit down. When men sit down, according to this approach, they create less mess and less conflict over the position of the toilet seat. A familiar wave of panic travels through me. My partner and I have, of course, assisted Sam in standing up. We let him stand on our feet when he was too short to stand by himself. We have even sung him a little song about using the toilet that includes the line “standing up on tippy toes high.” We’ve never forced him to stand, but I somehow have this sense that I’ve done something wrong. Have I limited his options? Have I narrowed the possibilities for his liberation? Have I grasped thoughtlessly onto a cultural norm for bathroom habits? Have I, god forbid, fostered his consciousness of his dominant status in society: men stand while women sit? I walk away from the conversation with considerable guilt and a little anger about how often I feel incorrect in this group. Scene 9: It is a retreat in a local county park this past August. The sun beats down on a crop of three-year-old bodies as we spot a family arriving late to the retreat. Their anger is clear forty feet away. Apparently we had not been at the designated meeting place at the designated time. This seemingly minor incident is packed with meaning, with long-held resentment. They glare at us, stating that the group treats them as outsiders, fails to communicate with them, devalues their children. They leave. We are stunned and spin into days of analysis and soul-searching to figure out what has happened. This is the first obvious rift, although there have been strains and tensions all along. The issue, as I interpret it, is that the group seems to be divided between an inner circle and an outer circle. The inner circle consists of those who belong to a fairly close-knit, long-established lesbian community in the inner city and who faithfully observe certain alternative cultural practices — vegetarianism, use of cloth diapers, and the banning of gunplay, for example. The outer circle looks a bit more like heterosexual middle-class America: one couple lives in a suburb, one values work and career almost as much as family, several eat meat. The outer group feels judged by the inner group, while the inner group sometimes seems oblivious to the rift. For the first time in four years, we examine ourselves as a community: Does our group really reproduce the same patterns of inclusion and exclusion that have sent us as lesbians to the margins of society? What responsibilities do we have toward each other? What is the level of our commitment?

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The incident prompts us to have a meeting without children to reflect on these questions. The discussion brings to light the sometimes oppressive dynamics that have developed over a long period. Each woman, not just the family that left the retreat, discusses ways in which she has felt inferior or devalued within the group. The discussion does not resolve the immediate problem — the offended family only very reluctantly agrees to continue — but it does create an openness that had not been previously present.

The third process in which a lesbian community engages, according to Phelan, is modeling what it means to be a lesbian. Our group has a more specific process, however; we model what it means to be lesbian mothers, and, even more specifically, lesbian mothers with sons. Even those of us who have had little direct contact with lesbian feminist communities of the 1970s and their aftermath feel the challenge of being lesbian mothers of sons. We have all encountered other lesbians who display, at best, a lack of interest in children, and, at worst, downright hostility toward them, particularly if they happen to be boys. When we moved from being childless lesbians to being the parents of young boys, some of us drifted away from old friends whose eyes glazed over at the sight of children or recoiled in the presence of boys; others developed new relationships with heterosexual couples engaging in the same struggles with infants and preschoolers that we were. We have to draw on a number of different resources, including those from the straight world, to invent what it means to be lesbian mothers with sons. When each member makes specific decisions about how to mix these different approaches to family and parenting, tensions inevitably surface within the group. It is not surprising, then, that the process of modeling lesbian motherhood has been the most complex and conflicted of the four processes for our group. As we navigate the uncharted waters of what it means to be a lesbian mother, group members sometimes erect barriers that prescribe correct and incorrect approaches to parenting. Other members run into these barriers, and the result is anger and distance. The barriers are least apparent in scenes like that in which Jack took his first steps, benchmark moments in which disputes over good and bad parenting are dissolved in the moment of wonder. They are more apparent when discussing parenting techniques, styles, or strategies that are loaded with cultural values — for example, issues like potty training or choosing between cloth and disposable diapers. When the dominant discourse of the group clearly assumes that cloth diapers are the choice for all members, an unhealthy political correctness takes root. The case of the potty is particularly problematic, because the boys who are taught only to sit on the toilet are encouraged (even required?) to act like girls. Phelan says: “Rather than engaging simply in identity consolida-

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tion, . . . a lesbian community informed by its own specificity will welcome the specificity of each new member’s mode of life” (96). This includes the modes of life introduced by boys, and the parents of boys who welcome their sons’ difference. Making Change Scene 10: It is fall 1993, and the babies are two plus. The boys move quickly from toy to toy, person to person in yet another living-room gathering. They call to us: “Mom, Susan, Mommy, Mama, Mommy Carol.” Each family has figured out the nomenclature. My son has found that having two mothers is linguistically efficient: he simply calls out “Mommies” when he wants help or attention. As they play, romp, whine, shove, and snuggle, I’m reminded of how powerful the home environment can be in nurturing the language and conceptual categories of young children. On this day, the topic of conversation is adoption. Some of the nonbiological mothers have recently adopted the child; some are seeking a lawyer to initiate the process; one couple is trying to do the adoption without a lawyer. We compare costs, discuss lawyers’ personalities, speculate on which judges are supportive, dissect the legal opportunities and pitfalls. So far the adoptions have been going smoothly, but there is no certainty in this risky business of redefining the family. Now in 1995, two years later, almost all the couples in the group have adopted their children. The climate for adoptions is variable, however. While adoptions by same-sex nonbiological parents have become legal in a number of states, including Vermont, Illinois, and New York, the State Department of Social Services in Nebraska recently instituted a ban on gay and lesbian adoptions. At home, our county juvenile court has refused to hear an adoption case of this kind since a new head judge was instated over a year ago; we’ve even heard rumors that alreadycompleted adoptions may be reversed. Our group continues to track any changes, ready to spring into action if our adoptions are threatened. Scene 11: Halloween is approaching, and the talk turns to costumes for the kids. A couple’s five-year-old daughter wants to be a bride. One of her mothers is distressed that she is choosing a traditional model of womanhood over the model offered her by her lesbian parents. Our son appears to be following a similar path: he wants to be Batman, a virile action hero. The issue of gendered behavior is constantly discussed in the group. I remember one distressed parent expressing her concern that her one-year-old was making truck noises in his high chair; she could not imagine where he had learned that, since he had rarely spent any time outside of the immediate family. Another couple wouldn’t allow their boy to play with toy police cars, fearing that to do so would lock him into a narrow range of gendered behavior. Another couple did not allow their son to engage in any kind of pretend violent play such as

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turning a Lego into a pretend gun or getting the bad guy. On the other hand, most families encourage the boys to adopt women’s roles, however stereotypical: cooking, throwing a tea party, playing with dolls, even wearing skirts to day care. Parents speak with pride about the female roles the boys play; they express concern about the male roles. The principle seems to be that boys will learn male behavior from the culture at large but that their more domestic, nurturing side can only be fostered at home. Is it right, though, to repress the exuberance of a hunting trip to kill monsters? Does a sword fight in the backyard condemn our children to lives of violence? Our parenting seems strongest when we offer our children options and then let them assume gender identities (and sexual identities) themselves. As is turned out, Halloween was not quite what we expected that year. The woman who feared the consequences of her daughter’s obsession with brides chose, finally, to make the bridal gown herself. We allowed Sam to be Batman, but, in the end, he chose to be a butterfly.

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Lines: 673 t In the final process identified by Phelan, lesbian community provides a base for challenging hegemonic structures. In our attempts to adopt our children, ——— in our insistence that families with lesbian parents have the same potential to 7.4pt Pg ——— grow healthy, well-adjusted children as other kinds of families, we are pressing Normal Pag for reforms in the nature and definition of family. Sometimes we seek this change through a series of small daily actions: we help our children learn, for * PgEnds: Eje example, to call both biological and nonbiological parents “Mommy.” We also work hard to fight gender stereotypes. The Halloween incident illustrates how [125], (55) our desire to resist traditional, rigid gender typing can lead us to a different kind of rigidity in which we expect our boys to shed the more aggressive parts of themselves; the scene also illustrates, however, our capacity to break down that rigidity and thereby open up more and more options for how our children express and embody gender. For some group members, particularly those with strong backgrounds in lesbian feminist communities, parenting has prompted them to realign their gender politics. While they may at one point have seen their own parenting as an opportunity to insulate their children from a culture that turns boy babies into bruisers, they now see that forbidding certain expressions of gender is repressive and, ultimately, counterproductive. Sam’s desire to be Batman, after all, may have swelled to unruly proportions if we had forbidden it; instead, it seemed to disappear altogether, subordinated to a new desire — to be a butterfly. While we work toward change through small, daily actions, our group members also have a surprisingly rich history in more public arenas. During the four years in which our group has been in existence, members have appeared

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regularly in the media, either representing the lesbian baby boom or fighting for the rights of lesbian families. One family, for example, was featured in a story on how the pride march has become increasingly oriented to kids; another family was the focus of a front-page article on the lesbian baby boom; one woman’s leadership of the fight for domestic partner benefits in the public school system received media attention; and yet another family was the subject of an article in the local gay and lesbian newspaper on lesbian mothers who include the child’s father in the family structure. Although many group members were activists before they became parents, the group has provided, as Phelan says, a base for a particular kind of political action, that which is oriented toward families. Scene 12: It is Pride Day 1994. Our family and others in the group have made posters, decorated bikes and wagons, and packed snacks and drinks for the long march. We walk behind a large banner that reads “Families with Children.” Not far ahead is the drag queen motorcade, streams of smiling political candidates, and a troupe of dancing lesbian anarchists. The children are awed by the size and noise of the event, but they seem at home, having attended these marches since infancy. It is a stunning day, although we begin to tire after about a mile. The last stretch takes us up a major city street, past one of the largest churches in the city, and across the street from a world-famous theater and art museum. Suddenly we notice that there aren’t people scattered in twos or threes along the side of the street anymore, but that the bodies are five, six, seven deep. Our little boys and girls stare in wonder as thousands of people look them in the eye and cheer for them — for the bundle of humanity that each one is, for the ideas they embody, for the mothers they love, for the future they represent. I lean down and tell Sam that they are cheering for him. He smiles and soaks up his fleeting celebrity. At its best, this is the gift that our group, and the larger community in which it is embedded, gives our children. Note 1. Shane Phelan, Getting Specific: Postmodern Lesbian Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 87–88, 96. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

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Ethnography is the description and comparison of cultures, and as Diane L. Wolf contends in Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, its practice presents a number of opportunities as well as problems for women writing about women as Other.1 First, the opportunities. Traditionally, the field of ethnography has been dominated by male anthropologists who did not have access to most female experience. As a result, women of every culture have generally been absent from our most basic understanding of what makes human cultures work. This makes a feminist approach to understanding experiences and cultures of other women not only valid but also necessary. Responding to that need, feminist ethnographers have sought out opportunities to collaborate, reciprocate, and advocate for and with women who are their subjects in ways more compatible with feminist ideals than traditional methods. The articles chosen for this section embody many of the new feminist approaches to fieldwork that make the study of cultures more inclusive and complex. However, while feminists have long investigated and challenged the unequal power relations between men and women in their own cultures, once a feminist ethnographer (who is usually white and generally well educated) enters a culture (usually poorer and darker than her own), she is faced anew with the problematic nature of power and the potential for exploitation. Unequal power relations between women doing fieldwork and their subjects — who are usually women living in developing countries or women of color in the United States — and the representation of those subjects in published work thus became central issues facing feminist ethnographers by the mid-1980s. Challenged by the critique of Third World women and women of color in the United States that the ethnographer’s role is colonizing and patronizing, feminist ethnographers have struggled to find new politically self-conscious, self-critical, and creative approaches to knowing and representing other women. 2 The articles appearing here illustrate ways that feminist ethnographers have engaged such challenges. Embodied within their work are responses to such questions as the following: What motivates their investigation of the Other? How do they position themselves in relationship to those they study? What power relations shape their work? How emotionally close do they come to their subjects? Who benefits from the work?3 In addition, women of color who investigate their own culture or the cultures of their racial ethnic ancestry respond

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to issues raised because of their position as cultural insiders or outsiders — or both at the same time. 4 In “Gender Issues in the Afghanistan Diaspora: Nadia’s Story,” Audrey C. Shalinsky delves into the ambivalent feelings she experiences after Nadia — whom Shalinsky met as a child of an Afghan family she studied while engaged in ethnographic fieldwork in Afghanistan — immigrates to the United States. Shalinsky is invited to attend Nadia’s wedding as a friend of the family, not as an anthropologist. Her ambivalence centers on the dilemma between, on the one hand, her own nostalgia for the traditions she meticulously studied in Afghanistan and, on the other hand, the inevitability of adjustments to such gendered traditions through the process of acculturation in the United States. She asks, in a self-reflexive moment, “How much of that nostalgia was a product of my [130], (4 own ethnographic creation?” Ultimately, ethnographic creations of territory, homeland, nationality, and gendered identities must come under scrutiny and constant reevaluation because the object of the ethnographic gaze is neither Lines: 21 isolated nor static but constantly adjusting to changing situations. Shalinsky’s ——— self-reflective analysis of her continued contact and friendship with her “sub13.0pt jects” penetrates the professional code of scholarly objectivity and beneficially ——— Normal opens a discussion about the production of ethnographic knowledge. It also reminds us that women’s identities are not fixed, bounded, and autonomous * PgEnds: but instead fluid and open to change. Ethnographers have focused recently on the significance of movement in [130], (4 culture and history, with particular interest in immigrant populations and diaspora, where displaced cultures reestablish themselves in exile from their homeland, bringing their culture with them. African American women and men moved from the rural South to northern cities during the twentieth century in the largest internal migration in U.S. history, the Great Migration. Of those African American women, more left the rural South after World War II than did during the early part of the century, and a full accounting of their gendered experience is still in the making. In “From the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to the Urban Communities of the Midwest: Conversations with Rural African American Women,” Valerie Grim has conducted thirty-seven oral histories of women who made the move after the war with hopes of decent jobs and housing, protection and education for themselves and their children, and the opportunity to organize community and to vote. 5 Their stories are revealed in the words of the women who experienced the migration north, where they generally could find work but where they nevertheless struggled to maintain a quality of life for their families without the help of extended kin and friends they had in the South. In


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such territory of transition and relocation, women’s oral history continues to make essential contributions in ethnographic writing. 6 A reevaluation of the field of ethnography by those responding to the postmodern challenge for more self-reflexivity in their scholarship has generally ignored the contributions that women of color have made to that assessment, according to Janet L. Finn. While James Clifford and many feminist ethnographers have called for heightened self-awareness about unequal power relations between source and ethnographer, and for sensitivity about appropriation of information from “cultural Others,” the contributions of women of color to that process have too often been overlooked. In our final selection, “Walls and Bridges: Cultural Mediation and the Legacy of Ella Deloria,” Finn explores those dynamics by focusing on the life and work of Ella Cara Deloria (1920– 71), a member of the Yankton Sioux tribe whose contributions to anthropology brought her into professional contact — and conflict — with the most famous white ethnographers and Indian social policy makers of her day. Deloria also devoted great creative energy to performing cultural “texts” before audiences curious about Native ways of being and knowing. This essay explores Deloria’s multiple roles as ethnographer, linguist, and performer of culture that defy and redefine the notion of a single, uncomplicated identity. It seems fitting that we end this selection of feminist ethnography with Deloria, a woman who embraced, experienced, and expressed so full a range of cultural, historical, and personal complexities. Notes 1. Diane L. Wolf, preface and “Situating Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork,” in Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, ed. Wolf (Boulder co: Westview Press, 1996), ix–xii, 1–55. An earlier version of this article, “Introduction: Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork,” was published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 13, no. 3 (1993): 1–8. 2. Chandra Talpade Mohanty,“Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 51–80. 3. Some feminists have concluded that studying those less privileged is incompatible with feminist practice that avoids the exploitation of others for the benefit of self. See Daphne Patai, “Ethical Problems of Personal Narratives, or, Who Should Eat the Last Piece of Cake?” International Journal of Oral History 81 (1987): 5–27, and “U.S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?” in Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge), 137–53. 4. Patricia Zavella,“Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with Chi-

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cana Informants,” in Wolf, Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, 138–69. An earlier version of this article was published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 13, no. 3 (1993): 53–76. 5. Grim’s article includes an excellent update of sources on this topic. Carol B. Stack writes of the dilemmas she experienced as a white woman doing research among northern black women for her first book, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), her second book, Call to Home: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South (New York: Basic Books, 1996), and in “Writing Ethnography: Feminist Critical Practice,” in Wolf, Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork, 97–106. An earlier version of Stack’s article was published in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 13, no. 3 (1993): 77–89. 6. Susan H. Armitage, with Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon, eds., The Frontiers Guide to Women’s Oral History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002); and Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, special issues “Varieties of Women’s Oral History” 19, no. 2 (1998) and “Problems and Perplexities in Women’s Oral History” 19, no. 3 (1998).

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[First Page] [133], (1) Rather than restricting themselves to the study of isolated tribes and peasant villages, anthropologists have begun to study peoples who are “culturally displaced”: refugees, diasporic groups, people without territorial homelands, and immigrants. Such groups are increasingly prominent today in the aftermath of local wars, interethnic conflict, and economic globalization. In the context of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent Afghan Civil War, many from that country have left for other parts of the world, including neighboring Pakistan, other Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia and Turkey, and the United States. When I began conducting ethnographic research in Afghanistan in 1976, I did not realize what political, social, and economic upheavals were in store for the ethnic community I studied. Like other Afghans, community members became refugees and later immigrants to other countries; in many cases, however, they maintained kinship, social, religious, and economic ties to relatives in various parts of the world, forming a transnational community in which people, money, commodities, and information circulate. Discussions of transnationalism frequently begin with the cultural dynamics of deterritorialization, which is viewed as a kind of postmodern decentering and as such is elevated by many critical theorists. Writing from a feminist perspective, Kamala Visweswaran suggests that this view of deterritorialization ignores both the oppressive political forces that may have unleashed deterritorialization and the personal pain of those who lack a sense of belonging anywhere — those who, in essence, lack a home.1 Visweswaran’s insight certainly holds true for the Afghans I have known. They live a complex existence that forces them to confront, draw upon, and rework different identity constructs — national, ethnic, racial, class, and religious. 2 Identity rearticulation may be particularly difficult


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for those who come to the United States from traditional Muslim backgrounds and may focus on gender issues, particularly in relation to marriage and the family, two intertwining aspects of the traditional home. Moving from a household where a young woman is surrounded by other women — her mother-inlaw, sisters-in-law, and other female family members in the neighborhood — to one in which she is alone for most of the day may foster a sense of profound ambivalence. A woman gains autonomy but loses the emotional support of others. One juxtaposition of seemingly contradictory identities, for example, is women’s veiling behavior. In the United States many women never veil outside the home when going to work or visiting friends, but they continue to wear the long scarf at the five prayer times each day in the home, the very place where they used to be the least restricted. In these examples, the home becomes a locus for the deepest conflicted values: personal agency and resistance versus accommodation to previously relevant norms, even the observance of Islam versus its loss. Gender ideologies involving modest dress, veiling, and the positioning of women inside the home versus outside at work become newly contested in re-created and reenergized ways. Cultural studies scholar James Clifford writes: “Do diaspora experiences reinforce or loosen gender subordination? On the one hand, maintaining connections with homelands, with kinship networks, and with religious and cultural traditions may renew patriarchal structures. On the other, new roles and demands, new political spaces, are opened by diaspora interactions.” 3 With concern about the possibilities of gender renegotiation in diaspora in mind, this essay examines the life of one young Afghan woman. Nadia lived the first fifteen years of her life in a town in Afghanistan fairly near the Soviet border where she witnessed the invasion of her country by the Soviet Union, the country from which her grandparents had fled fifty years earlier. She escaped with part of her family to Pakistan, where in her mother’s absence she became the chief caretaker, cook, and domestic for a large group. Since then she has lived in Wyoming and Washington dc, has learned to drive in rush hour like a native East Coast resident, and has been the first of her family to become a U.S. citizen. She has earned a high school degree, attended a community college, and contemplated such different careers as travel agency work, banking, computer programming, and picture framing. In May 1995, at the age of twenty-six, an age at which her parents and other relatives had quite despaired and given up all hope of a match, she was married in a Virginia suburb of Washington dc, an event that culminated a year of special parties and celebrations. When I asked Nadia how her life differed from her mother’s, she mentioned three things: she has worked outside the home since she was a teenager, she does

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not have to live with her husband’s family, and she has made a lot of decisions about her own life. Not being a social scientist, she would not speak of the problematized nature of the home, the renegotiation of gender relationships, or the possibility of strengthened personal agency in diaspora, but these are part of what her life teaches us. In this essay I present some of the events of her life from the time I first knew her in Afghanistan to the present. She has obviously changed, and so have her circumstances. She is a person of great strength, and I find her life fascinating. This is a necessarily incomplete story of a young woman, a refugee and an immigrant, a bicultural and transnational person who has succeeded in dealing with a complex and contradictory set of dreams, desires, and expectations. I want to convey some of the complexity of her life, but I will only be able to do this through my eyes, and I have also changed since my original fieldwork. 4 Unlike most other ethnographers, I find that my “field” area was radically transformed by prolonged conflict soon after my research was over. In addition, I did not “leave” everyone behind in the field, since within a few years some had come to live in the United States. The arrival of Nadia and her family in the United States altered my relationship both to my work and to them. I had many more opportunities to check what I wrote, once to the extent that I read a complete book manuscript aloud to Nadia’s father. Although I consider it both ethically responsible and methodologically desirable to share works in progress with those intimately involved in them, the line between “research” and personal relationships is obviously blurred in this process. Furthermore, the division between “fieldwork” and “homework” became less distinct as different pieces of myself that had been fostered in different places and with different experiences began to interpenetrate — a rather discordant process, but one that may foster a “decolonized” ethnography. 5 Nadia’s family took me in as a stranger and as an anthropologist in Afghanistan. When that time and place disappeared, I became an odd representation of it. I have been part of the family then as a kind of ironic nostalgia that reminds them of past and present simultaneously; my note taking becomes familiar and expected not just as routine but as validation of that past and of the strange events that have constructed our shared present. Nadia’s family and she herself expected that I would be part of her wedding. That I chose to write about her became for her almost a symbol of her adulthood, since I had previously only written using her parents as additional voices to my own. I have in this essay a more thorough written account of some parts of Nadia’s past than she remembers. We validate each other’s memories and confessions. She is a daughter, sister, and friend.

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My goals in this essay, then, are multistranded. I provide longitudinal information about an individual’s gendered and particularized experiences. I do this to provide a rich descriptive account of a woman’s experiences in diaspora and to indicate both how gender is grounded in the daily life, activities, and social relationships of the individual and how transnational processes transform gender relations and gender ideology. Furthermore, by writing about an individual in this way I avoid certain problematic conceptualizations of culture, namely that it is timeless, coherent, and homogeneous. Individuals like Nadia make decisions, struggle with others, change their minds and desires, and confront new pressures. Through the particularities of Nadia’s story, one can “read” the larger forces that at least partially moved her life in certain directions. 6 Afghanistan I must have first met her in the late summer of 1976, when she was nine years old. Her father had escorted me from Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, to Kunduz, a northern provincial capital where they lived, so that his household could meet me and decide whether they would like to have an American anthropologist living with them. I don’t remember her at the initial meeting, and there are no descriptions of her in my notes from that time, since I was too focused on such issues as being polite and adjusting to the lack of bathrooms. But still I must have met her, because when I was back in Kabul waiting for the governmental permissions to come, I set off to buy presents — one for each of the four children. 7 For Mahbuba, as she was called then, I bought a box of colored marking pens in an array of colors. Among the early entries that fall after I began living with her family are little marks in all of the different colors as well as the Persian and Uzbek terms she gave me. 8 At age nine she was a solemn, slight, but not frail child with dark brown eyes and brown hair that had something of a reddish tinge to it. I remember her as listening wide-eyed to grown-up talk rather than speaking herself. 9 I observed Mahbuba’s life in Afghanistan but never wrote extensively about her, although I did note the following in an early article: Mahbuba and her friends had two games that seem to involve role modeling. In one, they would plan a party, or tuy. They went so far as to prepare pilau, a rice dish, for refreshments. They would also practice dancing and beating the daira, a tambourine-like drum. Girls are called upon to dance at women’s celebrations. In the other game, they would say that they were playing wedding. Interestingly, the role of bride was not desirable. Usually, a little brother or sister was pressed into playing the bride. The child would be dressed up in veil and makeup, and the

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fun for the others was in singing the wedding songs, beating the drum, dancing, admonishing the “bride” concerning proper behavior, escorting the bride to her chair, and so on. In other words, Mahbuba and her friends imitated the roles of their mothers and community elders, not the bride. 10

The traditional Afghan bride was supposed to be passive and modest. She was controlled by her mother-in-law and the other elders of the women’s community. The little girls’ games show Mahbuba’s preparation for marriage and for life in a community that no longer exists. Mahbuba laughed when I read this to her, adding that they also had tea parties for their dolls. First they had to make the dolls, after which each little girl would bring some food, and they would have a social gathering that paralleled social occasions among the women’s community. 11 Women in the ethnic community were never dated but were always surrounded by women kin in the household and neighborhood who were also friends. Children learned this when they accompanied their mothers to women’s special celebrations. According to Mahbuba’s mother, who had married her husband when he was nineteen and she sixteen, she had her period only once before becoming pregnant with her oldest child. The pregnancy and labor were difficult, the latter lasting about twelve hours from dinner to the following morning. Whereas the mother was attended by her mother-in-law and a midwife for this first birth, her subsequent children were born with the aid of a nurse-practitioner who could offer pain shots. In Afghanistan, Mahbuba’s parents lived with her father’s parents; with three brothers, one of whom married shortly before I arrived; and with two sisters, one of whom had married and was living with her husband and his family in the same neighborhood. Often after a baby’s birth, several relatives suggest names with one eventually sticking. Mahbuba’s name was chosen by her father’s brother, who, when she was born, said that if his suggestion was not given, he would never pick her up. Known to have something of a temper, he then went outside and sat as if in huff. Mahbuba’s paternal grandmother then took the baby to him, and his name remained. I did not record much about Mahbuba’s early years, but my notes indicate she was known for eating dirt at about age three, which would have been at the time her brother Fazl was born. Her childhood revolved around her position in the family as the oldest female child with five younger ones to care for. My slides frequently show her carrying around the newest baby balanced on one hip, and in one she is even playing a game similar to hopscotch with the baby on one side. By 1976, when I first arrived, she was partially bilingual in Afghan Persian

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(Dari), one of the official languages of Afghanistan, and Uzbek, the minority language related to Turkish that is spoken by the majority of the people of her ethnic group as their household language. My notes also record her attempts to count in both languages, to name animal terms, and to show she already could use the appropriate kin terms, a necessity in the extended family household and ethnic neighborhood. Islam was an important part of her life even at that young age. Among the religious practices I noted was Mahbuba and her brother practicing the creed with their mother: “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God.” Every Thursday the two children attended Qur’an school with a learned woman referred to as a “bibi mullah,” to whom they gave five afghanis (about twelve cents) each time. When she reached a certain stage in her lessons, she was given a new dress and other little girls came for a party. She also attended public school; this was at the time when the first girls in her ethnic community were graduating from the local high school. High school graduation would complete their formal education, because girls were not allowed to attend the university in Kabul. Mahbuba, who did many chores around the house, was not a particularly favored or indulged child. For example, one day we all went to her maternal grandmother’s home for a visit, and she was not allowed to go. She cried, but when that did no good she took up her recently learned knitting. Actually, one aspect of the culture with which I had trouble was that people would openly ask each other and me which of the four children was the favorite. At this time the younger son, Mujib, was singled out to be favored and indulged. He was petted and made much over even when the other children were present, but today Mahbuba does not really remember this, and I think it upset me more than it did her even then. She was already starting to grow up at the age of nine. An entry in my field notes states: “Children are sometimes given a few af[ghani]s to keep and buy toys at the bazaar. Fazl bought bread at the bazaar which everyone thought was very funny — as if we didn’t have enough bread at home. Mahbuba bought some Pakistani nail polish and lipstick for 5 afs.” This interest in grown-up things was accepted, although girls were really not permitted to wear makeup until their wedding celebrations, at which point they were bedecked for the first time as part of the rituals. Today makeup is worn at parties by women and girls of this ethnic group in the United States, but Mahbuba still had to wait to pluck her eyebrows for the first time until the occasion of her engagement. At age nine, Mahbuba had a limited understanding of sexual relationships and their consequences. She once told me that animals give birth anally and

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women through the navel. Once late at night when her father was away, her mother showed me some contraceptives obtained in Kabul. Mahbuba kept waking up, looking, and asking what everything was for, but her mother just laughed and told her to sleep. Another time her mother and I were discussing menstruation, and again Mahbuba asked what we were speaking about. Her mother commented, “She does not understand, and girls are not told anything by anyone.” However, this was changing, as other little girls of the same age or slightly older were more knowledgeable. For those living in the United States this is not an issue, for they are inundated with sexual information at school and in the media. After I returned to the United States in 1977, I prepared two large boxes of gifts for everyone in the neighborhood: photos, a camera, clothes, catalogs (which they used for sewing ideas), billfolds, and nylon stockings. I had forgotten what I sent Mahbuba until she reminded me of it many years later. It was a watch with a red leather strap. I had worn one similar to it that she had always admired, so I sent one designed for a child. She told me how she had loved it. Mahbuba grew up surrounded by family, friends, and fellow ethnics. Although her life did not recapitulate her mother’s in all respects — she attended public school, for example, and her mother had not — her life was the same in crucial ways. Home, the women’s community, and Islam surrounded her and were so much a part of the daily routine that they were completely taken for granted. In 1983, at the age of fifteen, Mahbuba, her father, and her three oldest siblings escaped the Afghanistan Civil War and went to Pakistan. Her mother and the two youngest children went to Saudi Arabia on a pilgrimage passport and then rejoined the family in Pakistan months later. As was commonly the case for this ethnic group, they moved on to Karachi, a place where they could receive money from relatives already settled elsewhere rather than registering and living as refugees in one of the camps. This period was very difficult because they were unaccustomed to Karachi’s heat and insects. Mahbuba had to take on the household role of an adult woman. Her father decided to immigrate to the United States as a political refugee, primarily because he felt his children would have greater educational opportunities here. 12 Mahbuba remembers her father indicating that life would be very different in the United States. He went out and bought her two pairs of slacks, one of denim, to wear rather than their traditional clothes, shocking a neighbor woman. By the time her mother and the two youngest children joined them, they had bought a television set, from which they were gaining a knowledge of the United States from shows like Trapper John, MD that were shown on Pakistani television.

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The United States The trip to the United States, their first airplane ride, was exciting; there were luxurious-seeming hotels and large television sets that they would stay up all night watching. They especially loved cartoons. And so they came to Laramie, Wyoming, sponsored by the local Episcopal Church. Since they were coming to a small university community in a rural state, I thought their transition into this culture would be eased. 13 Mahbuba and her three oldest siblings were attending the university preparatory school within three weeks of their arrival. Most of her memories of Laramie focus on the school, her teachers, and the young people she met. She had no knowledge of English, and since all the classes were in English she sat and tried to catch on. She remembers thinking one of the teachers had said that the next day they would have a party, so she brought popcorn and some of the Hindi popular music that the Afghans like. Although her teacher let her have her party, she laughs at herself now that she naively thought her music would be popular. I remember her crying because her parents would not permit her to go on overnights like school camping trips, saying that it was time to start thinking about honor, family reputation, and potential marriage partners. Other families were already asking about matches, and at age sixteen she could undertake the household responsibilities of an adult woman, as she had shown in Pakistan during her mother’s absence. I think the worst experience she had at school came about because of her name and the insensitivity of three teenage girls. The girls kept making fun of her name, emphasizing the second syllable and giggling. She could not understand their reasons — obviously, American slang for “breast” was unknown to her — and she puzzled and cried about this for awhile. Eventually, when the school administration became aware of the situation, the girls were told to stop their behavior. Still, out of this time, and from her pain, a new name, Nadia, emerged, representing for the first time her own decision and a changed view of herself. The name was not used as much in Laramie as it was after the move to the Washington dc area for a new start, and it is the one on the American citizenship papers. Now, only her family calls her Mahbuba. Moving to the northern Virginia suburbs so that her father could take a government job opened up new opportunities for Nadia. She finished high school, and I attended the graduation ceremony. She also completed another rite of American adolescent passage: driver’s education and car ownership. She explored several careers, finally owning and managing an art gallery and framing store, and she was in no hurry to marry, even though she frequently spoke to me about the many offers of arrangements that were suggested by kin and other

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Afghan friends. First her reason was,“How can I marry someone I don’t know?” Gradually, it became,“How can I marry someone I don’t love?” Still, Nadia never dated, even though she had plenty of opportunities to do so given her extensive work experience outside her home. She never considered dating non-Muslims and would never have married someone unacceptable to her family. 14 She said, “Because there are few possibilities to know people, arranged meetings are best.” Her life at school and work did affect her expectations about a future husband. Nadia wanted someone acceptable to her family, but she also wanted someone who shared her own vision of life in the United States. Nadia had known a sort of love once, although many might say it was more of a romantic crush. Back in Afghanistan, she and a boy had actually promised to marry each other, and for some years, I believe, she hoped that there might be a way for them to be together. But he was still in Afghanistan, which made for many difficulties, and eventually a match was arranged for him in Saudi Arabia. Nadia still did not agree to any suggestions about possible matches. She knew what she wanted, and, with less control from extended family relatives who were far away, she could not be persuaded. Some suitors she refused to meet, while others whom she met with in the company of her parents were then refused her consent. The amount of pressure on her was great, and her father, who considered religious observance and an honorable family background indispensable for the match, once called me to express his frustration. A very good young man had approached the family; Nadia refused him, and when all her relatives tried to convince her, she cried for three days. Her father thought that her refusal, about which she was firm, was based on modesty and that she really did not know her own mind. He told her to say a special prayer and, the next morning, to say the first thing that her heart responded about the proposal. She told me that she already knew how it would come out, but she did as her father wished and, of course, then refused in the morning. I have always been amazed at the amount of courage she showed in rejecting the matches that were proposed for so many years as she became older and older and more ineligible in many eyes. These are notable examples of resistance, although she never rejected the idea that her parents’ approval would be necessary for a match, nor did she act in ways that were completely outside acceptable gender roles — that is, she did not leave her parents’ home. She was stubborn, but she expressed it within available discourses, such as her right of consent, a woman’s modesty, the traditional importance placed on marriage by the family, and a young person’s emotions.15 It is also significant that though she wanted to visit relatives, including her grandmother, in Saudi Arabia for many years, somehow she never quite managed to go. Pressure from her grandmother

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about marriage was very great and perhaps would have been impossible to withstand had she actually been living in her household in Saudi Arabia. At different times Nadia has told me what she wanted in a husband. Her requirements included that “the man should be older than the woman.” All the proposed men who were the same age or younger were automatically rejected. The man she accepted is four years older. She did not want a man who was completely under the control of his parents, and she told me of one such man with whom she met to discuss the possibility of marriage: “He told me how his father planned his work and had said certain things about his future. That was nice, very respectful, but didn’t he have any ideas and wishes himself?” She wanted to feel something after meeting the man, an attraction or what I told her would be called “chemistry.” This is the one area that her parents understood least; they had never even met before their marriage. One of the first things she ever said to me about her fiancé was, “When we met, something clicked in my heart.” That was it. When we spoke again by phone about a month before the final marriage celebrations, she said, “I still feel it.” Nadia’s struggle to find an acceptable husband, one who would not only meet her needs but also fit into her family situation, indicates a significant change from women’s traditional situation in Afghanistan. While women in her ethnic group were given the right of consent, withstanding the opinions of family, community elders, kin, and the ethnic neighborhood was not something that young women were able to do very frequently. In the 1970s, refusing several suitors was enough to cause scandal and ruin a woman’s chances of marriage. The diaspora situation gave Nadia an opportunity to pay more attention to her own feelings. Nadia’s husband, Errol, is from Turkey, not Afghanistan. However, this is not as great a difference as one might think, since both are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi rite. Also, Uzbeks like Nadia’s family, whether in Uzbekistan or northern Afghanistan, are Turks, that is, their language and origin is Turkic just like the people of Turkey. Nadia can understand Turkish and will probably learn to speak it. Her father, for example, with more experience in speaking to Turkomans in Afghanistan, whose language is closer to Turkish than is Uzbek, could already speak to Errol without using English. According to Nadia, very few Uzbek men of the appropriate age were left as potential spouses. There were some Afghans or Pashtuns, but these are not looked upon as favorably. Although from Istanbul originally, Errol has been living in the United States for five years. His real name is Hizr, Arabic for Elijah, an Islamic prophet, but he had some difficulty with the name Hizr in the United States. People’s lack of familiarity with the name led him to use another common Turkish name, Errol, and to introduce himself that way. Sometimes he even uses the name

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John just to make his business transactions go more easily. Errol and Nadia thus share the immigration experience in the United States. Both have had to accommodate to their new culture to the point of changing their names. The new names, however, do not only indicate loss; they show positive creativity and a presentation of a new independent self not so clearly linked to an Islamic and alien past. The extended family was consulted about the match, and, according to Nadia, she spoke to one uncle in Saudi Arabia to ask for his permission, which he readily gave with the comment that the most important thing was that she asked. He also said that“Turks are like us,”that is, similar to Uzbeks and certainly better than Afghans or Pashtuns, the dominant ethnic group of Afghanistan. 16 While Nadia did not talk to her grandmother in Saudi Arabia directly, her grandmother also apparently favored the match, perhaps because she hopes that marriage with someone from Turkey will lead Nadia’s family to Turkey, which is closer to her in Saudi Arabia. However, Errol likes the United States and does not have any intention of leaving in the immediate future. Originally, Nadia had persuaded Errol to move his business from New Jersey to the Washington dc area so that she could remain close to her family, but then she agreed to move to New Jersey to be with him. These changes in the ideas about place of residence are simultaneously a reassertion of the convention — shared by both Nadia and Errol — that the woman moves to the man’s household and an indication of Nadia’s new independence from her natal family. Significantly, after less than six months in New Jersey, Errol and Nadia moved back to Washington dc, initially residing with her family before they found their own apartment. Nadia and Errol renegotiated their living arrangements, and Nadia again asserted her wish to be near her own family. Despite the norm that the husband’s business should dictate family location, Errol acquiesced to Nadia, another sign of her ability to assert herself and of their adaptation to the United States. The only member of Errol’s family who resides in the United States is a brother. The preceding section mentions several important considerations that recommended this match in Nadia’s eyes. First, I believe she prefers the life she has in the United States to one in Saudi Arabia, or anywhere else for that matter. She has referred many times to the freedom she has: “The life is good there [in Saudi Arabia, that is, materially prosperous], but there is no freedom.” One lives by asking permission of senior relatives about how, when, and where one may go. Second, Nadia does not have to live under the authority of a motherin-law, as she would if they resided in Turkey or if Errol had senior relatives living here. While Nadia is accustomed to living under her parents’ authority, a

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mother-in-law traditionally imposes authority in areas such as the performance of household tasks. There would also probably be strong pressure to become pregnant quickly, and Nadia wants to “wait at least a year” and have “three or four children at the most.” Errol creates custom-designed lamps, sculptures, mirrors, and other home decor items. He sells them wholesale to stores and occasionally on a retail basis. When he first came to the United States, he worked in a gas station in order to save money. Having resided in New York, California, and New Jersey, he apparently doesn’t care about the location of his business and generally is willing to accommodate Nadia. In fact, some of his pieces could easily have been sold from her art gallery, another important element of compatibility. I recorded in my notes Nadia’s description of the events that led up to her marriage: At first his parents, who are in their 60s, were not enthusiastic. They thought he was marrying an “American.” They wanted him to get married in Turkey but he likes the freedom of the United States. This guy Hakimi [a member of their ethnic group] knew this guy [Errol] for four or five years. Hakimi is a little older. He called me about it himself. He had gone to his mother and she had talked to my mother. She [her mother] was bugging me about it. I asked Hakimi what he was like and he said,“He is beautiful inside and out.” So I agreed to meet him but with no promises. 17

When they first met, Errol came to her family. He sat by her father and did not say much, while Nadia mainly stayed in the kitchen. Her father thought, “here’s another rejection,”because he did not think the young man sophisticated, which he thought was what Nadia was looking for and why she had turned down so many. They really did not speak together except to say hello. The day after this initial meeting, Errol and Nadia were allowed to go to a restaurant and talk to each other. They shared many perspectives and had many common interests. She consented to marriage. Nadia’s father then investigated the man and his family background before agreeing to the arrangement by having a friend in Turkey go talk to the parents. It was late April when the engagement was announced amidst a large social gathering where Nadia’s family fed more than two hundred people in their house. The engagement is the occasion on which presents are given to the groom by the bride’s family and to the bride by the groom’s family. Nadia and Errol exchanged gold rings. She picked out a diamond ring for herself as the engagement ring, because having the kind of jewelry she wanted was important to her. At the engagement there were no other significant gifts of gold, a traditional component of Afghan bride-gifts. Nadia does not favor elaborate

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gold jewelry, although Errol has promised to get a few pieces from Turkey so that the honor and traditional value of a woman, measured in her own gold, can be maintained. Nadia and Errol do not wish to subject themselves to surreptitious gossip by the ethnic community, but they also do what they choose even about such traditional gifts as gold jewelry. Engagements have taken on many customs once saved for the wedding celebrations themselves. For example, the bride and groom dress formally and are escorted into the crowd while a Qur’an is held over the bride’s head. This used to be part of the third day of the wedding celebration in Afghanistan rather than part of the engagement celebrations, from which the bride herself was often absent to show herself modest. Gifts were presented to her by a woman related to the groom who displayed them to those present. 18 Engagements and weddings were celebrated separately by men and women in Afghanistan, while in the United States men and women are present at the same celebration. Nadia’s father did not want to have separate engagement, contract, and marriage celebrations but rather to have the contract, or nikah, finalized at the engagement celebrations. All that is needed for the contract, the Islamic part of a marriage arrangement, is for witnesses to be present, for the bride and groom to consent, and for a payment, or mahr, to be specified in a written document. The couple is then married according to Islam. However, Nadia and Errol’s engagement was held during the period between the end of Ramadan and the end of the festival that commemorates Abraham’s sacrifice, Id-i Qurban, a time when it is not customary for marriages to take place. Nadia’s father said that this customary prohibition is not Islamic law and wanted to go ahead; he wanted his daughter and future son-in-law married as soon as possible so that there would be no temptation for illicit sexual behavior when the two were alone together. Both Nadia’s mother and Errol’s mother objected, however, so the engagement and contract could not be combined. In July, after the second festival, Nadia’s father arranged for the contract. There was no large party — only five witnesses. Errol was the one surprised at the contract because he apparently did not know about mahr. When this sum was to be specified, Nadia’s father said $1,000, at which point, according to Nadia’s account, her mother rolled her eyes and said $5,000. This was the amount written, with the understanding that $1,500 would be paid soon and $3,500 eventually. Errol did not know what any of this was about and thought the practice was out of the Dark Ages — perhaps, I thought, because mahr was made illegal in Turkey in the 1920s. However, Nadia’s father’s explanation was that Errol had not been at home for some years before his immigration to the United States and was ignorant of the core practices of Islam still followed by

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many Turks. The mahr is used to set up the couple’s household and is not a source of financial gain for Nadia’s family. For the contract, the family sent no notifications or invitations, and Nadia as well as her parents heard plenty of criticism from people who were not asked to be there, but she shrugged it off. She spoke of her relief that the pressure was over. She again mentioned the sense of freedom she felt in no longer needing to ask her parents’ permission when she went out at night. However, this“freedom” was more ambiguous than it seemed. When Nadia wanted to drive up alone to see Errol in New Jersey, she still asked for permission, but her father now would not answer. He told me that he did not care what they did, stating, “They are married.” This meant that they could be alone together as much as they wanted, but Nadia did not want to consummate the marriage until after formal wedding celebrations were held in the spring. This desire to wait seemed not to be the fear of a sexual relationship but the wish to do things properly at the right time in the right way. In a way, they dated after marriage to get to know each other. The Wedding Celebration Until the spring final wedding celebration, Nadia continued to work and lived with her parents. She and Errol did the marriage license and blood tests at the time of the contract and so could then complete the other paperwork, such as Nadia’s changing her name on official documents. They spent months saving money and planning for the wedding celebration. Nadia consulted the wedding planner magazines that show all the bridal dresses. Her problem in buying the dress was that most were cut too low; again she attempted to reconcile her Islamic-based values with her desire to be fashionable in the American way. Nadia and Errol (mostly Errol) were paying for the final wedding celebration. Nadia chose the Holiday Inn in northern Virginia for the occasion because the manager is an Afghan and because they allow outside catering, which meant that Afghan food could be brought in. She and Errol also stayed there for their wedding night. The food, the hotel, and other expenses cost them more than $10,000, and because Errol is paying these bills they decided that he is not to pay the mahr previously agreed on. Nadia would have flower girls precede her but no bridesmaids, because her sisters did not want to participate in that way. Perhaps they still felt some sense of not wanting to be the center of attention, since traditionally it was not considered appropriate for unmarried girls to push themselves forward. Although Nadia had dreamed of Hawaii for the honeymoon trip, Errol suggested Florida, and though they originally planned to honeymoon two days after the celebration, their disagreement about the

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destination as well as financial considerations delayed the trip. They returned to New Jersey two days after the wedding. Nadia visited Errol quite often in the period between the contract and the final celebration. Occasionally, accompanied by one of her sisters, she stayed at her father’s cousin’s house in Brooklyn. She spent some time looking at apartments and finally found one. When Errol came down to visit her, even the day before the wedding, he stayed with one of her relatives in a different house. I don’t know how much time they ever had to be alone. Nadia herself basically arranged the wedding celebration, a tuy, with Errol’s help. She did not ask her parents for anything, and when her father offered at the very end, there was some tension between them. Nadia’s mother had said, “If you invite everyone, no one can be offended,” so Nadia had enough [147], (15) invitations printed for 350 guests. The invitations had gold printing on the inside of the white cards. She hired the services of a still photographer and a video cameraman. 19 She found a caterer for the Afghan food — four kinds of Lines: 122 t rice pilafs, several kinds of meat and chicken kebabs, salad, spinach, cornstarch ——— pudding, and baklava for dessert, enough for 350 big eaters. Only Sprite and 13.0pt P Coke were served as the drinks because Nadia is, in fact, a strict Muslim. She ——— Normal Pag realized that some of the more assimilated guests would take advantage of the hotel bars, but she deplored that fact. * PgEnds: Eje The cake, purchased and set up by its creators, was to be five tiers with whipped-cream flowers on the outside and a light sponge cake inside with small [147], (15) pieces of fruit between some of the layers. She hired one band to play Afghan music and another — friends of Errol’s brother — to play Turkish music. To go with her white dress with train and faux pearl bodice, she made both her own veil with three tiers of net down to the floor attached to a headband of faux pearls and rhinestones and her bouquet of white silk flowers. For the tables she and Errol made thirty-five centerpieces, which were silk flowers in pots color-coordinated to go with the reception room’s green and maroon decor. Nadia made the ring bearer’s pillow and four flower baskets — each decorated white with white silk flowers, white satin bows, and pearls — as well as the decorated cover in which was wrapped a copy of the Qur’an. She also purchased a decanter, two elegant goblets, and an ornate cake knife and server, all of which she decorated with small white silk flowers. The striking aspect of Nadia’s concern with all these details is that she saw the wedding as her concern and under her control. Brides in Afghanistan were never this powerful. Mothers and mothers-in-law, with the help of their female kin, made all these decisions about food, clothing, and decoration. The bride essentially did nothing except agree,

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wait to be taken to the groom’s parents’ house, and appear obedient, even if she were really exuberant and excited. The pace accelerated about three weeks before the tuy, at which point the bridal showers were scheduled. Each of these fulfilled a different purpose and indicated the ease with which Nadia and her friends and family move between different cultural traditions. Her mother sponsored one party, which was actually a version of the henna party, usually held in Afghanistan the night before the contract. About eighty senior women attended the party and brought gifts. Everyone’s hands were decorated with henna, a celebratory activity believed to make hands beautiful and bring good fortune. Then her mother’s brother’s wife sponsored a party, similar to a typical bridal shower, for unmarried girls, who also brought gifts. Finally, about fifteen of Nadia’s closest friends surprised her with a party in a restaurant, where she received more gifts. The weekend before the final celebration, Nadia’s parents took all the household goods that they were giving the couple and the assorted wedding gifts to the newly rented one-bedroom apartment in New Jersey and moved her in. Some family and friends helped. This move essentially paralleled the move to the groom’s parents’ household that would take place immediately after the contract in the traditional marriage celebrations. It was at this time that one of the most significant parts of traditional Uzbek marriage rituals took place, the singing of “Yar Yar,” the lovers’ song. In Kunduz,“Yar Yar” was sung whenever the bride was escorted outside of her mother’s house during traditional marriage rituals. It highlights the sadness of the family that must lose a daughter. For example, some verses say: Don’t throw the stone in the river because it will not return Don’t give your daughter far away, he will take her and go The one who gives her daughter far away has a pale face Tears from her eyes flow like a stream.

The move away was thus marked with “Yar Yar,” but the wedding celebration itself would lack this element. The wedding as Nadia envisioned it would not be sad; it would be that fairy-tale dream that one sees in American bridal magazines with some elements from wedding celebrations as they were done in Kabul by the more sophisticated members of their group. 20 When I arrived at her parents’ house two days before the wedding celebration, Nadia’s first remark to me was that she felt sick. She said her stomach felt funny and she was not eating. She had classic symptoms of prewedding jitters, complete with butterflies and weight loss. She was also frantically trying to complete everything at the last minute, fixing parts of the four flower girls’

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dresses and her sisters’ clothes. At parties like this, women dress in evening wear: long dresses, sequins, and bugle beads. It is not easy to find dresses that are fancy enough and yet sufficiently covered, and two of her sisters’ dresses had to have black mesh demi-blouses sewn into the tops. The day before the wedding, a couple of women came over to help prepare a special food, malida, which is set on the wedding table directly in front of the bride and groom and may be eaten sprinkled on cake or as a pinch of sweetness. It is a fragrant powder made of pulverized bread crumbs, sugar, oil, and cardamom that is customarily served at fancy weddings in Kabul. It took the women about five hours to make two platters’ worth. Her mother also fixed seven large plastic bags filled with meat to give away. These represent zakat, alms, one of the five duties of Islam. On joyous occasions such as weddings, their custom in Afghanistan was to give specially prepared food to the poor. The wedding day was not without complications and problems. Nadia had arranged to have her sisters’ hair as well as her own fixed at a local salon. However, all except one did not like the results, so they went home and rewashed their hair. Nadia redid her hair herself, burning herself with the curling iron in the process; the resulting burn mark caused considerable teasing throughout the evening about her “hickey.” Her sister, a new driver, drove her with her wedding gown and most of the other important people and objects of the wedding in their family van to the hotel. At a major intersection on the highway they ran out of gas, arriving at the hotel about three hours after Nadia had originally planned. They immediately went up to one of the two rooms they had reserved so that she could put on her makeup and dress with the assistance of two friends. Finally, all the last minute activities were completed. Errol was given his boutonniere, and the petals were pulled off bundles of fresh flowers for the flower girls’ baskets. The wedding party went to the hotel lobby to get their pictures taken at about 8 p.m., after the time guests had been asked to come according to the invitation. Fortunately, the party was to last until 2 a.m., and guests knew they should come late. The appearance of the guests shows the diversity of Muslim practice among this group in the United States. Some married women, the strictest, are just as elegantly and sophisticatedly dressed as the others, but their clothes cover them from wrist to ankle and they wear scarves over their hair. Other women leave out the scarves. Others dress as if Islamic norms of modesty no longer apply and look as if they are about to go to a nightclub, barely covered in sequined dresses and wearing shoes with three- or four-inch heels. The men wear suits and ties. The most important event of the evening’s celebration occurred at 10 p.m.

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when the grand procession of the bride and group entered the party. One band’s emcee announced the guests’ arrival as they entered the room and headed toward the far end of the dance floor. First the flower girls and ring bearer walked in. The bride’s younger sister followed carrying the decanter and goblets. Then the bride and groom came in together, followed by the bride’s younger brother, who held the Qur’an over the bride’s head. They walked into the room across the dance floor and lined up there for more photos. At this time, the bride and groom exchanged gold wedding rings. Since they were already married, there was really no other ritual except for this final social acknowledgment of their married status. 21 Nadia and Errol began the dancing as a couple. Dancing continued for about forty-five minutes before dinner was served; usually husband and wives danced [150], (1 together by facing each other but without touching. Women also danced facing each other as partners or in groups. Because dancing is considered to have the potential of promoting lascivious and disruptive behavior, the strictest MusLines: 15 lims — the women who dress most conservatively and men who are leaders of ——— the Islamic community — did not dance. 22 Although the steps are traditional 13.0pt Uzbek dance, this is not the way dancing proceeded at parties in Kunduz; there ——— Normal women danced individually as entertainment for the bride and groom or as display before the rest of the women. The mixed dancing at weddings, with its * PgEnds: connotation of the open display of women’s sexuality, is a significant symbol of the Americanization of these marriage rituals. First, husbands and wives are tied [150], (1 together as couples, whereas in Afghanistan men and women as gender groups celebrate by themselves. Second, the women are not afraid to express themselves in front of men in this way. In Afghanistan, women acting in this way would be considered to have essentially prostituted themselves, and their menfolk would be dishonored. In the United States, where sexuality is so blatantly displayed in the media, this fairly moderate exhibition was less objectionable. After dinner was served, dancing continued for the rest of the evening. Dancing is significant, for it means rejoicing at the happiness of the bride and groom. The bride’s brother commented to me that though he is twenty years old and has been to many weddings, this is only the second time that he ever danced: “It’s a lot different when it’s your sister than when you’re just visiting.” The only other activity was the bride and groom drinking a goblet of fruit juice from the decanter, an act reminiscent of the bride and groom’s champagne toast at American weddings. When the guests had to leave at 2 a.m., many said good-bye to Nadia and Errol at the reception room’s entry door. Nadia was occasionally tearful at her

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farewells. She and Errol then retired to one of their two reserved rooms. As a treat, Nadia’s sisters went to sleep in the other hotel room. The next day Nadia’s mother and a few others prepared a special brunch for the newlyweds before they returned to New Jersey. Nadia, always thoughtful, had brought bouquets of flowers for all the women because it was the day before Mother’s Day. I remember how she looked, model slim, her face heart-shaped with high cheekbones, and her hair in waves several inches past her shoulders. Her traveling brideclothes were a beautifully cut beige jacket with a chiffon skirt, pretty enough for a less formal wedding. One of the women said,“She glows like a bride,” and so she did. Concluding Remarks Since lives are always unfinished stories, I am left with many questions. Where will Nadia work? How soon will she have children? Will they go to live in Turkey? Will they ever have a honeymoon? How will she and Errol negotiate their marital decisions? How much of a force will Islam remain in their lives? Nadia’s story appears to be more positive than that of many other women refugees. She clearly had a great deal of control over whom she married and how the celebrations took place. Yet she remains a devout Muslim, probably more so than her husband. She did not become estranged from her family and ethnic network, which was intricately involved in introducing her to Errol. There seems to be a complicated interweaving of disparate elements of identity: the Uzbek and Afghan identity giving way to the Muslim identity, the middleclass identity carried over from Afghanistan gaining new expression with American consumerism. There may indeed be an important renegotiation of gender relations and ideology in the immigrant context, since Nadia never presented herself, nor was she constrained to display herself, as the downcast and forlorn bride who is reluctant to leave home, the major symbol of the modest, obedient daughter-in-law. 23 Nadia waited until she found whom she wanted to marry and then organized a series of celebrations that integrated a few traditional cultural elements (food and songs) and some Muslim elements (a contract) with many American-style components (dress and decorations). Nadia and her husband are obviously still negotiating about career and location, as do many other young married couples in the United States. In my field diary I commented about how sad I felt that so many customs were either lost or so transformed in their current contexts that they seem to mean something rather different than they did before. 24 How much of that nostalgia was a product of my own ethnographic creation? After all, even in the 1970s the people of this community, who were of middle-class mercantile background,

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moved back and forth between Kunduz and Kabul and attended celebrations in both places. Wedding celebrations were perhaps even in the 1970s a powerful indicator of contextual and situational readjustment. The society was not isolated or static, as political events demonstrated. As transnational migrants, people from this community attend weddings in Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, adjusting to the differences easily enough. How odd that I, the ethnographer, recognize and can articulate more examples of the ways their cultural practices have adjusted and feel more nostalgia than they about some aspects of their changed culture, and yet my work and sometimes even my presence evoke in them the very nostalgia that I have mentioned. Nor does the community seem as necessarily linked to territory as it once did in my ethnographic constructions. Instead, notions of territory, homeland, and nationality seem to be constructed positionings of persons as they reconceive multiple layers of identity in new situations such as diaspora. Even the home itself has a transformed meaning in the new context. Gender, class, and religion likewise interact, and their intersection is part of the process of the rearticulation of identity. Nadia’s story has been one of creativity and of a complex pattern of resistance and accommodation to social and political forces in disparate and even contradictory situations. Nadia and Errol work together in their store in the Washington dc suburbs. Living near her family but not enmeshed in it, they create their own new home and practice Islam as part of the American Muslim community struggling to be middle class. Their individual experiences with transnational forces have enabled them to gain strength and perseverance that should serve them well. Notes 1. Kamala Visweswaran, in Fictions of Feminist Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 109–13, is extremely critical of those like Arjun Appadurai who valorize “placelessness” and concludes with the rhetorical question, “Is it coincidence, then, that while many feminist theorists identify home as the site of theory, male critics write to eradicate it?” (111). 2. One of the best theoretical accounts of transnationalism is Nina Glick Schiller, Linda Basch, and Cristina Blanc-Szanton, eds., Towards a Transnational Perspective on Migration: Race, Class, Ethnicity, and Nationalism Reconsidered (New York: New York Academy of Science, 1992). Despite their inclusion of various case studies that include women’s experiences, they ignore gender as a crucial intervening variable within their conceptual framework. 3. James Clifford, “Diasporas,” Cultural Anthropology 9, no. 3 (1994): 313–14. 4. For an excellent example of an anthropologist/ethnographer reflecting on her old

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field notes and how she herself has changed, see Margery Wolf, A Thrice-Told Tale: Feminism, Postmodernism, and Ethnographic Responsibility (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1992). I concur with Wolf, who notes that she is still more interested in the Chinese villagers than in writing about herself (1). This is Nadia’s story and not mine. 5. Compare the different forms of transnational experience that are possible. My Afghan friends find their homeland destroyed and themselves literally and figuratively “displaced.” I seek out “displacement” as part of the ethnographic enterprise but am then ambivalent upon finding the field intersecting home. For an interesting addition see Visweswaran, who argues that she, born in the United States of Indian descent and thus “displaced,” was returning home through traveling to India for anthropological fieldwork (Fictions of Feminist Ethnography, 109). 6. On the significance of writing individuals’ stories, my perspective is similar to Lila Abu-Lughod’s in Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (Berkeley: University of California Press, 993), 13–15, 18–22. Abu-Lughod writes, for example, about how arranged marriage conjures up all sorts of images of oppression and the control of women’s sexuality and lives in the minds of Western readers, and yet the practice as it is realized in the lives of individuals does not foreclose opportunity for choice or struggles to influence or oppose. 7. Eventually two more children were born into this family, the youngest in 1981. 8. The ethnic group under study originated in Uzbekistan. The people were bilingual in Persian, an Indo-European language, and Uzbek, a language related to Turkish. For general information about the group see Audrey Shalinsky, Long Years of Exile (Lanham md: University Press of America, 1993). 9. When I discussed writing this essay with her, she agreed because she thought I should change the focus of my research to her generation rather than her parents’. However, she did not think there was anything special about her life or words. Obviously, this essay would not exist without the cooperation of Nadia and her family, although I am solely responsible for its content. 10. Audrey Shalinsky, “Learning Sexual Identity: Parents and Children in Northern Afghanistan,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 2 (1980): 258. 11. For the most complete account of the women’s community, see Audrey Shalinsky, “Women’s Relationships in Traditional Northern Afghanistan,” Central Asian Survey 8 (1989): 117–29. 12. I explain the context of their immigration to the United States in “The Aftermath of Fieldwork in Afghanistan: Personal Politics,” Anthropology and Humanism Quarterly 16 (1991): 2–9. In that essay, Nadia’s father discusses his reasons for applying to come to the United States rather than move to Saudi Arabia as his mother desired. The ethnic group has a long-standing émigré community in Saudi Arabia. 13. Shalinsky, “Aftermath,” 6. 14. Marriage to non-Muslims even by women is now increasing, and living together

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without marriage now also exists. However, most people in the community feel that such behavior reflects badly on the family and brings them dishonor; it is considered a major tragedy. 15. For a comparative example in which women strategically lay claim to certain control over their situation using a gendered discourse, indicating both the structural limitations of this deployment and the possibility of fulfillment and strength, see Dorinne K. Kondo, Crafting Selves: Power, Gender, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese Workplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 259. 16. Pashtuns, who were dominant politically in the national government of Afghanistan and locally in Kunduz, were the objects of ethnic animosity by other groups. Afghanistan’s political ethos contains important themes of interethnic competition for economic resources. 17. For a discussion of how marriages were arranged by this group in Kunduz, Afghanistan, see Shalinsky, Long Years of Exile, 68–69. 18. See Audrey Shalinsky,“Battle for the Bride: The Wedding as Rite of Passage in Northern Afghanistan,” Eastern Anthropologist 37 (1984): 3–4. 19. Wedding videos are important for many Afghan ethnic groups. David Edwards, in “Afghanistan, Ethnography, and the New World Order,” Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 354, reports on one that he viewed with some Pashtun men in Washington dc that included only the men’s celebration in Peshawar, Pakistan. As Margaret Mills, in “Response to David B. Edward’s ‘Afghanistan, Ethnography, and the New World Order,’ ” Cultural Anthropology 9 (1994): 363, points out in commenting on Edwards, some ethnic communities do allow mixed-sex viewing. She notes that the diversity of the interpretations of these electronic texts provides perpetually emergent retextualizations. 20. There are also events in these wedding celebrations similar to marriage rituals in Uzbekistan. An example is the singing of the wedding song, “Yar Yar.” Visitors from Uzbekistan occasionally are invited to attend weddings of the community in the United States. Likewise, wedding celebrations among the community members who live in Saudi Arabia also have similar practices. A discussion of all the variants of wedding customs in their different locations is beyond the scope of this essay. 21. For an analysis of the traditional marriage rituals in a rites-of-passage framework, see Shalinsky, “Battle for the Bride,” 1–13. 22. Dance and music are a part of the traditional wedding celebration; however, indulgence in such activities was believed to promote sexual immorality. See Shalinsky, Long Years of Exile, 91, for a specific example. The general ideology is that the arousing of passion and selfishness leads to the lack of community responsibility, especially for women who then tempt men away from their duties also. The most complete analysis of this is provided in Audrey Shalinsky, “Reason, Desire, and Sexuality: The Meaning of Gender in Northern Afghanistan,” Ethos 14 (1986): 223–43.

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23. Clifford called attention to gender renegotiation in immigration situations in “Diasporas,” 314. 24. As for many communities of exile, there is some nostalgia as a mode of discourse and representation. However, this is not as institutionalized as for Iranians in the United States. See Hamid Naficy, “The Poetics and Practice of Iranian Nostalgia in Exile,” Diaspora 1 (1991): 285–301, for the Iranian case.

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From the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to the Urban Communities of the Midwest Conversations with Rural African American Women valer ie g r im

[156], (2 African Americans had a particularly difficult existence in the rural South during the early twentieth century. For those who wanted to own land, houses, and other property, who desired participation in the political process, and who hoped to improve themselves socially, culturally, and economically, the rural South was deadly. Racism and intimidation killed blacks in body and in spirit, diminishing their emotional and mental strength and limiting the ability of their communities to survive. Among those who suffered the effects of racism, none endured worse hardships than rural African American women who labored diligently on farms in order to contribute economically to their family’s survival and well-being. The pains rural African American women suffered were most evident in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta, where their life was orchestrated around the beat of the cotton planter, the scrape of the hoe, and the rasp of cotton sacks moving swiftly over the fields. Cotton became “white gold,” taken from the hands of black sharecroppers and day laborers to support the agricultural enterprises of white landlords. “Life was hard,” said Eva Glenn, one of thirty-seven women I interviewed who moved from the South to northern midwest cities, “and us black women had no choice but to grow hard along with it.”1 “You could let it beat you,” explained Mae Liza Williams, “or you could take control over it by not lettin’ what white folk did to you or said ’bout yo’ people bother you.”2 Or, according to Estella Thomas, “You could leave and go up North and try to find a better life for yo’self.”3 Leaving was exactly what many African American rural women did. They left the fields and farms by the hundreds of thousands and moved to urban communities across the United States. Many, like Mary Alice Williams of St.

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Louis, packed their bags for the same reason as did her husband, Isom: they wanted to make more money and find better social, cultural, and educational opportunities for their children. 4 According to Willie Ester McWilliams, some women wanted to see “just how different the city was, especially if black people voted and held some kind of office to help they people.” 5 Other women made the journey from the field to the city to reunite with family members, especially aunts, uncles, and siblings who had gone ahead of them. These pull factors were particularly strong on those living in rural communities following World War II, but African American female cotton pickers also left because life in the rural South was too hard on women and devastating to their sense of womanhood. Many rural black women left the cotton fields, as Annie West did, because “there was no way to be protected from physical, sexual, and spousal abuse. . . . The law was not interested in keepin’ black field women safe from any kind of attack,” she proclaimed, “so the fields, because they were so far from town and the lack of enforcement of the law, worked together and actually became a form of imprisonment for many women.” 6 “Surrounded by cotton and cotton fields,” Jessie Easter explained,“you felt, at times, that you could not get out and no one could get to you because you was livin’ in a closed-off community where you did not see many things or folks from the outside. . . . So the only way to escape the madness caused by greed and the power white folks got from raisin’ King Cotton was to run, run, and run away as fast and far as you could.”7 Migration became an attractive alternative to the Delta’s cotton fields because it offered many women the opportunity to search for a new identity and a different sense of community. However, once settled in the North, the women worked hard to maintain some of their rural heritage and culture. “We still like to eat the same foods because it reminded us of home and our traditions,” Rosie Fountain explained.8 “It is so important for my children and the people in this community to understand that black farm women, like me, came from a rich tradition and that all of us did not come off of white people’s farm, but actually lived on land owned by our parents and other blacks, went to schools and churches our grandparents helped to build, and shopped in little stores black country people sat up so we could see some positive role models in our little rural community,” explained Clementine Coleman of St. Louis. 9 Upon arriving in the city, many African Americans faced harsh realities. The industrial landscape also presented problems similar to those in the rural South. Poverty was rampant, and every form of social, cultural, and economic limitation existed. They could only expect difficulties in securing employment and in finding decent housing, health care, and nutritious food. Transporta-

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tion and telephones, when they could be afforded, enhanced their lives by helping connect their urban communities to their home communities in the South. 10 Housing was never plentiful, and that which was made available to blacks was substandard and inadequate for the large families migrating from farms. Rent was exorbitant, draining families of the majority of their income. Because migrants had been told by promoters of industry needing a cheap workforce that the city offered better housing than in the South, many had looked forward to efficient plumbing and bathroom facilities and bedrooms large enough to house their families. Such accommodations were scarce and costly. Indeed, respectable housing seemed available only to those who brought money with them for a down payment and only in certain neighborhoods. Women with this kind of money were few, and for the majority, housing “projects” were the only alternative to overcrowded, substandard urban housing. 11 African American women migrants and their families also needed health care. In the South, doctors willing to treat blacks were few and expensive, and as a result, many did not seek medical care regularly until the 1970s post– civil rights period. In contrast, health care was more readily available in the North, and public assistance was in place to help the poor without the kind of discrimination practiced by white landlords who determined who would receive public aid. “Up here, I always had a doctor when I needed one, and my children could go, and we did not have to worry ’bout settlin’ accounts at the end of the year like we did when we was a woman sharecroppin’ to make a livin’,” said Rita Davis of Chicago. 12 Between 1964 and 1980, poor and working-class women migrants off the farm found their greatest support in government-funded social services in the city, which helped them pay medical expenses for themselves and their children. “There was so many doctors, black and white, who was available to treat you,” explained Dollie Williams of Columbus, Ohio. “All you had to do was to work out some form of payment if you did not have all of the money.” 13 Having better health care was important because “women had to be concerned about childbearin’, treatin’ heart disease, common colds, and other kind of illnesses.”14 So important was having access to better-quality health care that each of the women sought it out with the understanding, as Bernice Ware said, “that it was goin’ to take time to find everything we needed and the right doctors to treat us and our children.”15 Tied to the issue of health care was a concern about quality food for the women’s families. Rural migrants in general had used fresh dairy produce, meat, fruits, and vegetables they had raised themselves, and farm women were accus-

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tomed to performing this role. However, because the majority of the migrants did not own houses with large backyards, raising and acquiring fresh food in the city was difficult. With limited resources, many migrants were forced to eat canned goods and government commody staples of cheese, peanut butter, powdered milk and eggs, dry beans, and canned beef. Each of the women stated that their family diet suffered because the city did not offer an opportunity for them to control the production of their food supply. “As long as we had a place, we could eat well and keep the children fed with a minimum of three meals a day,” explained Jessie Mae White. 16 Lack of land combined with low incomes made it difficult for poor and wage-working women to afford quality food. This condition contributed to these women’s concerns about health conditions such as heart disease and diabetes. When they arrived in the city, rural migrants could see that technology had greatly improved urban women’s lives. “We was surprised at how good some of them had it in their housework, with electric irons and washing machines as well as gas stoves and refrigeration, since the women down South lagged behind in buyin’ household devices that saved them time,” Mary Alice Williams recalled.17 Ann Gordon remembered,“Women in the city had the luxury of bein’ entertained as they did their housework because they could listen to the radio, or watch television, or even talk on the phone to take some of the boringness away and to make their work load seem lighter and less of a burden.” 18 Mary Tucker said, “These things — the radio, and television — was way, way different than what we knowed or had seen because they connected us to the world. . . . Many of us remained isolated until we left the farm.”19 By the 1960s, television was much more common in these migrants’ homes than in those they left in the South. As soon as families could afford it, they added telephones to their homes to improve their contact with family members they left behind. According to the women, the car was the most valued piece of property one could own in the city. “You need a way to get around because the bus didn’t go everywhere back then,” remembered Canary Coleman. 20 As a significant investment, owning a car “meant no mo’ mules and wagons, ridin’ on a horse’s back on broken-down back roads, no mo’ getting’ dirty as you travel, and you sure enough didn’t have to be a hobo no longer.”21 The acquisition of a car was similar to a farmer’s purchase of a new tractor; both were symbolic of economic profitability. “When a woman was able to get herself a car, she had arrived, movin’ immediately into a new social circle where few blacks traveled in the 1950s and early 1960s,” Canary Coleman remembered. 22 Nevertheless, because cars were expensive, most African Americans used public transportation to get to and from work. Many rural migrants did not have the economic power or the

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political connections to acquire such expensive possessions until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when wages and the economy improved. Discrimination based on race, gender, and class was remembered vividly by all participants in the study. Throughout the rural communities of the South, racism established a social stratification that placed African American women at the bottom of the socioeconomic and cultural ladders. Black women were valued as important laborers in rural manufacturing, domestic servitude, and field work, but as a group they were considered loud, unattractive, and lacking the social skills of white women. These African American females in the rural South had no chance of achieving white society’s standard of womanhood because of these kinds of attitudes combined with discrimination. As a result, many black women field-workers left the farms of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to find places where they hoped more positive views of black people existed. Many never found their utopia. Rosie Fountain elaborated: “When I came up here to St. Louis, I thought my race wouldn’t matter as long as I was willin’ to work, but I found out white society is basically the same everywhere, especially if they detect you are a southern black person who should expect no more than to be treated with no respect and who didn’t mind bein’ on the bottom.”23 According to Rose Jackson, “We could get jobs and we worked hard, but that did not stop our factory boss from treatin’ us like a second-class citizen.”24 Some of the women were satisfied with the way whites and blacks interacted. “I moved up here to find work, not to become the best friend of white people,” said Ann Hearon. 25 She explained: When I found work, my mission had been accomplished, and I did not need to interact with them to know I was a good worker, and neither did I need to seek out their blessin’ to understand who I was because I was proud to be a southernborn, rural black woman who understood what it took to make it. And for me, my survival did not depend on race mixin’ because I was quite comfortable spendin’ my time away from them, as I enjoyed my life in my community with so many other black folk who had walked out of them Mississippi Delta cotton fields. 26

While Ann’s attitude seems positive and uplifting, and represents the perception of six other women participants, other women were distressed about race relations in the city. Betty Williams of Indianapolis explained: “I didn’t like it because we left the Delta for this reason, too much racism and prejudice existed, and now to have come up here and find that racism was just as bad, and that white folk in the North had a place for black folk just like they did down South, was disappointin’, but I wasn’t willin’ to be on another plantation, a fieldhand in the factory workin’ like a Mississippi slave.”27 Primary and secondary sources support the experiences discussed by these women. The research indicates that

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racism did not prevent rural African American women migrants from securing employment, but it forced them to take the lowest-paying jobs, thereby causing the majority to live in abject poverty in their adopted urban communities. While the racial attitudes of the dominant white society were frustrating for rural black women, they were not the most painful. Self-imposed prejudices favoring lighter skin among African Americans were the most hurtful. As Patricia Adams explained, black women “never forgot what society thought ’bout ’em.”28 However, what mattered was “what the black people in the city thought about who you were and your reason for comin’ North, knowin’ that jobs were not as plentiful as they had been during the forties and early fifties,” said Linda McWilliams.29 Doris Lindsey elaborated: “Due to competition for jobs, people’s practice of racism spreaded over into the black community where blacks began to practice a form of color prejudice among themselves, believin’ that skin color was important and that the lighter your skin, the easier it would be to get a job from white people and to separate from those who white folk despised ’cause they skin was dark.”30 The majority of the African American rural women participating in this study suggested that their sense of self was affected by how their skin color was perceived. “The North was supposed to represent a kinder place for black women,” explained Bernice Black, “and it was supposed to be the place where the black woman was treated well, ’cause people had said women could have a better life in places like St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis, and Detroit.” 31 That better life was difficult to achieve, especially because black women were also victims of northern-based sexism. Sexism in the North was difficult for black women off the farm to understand. Although they had experienced male patriarchy in agrarian societies, they had nevertheless held a respectable place in the economy that rivaled black men’s because their labor was essential and they were successful in performing their duties and roles. In rural communities, male and female responsibilities overlapped in the home, church, and community, preventing, to a degree, the inhibition of the activities of black women. However, in the North, African American women migrants found gender discrimination to be more real. Men’s labor was more highly valued, and men were chosen more often for the skilled and semi-skilled jobs available in the factories. “We thought makin’ mo’ money would eventually remove the northern stigma of what a black woman from the farm could do,” Ann Gordon explained. “We didn’t understand their notion of a woman’s place, and we did not like the hard separation of the sexes because to us there was no such place as a woman’s or man’s place; it was just a role to be played, and whoever could do the job, did it and kept movin’.”32

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Segregation was a major issue in urban communities. It existed in the factories, in some of the schools, and in neighborhoods. While manufacturers encouraged blacks to migrate to the city to work, whites and other people of color did not look favorably upon blacks moving into their neighborhoods. “One of the most disappointin’ things was to realize that segregation was as much a problem up here in the city as it had been for us down South,” said Ann Gordon. 33 Every woman interviewed disliked segregation as a system because it reminded them of the second-class citizenship they had hoped to leave behind. Canary Coleman explained: “Up here, you did not see the signs, but you understood where you could go and what you could do, and folk didn’t necessarily want you eatin’ in they restaurants, swimmin’ in the pool with they children, workin’ the same good job they had, or goin’ to school with they children.” 34 Despite their dislike of institutional segregation in their urban communities, these women were not sure that integration would solve the problems between the races. In their former community, each had interacted with whites in a number of interracial and cross-cultural contexts but had gained very little from the exchange. The women primarily encountered whites in the workplace. Whether African Americans worked as agricultural laborers, domestic servants, or low-wage factory employees, the black world was controlled by the white world, was predictable, and offered little in the way of empowerment to blacks. For the majority of women, integration offered more struggle than opportunity. “When you are always with them,” explained Annie Harris, “you have to be conscious of who you are and what you are doin’ and sayin’ because they was always actin’ like they had done us a favor by allowin’ blacks to be in their presence.”35 According to Linda Rice, because of the stress associated with racial, social, and economic integration,“blacks in the city had to think through how to make integration work in order to minimize its impact on their lives.”36 Consequently, the women migrants attempted to control the level of stress that school integration caused their families. “When our children went into those white schools, them white people wanted to know everything about them, their mamas and daddies and what was goin’ on in they home, even if nothin’ appeared to be wrong,” explained Linsey Billups.37 Sherri Hooper explained,“Such an intrusion into our private affairs did not take place when black teachers and parents was controllin’ the education of black children in segregated communities. Even if black teachers had to ask such questions of the children, the objective was not to shame the child or embarrass his family, but to point out that help was available.”38 To avoid such unwelcome intrusions, these women instructed their

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children to keep silent about family and community affairs when they attended school. Positive aspects of school integration were experienced by those who migrated between 1980 and 2000, as was the case with ten of the women. They received a better education and as a result were able to secure much better jobs and improved housing, which was not commonly available to earlier generations of rural black women off the farm. According to the women, migration was most effective for those rural blacks who had already acquired an education and had the type of credentials that would allow them to compete for social, political, and economic opportunities. Indeed, according to Ann Gordon,“This is one of the ways younger generations of rural black women off the farm can regenerate themselves.”39 Maintaining family ties has remained the most significant way that the women who were interviewed have renewed or revived themselves. Family celebrations also provided the opportunity for old-timers and newcomers to share their experience of migration. Linda Robinson points out, “We needed to keep that connection because it reminded us of our value as persons and our importance within the kinship circle.” 40 “Down South, family connection meant everything,” explained Deborah Walters,“from the time you spent with parents, grandparents, siblings and other kin folk to what you all actually did together, and everyone knew that crashin’ parties and takin’ part in any other community celebration was acceptable because everybody was family.”41 The women seemed especially revived when community celebrations occurred. “This was a time that you could let yo’ hair down and have fun the old way, laughin’ and talkin’ as loud as you wanted and enjoyin’ each other because you had so much in common,” explained Delores Brown.42 Easter, Mother’s and Father’s Day festivities, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and Labor Day cookouts, and especially the joy they experienced during Thanksgiving and Christmas celebrations regenerated the women interviewed. Because some of these women and many other rural black women migrants have been forced to reside in the inner city, they have created other celebratory activities in keeping with their rural heritage, such as sewing, quilting, and garden parties. Annie Williams recalled, “These help us remember our heritage and tradition of takin’ care of yo’ family with yo’ hands, similar to the way we celebrated rice, cotton, and corn harvests and the completion of the cannin’, quiltin’, and huntin’ seasons.”43 By doing so, explained Joyce Fountain, “We remained committed to treatin’ each other with love and functioning as a civilized community among ourselves.”44 African American culture in the northern cities was a diverse mixture of rural

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and urban traditions. In the South, rural black women had a limited choice of entertainment and recreational activities, and they dressed in a way that reflected the cotton culture. Rural southern towns also had a relatively low crime rate because there was not much to do beyond going to church, working, and frequenting juke joints. The migrant women marveled at the recreational and fashion opportunities that existed in urban communities in the North. They were also amazed at the high crime rate, “since nobody told you ’bout all the killin’, stealin’, prostitutin’, drinkin’, and gamblin’ befo’ yo’ move up here, because they didn’t want you to change yo’ mind ’bout leavin’ the farm,” explained Mary Alice Williams. 45 All of the women interviewed reported that they migrated to the North not only for better jobs and improved race relations but also to gain access to better entertainment, recreation, and community involvement. Because letters from family members and editorials in newspapers described urban culture as blossoming and exciting, migration emerged in some households as the answer to the oppression families suffered “down South.” The North promised not only work but also places to relax and to establish community, which could lead to organizing for social change. In the city, as in the rural black South, recreation was vitally important to a family’s sense of community and kinship. Large parks and movie theaters provided opportunities for families to spend time together, an activity greatly needed because family members were now working outside of the home. Maxine Johnson explained: “Every Saturday the children and I went to the stores, lookin’ for things for the house, and sometimes, after the shoppin’ was finished, I would take them to a movie or to eat a burger, the kinds of things I could not do as a young girl livin’ in a rural town.”46 Because of these kinds of opportunities, the women expressed general satisfaction with the recreational alternatives that were available, even though some missed the simpler types of activities available to children in rural environments. Dollie Rogers remembered: “A lot of us was not all that excited because it cost money to go to movies and museums and to enjoy yo’self outside the home, especially when you did not make much money on yo’ job, and when what you had, had to be used to first feed and clothe your children, it was enough to make you want to move back home where yo’ children could run around, fish, and hunt free of charge.”47 Indeed, recreational participation depended on having money available to buy new clothes and go to movies, concerts, museums, community meetings, and parties. Yet it was fashion that consumed much of the women’s discretionary money and time. Style, to some degree, indicated a level of economic success. The majority of the women participating in this study liked the fashion

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that existed in the city, but each generally disapproved of the emphasis placed on clothing and “looking good.”“Down South, we could wear anything because folk didn’t care,” explained Liza Dillard, “and we only paid attention to how we looked at church, and that did not require much, just a decent suit and a couple of nice dresses, but no pressure, like up here, when folk think you ought to be dressed up just to go to the store.”48 Like purchasing a home or car, improving one’s personal appearance indicated that migration had been a good decision. In cities throughout America, many blacks believed they had acquired new status when they secured employment. This new social standing suggested that families now had the resources to purchase fashionable clothes, modern appliances, and household items. Ironically, these new acquisitions brought the constant fear of being burglarized. “Folk just believe that you had money not only to pay yo’ bills, but to spend on fun, and to loan to other people, and to keep buyin’ things if someone broke into yo’ house and stole yo’ stuff.” 49 The perception that employment equaled wealth was so powerful that many working women feared for the safety of their home and children. According to those interviewed, working outside the home often meant that their children faced potential danger due to the growing crime rate in the inner city. All of the women felt that the city was somewhat unsafe, but Rebecca Fitzpatrick stated that “in the neighborhood, there was police on constant duty, so that if somethin’ happen, they could get to you or yo’ house much quicker than they could down South.”50 In fact, the majority of the women said they had confidence in the ability of the police to investigate crime and protect citizens. Many cited examples of the police arriving quickly when a crime had been committed, but they were not convinced that quick response time was the longterm answer to crime-infested cities. The opportunities northern cities offered for work and recreation were not enough to offset women’s fear concerning the criminal element that preyed upon urban black communities. The women expressed constant fear for their children’s life, of their children becoming involved in gang activity, of their daughters being raped, and of the visibility and availability of drugs. Some of the women were concerned about police brutality, gambling, prostitution, and other social problems that some children viewed as exciting urban entertainment. An overwhelming majority of the women interviewed are mothers, and their concerns were not unrealistic or exaggerated. While they were aware that crime existed in rural towns throughout the United States, to them, southern rural crime was not as life threatening, since, as Fannie Williams explains, “No black person on a farm, back then, could earn a good livin’ like some blacks in the city from drugs, gang activity, gamblin’, or prostitution.”51 Only within the

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last two decades of the twentieth century did rural America foster the kinds of criminal activity long established in urban areas. Family relationships ultimately determined whether or not migrants appreciated African American urban culture and whether they would adjust to living in the inner city. Each of the women believed that some form of family association was necessary just to survive. The question was whether they would rely solely on family living in their urban communities or maintain relationships with family members they left behind in the South. The majority of the women believed it was very important to maintain family ties generally, and they adopted a number of strategies to do so. “We visit back and forth,” said Eva Glenn, “and we write and send messages and gifts by travelers livin’ in the city where our folk lived.” 52 Because their income was limited, traveling and keeping in touch by [166], (3 telephone was difficult. When limited funds inhibited close contact with family far away, migration became a liability, a process that gradually separated them from their extended network of kin. Lines: 31 For some women, maintaining family ties was not an option. A few women ——— in this study chose to sever their relationships with family members they left 13.0pt behind because they still struggled with the effects of physical and sexual abuse ——— Normal they had experienced growing up. Two women had witnessed ongoing physical abuse of their mothers and other female family members and, as a result, * PgEnds: decided that it was best for them to let the past go, including contact with all family members, until they could heal from the emotional suffering they were [166], (3 forced to live through. For most, however, the vibrancy they felt from the energy in the city was enough to keep them hopeful and believing that their families had an opportunity for a better life in their adopted urban communities. The African American culture in which they became involved nourished them and retained enough of their rural traditions to make them feel somewhat comfortable living among “city folk.” For some women, the need to migrate had less to do with their desire to be in the industrial workplace than with the pains they suffered as young girls. In the American South, where there was no respect for African American women and little concern for their right to have their bodies protected, black women were often violated. The migrants interviewed discussed the sexual exploitation of black women in order to provide an understanding as to how migration influenced family and gender relations. Their stories included not only descriptions of sexual exploitation but also of how wives and children were abused. Women who participated in this study stated that they migrated because they

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were concerned about the emotional and physical abuse of their daughters and other girls. Joyce Fountain put it plainly: The country was a place where people lived so close together in their physical and housing space, and it was the perfect place where little girls, because they were always working around grown men, were at a risk of being sexually abused in the fields. . . . So I left because I wanted my children to be safe, and since I was a professional, no longer working all day in the field with them, and because I needed to know they would be under watchful eyes in the city, I decided to migrate and move to a community that offered after-school, all-day, and year-round child care for working and professional women. 53

While no woman or child was totally free of the potential threat of abuse, the general consensus among these women was expressed by Shirley Bullock: “The law, up here, seemed more likely to protect you because the police wasn’t concerned about causin’ the white landlord a loss of labor in the event they had to arrest the person.” 54 However, protection was far from guaranteed, as Faye Williams explained, “These urban communities up here was not foolproof, but you did have better protection under the law, just in case a mother might detect her child was being physically or sexually abused, and in case she, herself, was being battered.”55 Each woman who participated in this study recalled having a conversation with her mother concerning safety as a young girl. Their parents were concerned about protecting them not only from the white male gaze but also from any man making sexual advances toward young girls. African American women who left the rural South to find safer communities for their daughters were, however, often disappointed at the amount of sexual exploitation that existed within black communities outside the South. All of the women in this study indicated that sexual abuse continues to be a concern, even though a few safety nets are built in, such as leaving their children, especially the girls, with trusted family members and friends when responsibilities require them to be away from home. Fifteen of the thirty-seven women interviewed felt satisfied or very satisfied that their daughters were safe and did not face the kind of pressure that existed in the rural South. However, an overwhelming majority of twentytwo disliked the urban environment. Irene Scott said: “The city often proved to be more dangerous because we had to leave our children alone.” 56 Canary Coleman elaborated: “Down South we kept up with them, especially durin’ the day, ’cause they was in the field workin’ with us eight to ten hours a day, and when they wasn’t workin’, they was with us in church or workin’ in the garden, quiltin’, and when all other work was done, they was asleep.” 57 The ability to keep a watchful eye over their children was a privilege that farm life offered these

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women, but this privilege was diminished considerably when women went to work in northern factories. Since the late nineteenth century, tens of thousands of African American men, women, and children left the cotton fields in search of improved social, economic, political, and cultural opportunities in northern cities. By the end of the 1940s, as many as five million African Americans had left the fields and were working in various factories, packinghouses, and domestic industries. As these migrants labored in their new industrial fields, they also expended considerable energy in transplanting their rural culture and values into their adopted cities. Among the large groups of migrants searching for freedom, justice, and opportunity was great numbers of African American women with ambitions of becoming financially able to provide for their children and in the process hoping to purchase a little respect for themselves. They had hope, and they believed God was leading them to a “better land.” What this process involved in its entirety is not yet fully known, but a significant amount of information exists concerning how these women attempted to reestablish themselves through their family, work, church, and social activities. The question for these women became not whether they could find jobs but rather what quality of life they and their children would have far from their close-knit communities in the rural South, where families and friends shared resources to survive. The research that forms the basis for this article presents these women’s experiences primarily in their own words and reveals the kinds of struggles rural African American women migrants endured as well as their attitudes and perceptions concerning their hardships. Far more research of this type needs to be done in order to fully comprehend the significance of gender in the multiple migrations experienced by African Americans. As researchers and historians increasingly attempt to put faces and voices to historical developments to help us better understand the human and emotional aspects of change, studies such as this one can serve that need. The conversations I had with these thirty-seven women revealed much about their feelings, perceptions, and expectations concerning migration and the kind of life it was supposed to lead to for hardworking families who moved to northern cities. More research is needed in order to incorporate women’s ideas, actions, reactions, and behavior into recent scholarship that focuses on how migrants survived or assimilated into urban life.

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Notes This article is based on preliminary findings from a survey and data obtained from oral history interviews conducted with thirty-seven rural African American women. The women who participated in this study resided in six different midwestern communities and represent diverse social, cultural, educational, and economic positions. This research addresses issues pertinent to how these women have experienced urban life. The women interviewed migrated north to midwestern cities over a period of fifty years following World War II. A larger percentage of African American women left the rural South in the second half of the twentieth century than did during the previous exodus of African Americans from the South between 1915 and 1950. Once they arrived, educated and uneducated rural African American women alike competed for jobs more fiercely than they had during the first half of the twentieth century, and they coped with severe housing problems and alarming crime rates to do so. 1. Eva Glenn, interview by the author, April 28, 1988, Drew ms. See also Douglas Massey and Nancy A. Denton, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); and Darlene Clark Hine and Kathleen Thompson, A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America (New York: Broadway Books, 1998). 2. Mae Liza Williams, interview by the author, April 30, 1989, Minter City ms. For a discussion of life in general for African Americans and of black women in particular, see Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880–1930 (Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press, 1977); Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973); David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); and Richard W. Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915– 1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). 3. Estella Thomas, interview by the author, April 30, 1989, Drew ms, and May 25, 1991, St. Louis. For a discussion of how African American women have responded to crises and stresses they have experienced due to segregation, exploitation, and domination, see Robin Kelley, “ ‘We Are Not What We Seem’: Rethinking Black Working-Class Opposition in the Jim Crow South,” Journal of American History 80, no. 1 (1993): 75–112; Joe W. Trotter, “African Americans in the City: The Industrial Era, 1900– 1950,” Journal of Urban History 21, no. 4 (1995): 438–57; and Kenneth Kusmer,“African Americans in the City since World War II: From the Industrial to the Post-Industrial Era,” Journal of Urban History 21, no. 4 (1995): 470–504. 4. Mary Alice Williams, interview by the author, December 21, 1990, St. Louis. For a discussion of the many issues that influenced black women’s migration from the rural South, see Peter Gottlieb, Making Their Own Way: Southern Blacks’ Migration to Pittsburgh, 1916–1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1987); James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of

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Chicago Press, 1989); and Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interest: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). 5. Willie Ester McWilliams, interview by the author, May 1, 1990, Drew ms, and June 30, 1997, Detroit. See also James Borchert, Alley Life in Washington: Family, Community, Religion, and Folklife in the City, 1850–1970 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Allen B. Ballard, One More Day’s Journey: The Story of a Family and a People (New York: McGraw Hill, 1984); and Joe William Trotter Jr., Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariate, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). 6. Annie West, interview by the author, June 25, 1994, St. Louis. For a discussion of how important the issues of safety and protection were to African American women in rural and urban communities, see Arna W. Bontemps and Jack Conroy, Any Place But Here (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966); and Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics in Washington dc, 1910–1940 (Washington dc: Smithsonian Press, 1994). 7. Jessie Easter, interview by the author, June 15, 1991, Chicago. For a discussion of the feeling of enclosure and the problems associated with living in a closed society, see Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (New York: Dial Press, 1968); and Reynolds Farley, “The Urbanization of Negroes in the United States,” Journal of Social History 1, no. 1 (1968): 241–58. See also Kathryn Grover, Make a Way Somehow: AfricanAmerican Life in a Northern Community, 1790–1965 (Syracuse ny: Syracuse University Press, 1994). 8. Rosie Fountain, interview by the author, December 22, 1993, St. Louis. For a comparative discussion of how rural black women attempted to maintain their cultural heritage and rural values in northern, eastern, and western communities, see Albert S. Broussard, Black San Francisco: The Struggle for Racial Equality in the West, 1900– 1945 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1993); and Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black Community: Seattle Central District, 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington, 1994). 9. Clementine Coleman, interview by the author, May 25, 1997, St. Louis. See Florette Henri, Black Migration: Movement North, 1900–1920 (Garden City ny: Anchor Press, 1975); and Carole Marks, Farewell — We’re Good and Gone: The Great Black Migration (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). See also Joe William Trotter, Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 10. See also Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Dolores Janiewski, Sisterhood Denied: Race, Gender, and Class in a New South Community (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Darlene Clark Hine, “Black Migration to the Urban Midwest: The Gender Dimension, 1915–1945,” in Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective, 126–46; and Elsa Barkley Brown, “Womanist Consciousness: Maggie Lena Walker and the Independent Order of St. Luke,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 14, no. 3 (1989): 610–33.

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11. Nell Irvin Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction (1976; rpt., Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1986), 45–52. See also Kenneth L. Kusmer, “The Black Urban Experience in American History,” in The State of Afro American History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 1986), 91–122; Trotter, “African Americans in the City,” 438–57; Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It; and Kimberley L. Phillips, Alabama North: African-American Migrants, Community, and Working-Class Activism, 1915–1945 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999). 12. Rita Davis, interview by the author, July 11, 1994, Chicago. For a discussion of health and other living conditions faced by African American rural women migrants when they arrived in midwestern cities, see Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991); Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; Vincent P. Franklin, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths: Autobiography and the Making of the African-American Intellectual Tradition (New York: Scribner, 1995); Darrel E. Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial: A History of the Black Community of Evansville, Indiana (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); and James O. Horton, Free People of Color: Inside the African American Community (Washington dc: Smithsonian Institution, 1993). 13. Dollie Williams, interview by the author, June 1, 1997, Columbus oh. For additional discussion see Phillips, Alabama North; and Lillian Serece Williams, Strangers in the Land of Paradise: The Creation of an African American Community, 1900–1940 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). 14. Mary Tucker, interview by the author, December 11, 1992, St. Louis. See also Ulf Hannerz, Soulside: Inquiries into Ghetto Culture and Community (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969); Tamara Hareven, Family and Kin in Urban Communities, 1700–1930 (New York: New Viewpoints Press, 1977); and Robert B. Hill, The Strengths of Black Families (New York: Emerson Hall, 1972). 15. Bernice Ware, interview by the author, June 6, 1994, Chicago. See also Andrew Billingsley, Black Families in White America (Englewood Cliffs nj: Prentice-Hall, 1968). 16. Jessie Mae White, interview by the author, October 12, 1996, St. Louis. For a discussion of rural black women migrants’ concerns about food, diet, nutrition, and health, see Lemann, Promised Land; Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It; and Lewis, In Their Own Interest. 17. Mary Alice Williams, interview by the author, December 10, 1992, St. Louis. 18. Ann Gordon, interview by the author, November 15, 1993, Detroit. 19. Tucker, interview. 20. Canary Coleman, interview by the author, December 12, 1992. St. Louis. 21. Tucker, interview. 22. Canary Coleman, interview; see also Lemann, Promised Land; Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; and Kenneth W. Goings and Raymond A. Mohl, eds., The New African American Urban History (Thousand Oaks ca: Sage, 1996).

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23. Rosie Fountain, interview by the author, September 15, 1994, St. Louis. See also Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective. 24. Rose Jackson, interview by the author, August 5, 1991, Detroit. For a discussion of the kinds of jobs that were available to rural African American women migrants, see Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (New York: Harper and Row, 1968); St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City, 2 vols. (New York: Harper and Row, 1945); and Carol Stack, All Our Kin: Strategies for Survival in a Black Community (New York: Harper and Row, 1975). 25. Ann Hearon, interview by the author, May 28, 1995, Detroit. For a discussion of racial interactions between blacks and whites as well as other ethnic groups, see John E. Bodnar, Roger D. Simon, and Michael P. Weber, Lives of Their Own: Blacks, Italians, and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–1960 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982); James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan (New York: Arno Press, 1968); and Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial. 26. Hearon, interview. See also Mary White Ovington, Half a Man: The Status of the Negro in New York (1911; rpt., New York: Hill and Wang, 1969); and Goings and Mohl, The New African American Urban History. 27. Betty Williams, interview by the author, June 21, 1995, Indianapolis. For a comparison between southern and northern racism and its impact own rural migrants and immigrants to American urban cities, see Josef J. Barton, Peasants and Strangers: Italians, Rumanians, and Slovaks in an American City, 1890–1950 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975); and Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, and Unequal (New York: Scribner, 1992). 28. Patricia Adams, interview by the author, June 13, 1991, Chicago. For a discussion of the treatment of African American women in the public and private spheres, see Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; Billingsley, Black Families in White America; and Andrew Billingsley, Climbing Jacob’s Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of AfricanAmerican Families (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). 29. Linda McWilliams, interview by the author, October 15, 1995, Detroit, and November 15, 1999, Chicago. For a discussion of issues pertaining to African Americans’ self-imposed color prejudices and discriminations, see Franklin, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths; and Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). 30. Doris Lindsey, interview by the author, May 29, 1997, Minneapolis. For a discussion of available economic opportunities in the cities and how rural black women entered the workplace, see Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial; Spear, Black Chicago; Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis; and Trotter, Black Milwaukee. 31. Bernice Black, interview by the author, May 30, 1997, Columbus oh. See also Goings and Mohl, The New African American Urban History; Grover, Make a Way Somehow; and Hacker, Two Nations. 32. Gordon, interview. For a discussion of how African American women confronted issues of sexism in the home, workplace, church, and larger African American com-

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munity, see Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow; William Julius Wilson, The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978); and Hacker, Two Nations. 33. Gordon, interview. 34. Canary Coleman, interview; see also Philip S. Foner and Ronald L. Lewis, Black Workers: A Documentary History from Colonial Times to the Present (Philadelphia: Temple University, 1989). 35. Annie Harris, interview by the author, July 25, 1996, Columbus oh. 36. Linda Rice, interview by the author, August 10, 1995, Indianapolis. 37. Linsey Billups, interview by the author, August 12, 1995, Indianapolis. See also Vincent P. Franklin, “Education for Life: Adult Education Programs for African Americans in Northern Cities, 1900–1942,” in Education of the African American Adult: An Historical Overview, ed. Harvey Neufeldt and Leo McGee (Westport ct: Greenwood Press, 1990). 38. Sherri Hooper, interview by the author, September 7, 1995, Detroit. For a discussion of African American parents’ involvement in their children’s education see Rayford Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro (New York: Collier, 1965); and Bigham, We Ask Only a Fair Trial. 39. Gordon, interview. 40. Linda Robinson, interview by the author, September 23, 1994, Chicago. 41. Diann Walters, interview by the author, September 26, 1994, Chicago. See Goings and Mohl, The New African American Urban History. 42. Delores Brown, interview by the author, June 5, 1997, Columbus oh. 43. Annie Williams, interview by the author. See also Franklin, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths. 44. Joyce Fountain, interview by the author, July 10, 1998, Minneapolis. 45. Mary Alice Williams, interview, December 10, 1992. 46. Maxine Johnson, interview by the author, August 10, 1995, St. Louis. See also Lemann, Promised Land. 47. Dollie Rogers, interview by the author, October 29, 1994, St. Louis. 48. Liza Dillard, interview by the author, December 20, 1997, Minneapolis. See also Phillips, Alabama North. 49. Tucker, interview. 50. Rebecca Fitzpatrick, interview by the author, August 16, 1990, Indianapolis. 51. Fannie Williams, interview by the author, June 10, 1991, Chicago. 52. Glenn, interview. See also Borchert, Alley Life in Washington; Ballard, One More Day’s Journey; Grover, Make a Way Somehow; Franklin, Living Our Stories, Telling Our Truths; and Marks, Farewell — We’re Good and Gone. 53. Joyce Fountain, interview by the author, November 19, 1997, Minneapolis. For a discussion of rural women migrants’ concerns for their children, especially their daughters, see Elliot Liebow, Tally’s Corner: A Study of Negro Streetcorner Men (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967); Lemann, Promised Land; and Kenneth W. Goings, “Blacks in the

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Rural North: Paulding County, Ohio, 1860–1900” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1977). See also Drake and Cayton, Black Metropolis. 54. Shirley Bullock, interview by the author, April 15, 1998, Minneapolis. See also Lemann, Promised Land; and Trotter, The Great Migration in Historical Perspective. 55. Faye Williams, interview by the author, September 15, 1997, St. Louis. See also Liebow, Talley’s Corner; and Lemann, Promised Land. 56. Irene Scott, interview by the author, May 1, 1990, Drew ms. 57. Canary Coleman, interview. For a discussion of occupational opportunities and changes among migrants in midwestern cities between 1945 and 1980, see Goings and Mohl, The New African American Urban History; Beverly A. Bunch-Lyons, “And They Came: The Migration of African American Women from the South to Cincinnati, Ohio, 1900–1950” (PhD diss., Miami University, Ohio, 1955); Jack S. Blocker, “Black Migration to Muncie, 1860–1930,” Indiana Magazine of History, December 1996, 297– 320; Kusmer, “The Black Urban Experience in American History”; and James E. DeVries, Race, Kinship, and Community in a Midwestern Town: The Black Experience in Monroe, Michigan, 1900–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986).

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Walls and Bridges Cultural Mediation and the Legacy of Ella Deloria janet l. finn

[175], (43) Since the mid-1980s, anthropologists have debated the politics of cultural knowledge development, questions of representation, and the merits of experimental texts that blur the boundaries of ethnography and fiction. For example, in their 1986 edited volume Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, James Clifford and George Marcus challenged the dominant “realist” tradition in ethnographic writing, questioning the ways in which textual representations often gloss over the complicated relations of power and intimacy between ethnographers and informants in the field.1 Clifford and Marcus called for more self-conscious, reflexive, and dialogical approaches to ethnography, for techniques that are sensitive to the politics and partiality of knowledge production in the field and the text. 2 While earning praise for their advocacy of ethnographic experimentation, Clifford and Marcus were soundly criticized by feminist anthropologists for their failure to include women’s voices in their critique and for their neglect of the rich history of contributions by women anthropologists. Many of these women pioneered experimental approaches to ethnographic fieldwork and writing long before the subject was popularized by the postmodern turn in cultural studies during the 1980s. Particularly neglected have been the contributions of women of color, writing from the borderlands where they have straddled contradictory subject positions of “Native informant” and “cultural scholar” and challenged the assumptions of ethnographic authority in the process. 3 In my own efforts to learn more about the contributions of minority women to the practice and critique of anthropology, I turned to the legacy of Ella Cara Deloria. A member of the Yankton Sioux tribe of South Dakota, Deloria was an

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ethnographer, linguist, and educator who made rich and varied contributions to the field of anthropology during her fifty-year career (1920–71). 4 She wrote classic texts on Dakota language, public policy studies, ethnographic accounts of Dakota life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and a novel, Waterlily, the poignant story of Dakota life told from the perspective of women’s experiences.5 Deloria also produced some of the first written accounts of Dakota oral narratives of myth and history. I discovered in her work important insights about the politics of ethnographic authority, dilemmas facing women of color as they struggle to claim their voices within the strictures of academic anthropology, and the problems and possibilities of action-oriented scholarship. I was invited to submit an essay about Deloria for Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon’s edited volume Women Writing Culture, which is dedicated to the reclamation and recognition of women’s creative and critical contributions both past and present. In that essay I discussed Deloria’s role as cultural mediator and the themes of incorporation, negotiation, and resistance in her contributions as an ethnographer, novelist, and educator. 6 Building on that earlier work, I focus here on the ways in which Deloria spoke and wrote from the borders, straddled and utilized her multiple subject positions, and stepped beyond the limitations of 1930s ethnography to speak politically and poetically of Dakota life to a nonIndian audience. 7 In returning to Deloria’s legacy, I have come to appreciate deeply the subversive nature of some of her ethnographic work that challenged the discourse and practices of federal Indian policy and the formidable obstacles she faced as a Native woman intellectual. Up against the walls of academic authority and elitism, she struggled for professional credibility and economic survival. I have found new respect for the place of performance as a means of cultural mediation in Deloria’s work. In this essay I situate Deloria’s life and work in relation to key moments in federal Indian policy. I consider the shifts and tensions of urgency and understatement, both in her diverse public and professional contributions and in her more private realm as revealed through letters. I argue that Deloria was intimately aware of her tenuous position on the margins; in response she positioned herself as mediator, crafting the spaces for dialogue and engagement with academic and popular audiences, challenging the assumptions of “salvage ethnography,” and attempting to raise consciousness about the politics of history that shaped contemporary struggles of Native American people.8 I consider the dilemmas she faced in bringing cultural knowledge to bear on social policy and the strategies she employed in living her mission of cultural mediation. I address the place of performance in her work and conclude with lessons from her legacy that challenge the short-sightedness of those who have erased the

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contributions of far too many women ethnographers from our collective memory. As Paula Gunn Allen writes, “The root of oppression is loss of memory.”9 Deloria’s legacy speaks to the importance of remembering. Coming of Age: The Personal and the Political Ella Deloria was born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation of South Dakota in 1888, a key moment in the repressive history of U.S. Indian policy. 10 The Sun Dance ceremony had been forbidden in 1881. Passage of the Dawes Act in 1887 imposed an alien model of private ownership and household structure on Indian peoples, relegating individual families (as defined by non-Indian policy makers) to small tracts of reservation land and opening vast amounts of socalled leftover land to white settlers and commercial interests. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan outlined the strategies of the U.S. government’s “civilizing mission” in his 1889 report, which called for “reduction to citizenship,” the breakup of communal lifeways, universal adoption of the English language, and compulsory, white-administered education for Indian children. 11 The forced removal of Indian children to government and churchsponsored boarding schools expanded rapidly throughout the 1880s. By 1890 there were 140 boarding schools with an enrollment of nearly ten thousand students. 12 And in late December 1890 came the massacre at Wounded Knee. A group of Sioux Ghost Dancers had come together near Wounded Knee Creek to sing and dance for their dead relatives and their disappearing way of life. They were pursued by U.S. Cavalry soldiers, who, upon reaching the camp, opened fire, killing more than two hundred men, women, and children. 13 This was the world into which Ella Deloria was born. More than forty years later, she would record the account of a Sioux elder who had witnessed the Ghost Dance and the massacre as a child: The leaders beat time and sang as the people danced, going round to the left in a sidewise step. They danced without rest, on and on, and they got out of breath but still they kept going as long as possible. Occasionally someone thoroughly exhausted and dizzy fell unconscious into the center and lay there “dead.” Quickly those on each side of him closed the gap and went right on. After a while, many lay about in that condition. They were now “dead” and seeing their dear ones. As each came to, she, or he, slowly sat up and looked about, bewildered, and then began wailing inconsolably. . . . The visions varied at the start, but they ended the same way, like a chorus describing a great encampment of all the Dakotas who had ever died, where all were related and therefore understood each other, where the buffalo came eagerly to feed them, and there was no sorrow but only joy, where relatives thronged out with happy laughter to greet the newcomer. That was the best of all!

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Waking to the drab and wretched present after such a glowing vision, it was little wonder that they wailed as if their poor hearts would break in two with disillusionment. But at least they had seen! The people went on and on and could not stop, day or night, hoping perhaps to get a vision of their own dead, or at least to hear of the visions of others. They preferred that to food or rest or sleep. And so I suppose the authorities did think they were crazy — but they weren’t. They were only terribly unhappy. 14

Deloria grew up on the Standing Rock Reservation, where her father, Rev. Philip Deloria, one of the first Sioux to receive a college education, established an Episcopal mission in 1885. 15 Raised in the context of reservation missionary life, she attended mission boarding schools and developed both a deep Christian faith and a strong respect for the inseparable spiritual and cultural values of the Sioux people. 16 She attended Oberlin College and earned her bachelor’s degree from Teachers College at Columbia University in 1915. 17 During her stay at Columbia University, Deloria made the acquaintance of the noted American anthropologist Franz Boas, with whom she later worked as a research assistant, translator, and collaborator. Deloria’s personal and professional experience suggests a complex melding of worldviews. She accepted the reform agenda of the Progressive Era while resisting the flat and static representations of Indian people. Deloria considered it her personal and professional mission “to make the Dakota people understandable, as human beings, to the white people who have to deal with them.”18 Her mission carried a challenge to white image making and a commitment to construct dynamic representations that served as bridges for mutual understanding. She eloquently frames her desire to connect emotionally as well as intellectually with her readers as she writes: Reservation life has never been a “still.” It is a moving picture of continuous change. It has reacted readily to all sorts of stimuli from without, and these have come with increasing variety and frequency through the years, modifying the social structure and mental life of the people for better or worse. The picture moves through time. . . . Reservation life is a moving picture in still another sense — moving to those who watch it thoughtfully and sympathetically and who are naturally sensitive to the struggles of men against heavy odds. It moves me; I wistfully hope it will move you. 19

This passage is marked by both urgency and understatement. Deloria deliberately downplays the brutality behind the reservation system even as she searches for an empathic here-and-now connection with her audience, hoping to move her reader to a richer understanding and appreciation of Dakota cultural experience.

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I see Deloria’s work as inherently political. She employed the descriptive strategies characteristic of her mentor, Boas, as tools for building cultural knowledge and informing social policy, even as she questioned and challenged the limits of “objective” description. Deloria used the personal storytelling style of the Dakota people as a tool for educating a white audience. It is her means of creating common ground such that the cultural logic of the Dakota comes to make “common sense,” even to those whose cultural experience is framed around a differing logic. And, at times, she situated herself in the cross fire of tradition and reform in an effort to promote what she saw as culturally informed progress.20 The key themes Deloria developed through her life’s work — Dakota kinship, gender relations, education, child rearing, the value of honor over ownership, and the ironies of “civilization” — offered a counternarrative to the discourse and practices of federal policy makers and popular image makers. Deloria’s adult life was framed by her ongoing kinship obligations, her rigorous linguistic and ethnographic scholarship, and her piecing together of teaching, writing, lecturing, and performing in order to fulfill her mediating mission and survive economically. Upon graduation from college, Deloria returned to South Dakota as a teacher at All Saints boarding school. After her mother’s death in 1916, she also took over the care of her two younger siblings. When her father took ill a few years later, Deloria assumed additional responsibility as family caretaker and breadwinner. With her young charges in tow she moved to New York, hoping to work as a health educator among Indian groups under the auspices of the ywca and to supplement her income with lectures and demonstrations of Sioux cultural life. In 1923 she took what she hoped would be a more permanent and secure post as girls’ physical education director at the Haskell Indian School, one of the first Indian boarding schools, but that post proved to be temporary.21 While at Haskell, Deloria was contacted by Boas, who inquired about the possibility of her working with him on Dakota language texts. In 1927 Deloria began what was to be a fifteen-year correspondence and working relationship with Boas, one marked by her deep respect, frank admission of poverty, pointed economic negotiations, and challenges to the authority of America’s “father of anthropology.” Boas enlisted Deloria’s assistance in verifying material on Dakota culture and language collected by George Bushotter and accounts of the Sun Dance ceremony as recorded by James R. Walker. Deloria and Boas corresponded regularly during the course of this work.22 One notable feature of their correspondence is the tension between Deloria’s lived experience (kinship obligations fundamentally shaped her Dakota cultural knowledge and practice) and Boas’s detached anthropological view of kinship as a system of classification and relationship,

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subject to ethnographic scrutiny. 23 While Boas cultivated familial relationships with many of his protégées, including Deloria, he saw personal relationships as separate from the dispassionate discipline of ethnography. Described as a “methodological purist” committed to rigorous inductive inquiry, Boas held that careful observation and precise, detailed documentation of language and practices were the foundations of the historical science of anthropology. 24 Boas was concerned about “premature” or “arbitrary” classification in the study of cultural patterns and practices wherein the categories were derived not from the phenomena themselves but from the “mind of the student.”25 Deloria shared Boas’s scholarly commitment to rigorous research. For Deloria, however, her kinship relations and obligations were intimately tied to her ways of knowing the world. Deloria drew on stories told to her by her grandfather as a guide for questioning informants about tribal myths, history, and practices. As a Native anthropologist, she also struggled with the dilemmas of fieldwork with “informants” who were also relatives. For example, she anticipated their reluctance to share knowledge of the Sun Dance ceremony with outsiders, yet knew they might feel obligated to respond to her requests out of respect for the bonds of kinship. Deloria wrote of these concerns in her letters to Boas. In contrast, Boas responded with concern for the timeliness and accuracy of the data rather than for the predicaments Deloria faced in the fieldwork process itself. Even though Boas emphasized the importance of “obtaining and recording ethnographic data in the language of the natives themselves” and the need to “present the culture as it appears to the Indian himself,” he seemed insensitive to the complex web of social relations that Native field researchers had to negotiate in gathering cultural data. 26 There is both poignancy and frustration in Deloria’s letters as she tries to educate Boas about the fundamental nexus of kinship and survival among the Dakotas, the social and relational context of knowledge, and the multiple responsibilities and commitments she faced as part of her own kinship obligations. From his somewhat impatient responses, it appears Boas never fully understood this nexus. For example, in 1929, after many difficult months of trying to verify the Sun Dance materials and care for her father, Deloria wrote: I do not see how I could come [to New York] at all this month, and even November I should hate to promise to come because I have already put off coming too much. But as I see it, this matter of making a comfortable home for my father looks like my immediate duty, which would go undone or ill-done if I should leave it to come in now. Shall I come December first to work till February when I come out with Dr. Klineberg? Or do you have anything especial for me now? Which if I pass up would be fatal? I like the work and hope always to come back, but I have

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been unable to. I know white people leave their parents and go off, but we are not trained that way, and I can’t bring myself to do it, till I have things arranged as I plan and am working on. 27

Boas’s terse response perhaps reaffirmed Deloria’s perceived differences between white and Indian valuing of kinship obligations: It does not suit me very well that you are not coming here, but I presume I have to put up with it. I trust you will go on with the work that you are doing now as energetically as possible. . . . Will you please be good enough to look the Sun Dance manuscript over very carefully, and particularly answer all the question marks in the margins? There are a good many discrepancies between nasalized and unnasalized vowels, and quite often there may be mistakes in the aspirations. Of course, you are responsible for the accuracy. 28

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Over time, Deloria struggled to impress upon Boas the fundamental intimacy between her cultural scholarship and her cultural obligations: I can not tell you how essential it is for me to take beef or some food each time I go to an informant — the moment I don’t, I take myself right out of the Dakota side and class myself with outsiders. If I go, bearing a gift, and gladden the hearts of the informants, and eat with them, and call them by the correct social kinship terms, then later I can go back, and ask them all sorts of questions, and get my information, as one would get favors from a relative. It is hard to explain, but it is the only way I can work. To go at it like a white man, for me an Indian, is to throw up an immediate barrier between myself and the people. 29

Deloria’s letter speaks to her complicated cultural and professional position between Boas and her Dakota relatives and the frustrations she experienced in trying to mediate her responsibilities to both. A second striking feature of Deloria’s correspondence with Boas is her frequent and direct discussion of money, her precarious financial situation, and the difficulties of reservation life. She often wrote of her negotiation for small contracts with schools, church groups, and social organizations in addition to contracts for more formal ethnographic work. Her frequent references to her struggle to “better herself ” are generally in terms of trying to improve her economic position. She forces the issue of money into a valid subject of discussion with Boas. Her frank approach was anathema in the world of cultural anthropology, which was dominated at the time by “gentlemen scholars.” However, a particularly telling moment of Deloria’s close encounters with academic elitism occurs not with Boas but with Ruth Benedict, one of the first women to rise to prominence as an anthropologist in the United States. Prior to leaving for fieldwork in 1932, Boas had advised Benedict, who supervised students at

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Columbia in his absence, that Deloria should receive an additional $100 per month for her full-time work on the Dakota texts over a period of months. Benedict understood that Deloria was to receive a total of $100 per month. As Deloria recounted to Boas: She [Benedict] told me that she and anyone else who went in the field did it at their own expense, and made me feel very uncomfortable. I think if she and Gladys and others do go out on their own, it is because they wish to. I thought my coming out was sort of a commission, and I know Dr. Klineberg has a salary and travel fund, because I was with him. I can see how some people, who are trying to raise their standards as anthropologists, might be willing to go out at their own expenses for their own advancement. But I do not like the way she made me feel, and would like very much to “Waciko” [pout] but I shall not. 30

Clearly, Deloria is positioning herself here as a professional, not an apprentice. Her pointed recognition of classism and double standards speaks to both her strength and her vulnerability in negotiating a place in the academy. So much of her professional credibility and financial survival hinged on the maintenance and ongoing negotiation of her close relationship with Boas. After Boas’s death in 1942, her financial and professional position was all the more uncertain. 31 A third aspect of this correspondence reflects that, although Boas respected Deloria as a skilled cultural “technician” and as a translator and informant, he had little regard for her ethnological authority. Deloria was expected to translate, not theorize. 32 Their exchanges also point to Deloria’s determined and careful use of gendered cultural authority to challenge Boas and negotiate an alternative understanding. James Walker, a physician who worked on the Pine Ridge Reservation between 1896 and 1914, collected a wide range of accounts of Dakota life gathered from “Native informants,” which were placed on record at the United States Bureau of Ethnology. Boas sought Deloria’s assistance in verifying Walker’s data. Deloria had concerns about the material. While Walker’s original informants were deceased, Deloria located a friend of one of the informants and collaborated with him on review of the manuscripts, providing Boas with a detailed, understated commentary indicating her informant’s skepticism: It is principally about the so-called “Holy Men’s Society.” Walker seems to have understood it as a very exclusive club; according to these informants it was nothing of the sort. It was highly individual, the only occasion for their coming together being when they massed their medicines, at a ritual, which he gave me in detail. I am coming to think that we have been reading much more into the organization of these clubs than actually existed. We have been making a finished, united and exclusive thing of them, and giving them a good deal more formality that they

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deserved. I mean by deserved, due them, I mean the members were not asking for the kind of attention we give them. Nobody ever heard of a closed language, terms that nobody used; had there been such a thing, even such a rumor as this; “The Holy Men have a private language” would have got around; nothing like it ever did — because there wasn’t any. . . . Fire Thunder [her informant] said, “If they wanted a completely private language, they would not have mutilated words already in use, and abbreviated them in that silly way. They would have used figurative language or borrowed from neighboring tongues, not the way this material says.”33

It is interesting to note Deloria’s shift to “we,” joining here with the ethnographers and sharing the blame for their misinterpretations. She then allows her informant, Fire Thunder, to speak with authority of the “mutilation” and “silliness” of Walker’s account. Boas, however, was not so easily swayed. He wrote back indicating he was “not quite satisfied” with her comments and wanted her to do more verification. Boas sent her more of the Walker material, accompanied by the admonishment that he doubted that Walker“had invented the whole mythology.” In later correspondence, Boas questioned “how serious an effort” Deloria had made in getting the information he wanted. Deloria responded pointedly, arguing that she could not find verification if there was none to be found. She reminded Boas of the difficulty of doing fieldwork to gather the data he wanted with no money and by relying on the hospitality of very poor people. She also launched into a sustained critique of Walker’s work. Her informants had told her that Walker had likely edited some of the accounts to remove what he had perceived as “vulgar” content. She also described the understated way in which tribal informants challenged Walker’s authority: The material from pages 152 to 163 is for the most part doctrinal, and concerning it there is always an attitude of reserve, of cautiousness, a willingness to believe it if possible, but a disinclination to say it is so. “Maybe so — but one never hears anything like that now.” “I never heard this, but perhaps . . .” The material from 163 and ending top of 181 strikes no responsive chord anywhere. “That must be from another tribe” “That may be from the Bible” “Somebody made that up according to his fancy”“That’s not Dakota”. . . . It is the section where the elements, like people live out a drama as in Greek mythology. 34

In a 1939 letter to Boas on the subject, Deloria renders her final and strongest opinion: “If an investigator were to find those versions the way Walker has them, and especially that scheme of fours, the gods arranged in classes and hierarchies, which I personally still strongly feel to be the work of a systematic European mind, I should be most interested and surprised.”35 After her carefully developed challenges that placed the authority of Dakota men against that of

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Walker, Deloria claimed her own voice and right to authority as well, posing a challenge not only to Walker but to Boas. Her voice resonated with the truth of her nephew Vine Deloria Jr.’s claim that histories may be misinterpreted but they are never misexperienced. 36 In addition to her careful work verifying and contesting these accounts, Deloria also carried out her own ethnographic research. Her prolific scholarship created a legacy of knowledge in and of Dakota languages and culture. Julian Rice notes that Deloria wrote more pages in Lakota than any scholar before or since. 37 Between 1927 and 1932 she recorded an important body of Dakota stories as told to her by tribal members. Part of this collection of stories was published as Dakota Texts in 1932. The volume, edited by Boas, included sixtyfour tales. Deloria describes the process: “The following Teton-Dakota tales from the Standing Rock, Pine Ridge, and Rosebud Reservations in South Dakota were written down in the original, directly from story-tellers who related them to me. Each tale is accompanied by a free translation which I have tried to keep as simple and close to the Dakota style as possible, and by notes on the grammar and customs. In addition, a literal translation was made for the first sixteen tales.”38 Deloria did not take notes or record her narrators’ stories. Rather, she listened carefully to the stories, perhaps as they were told time and again by various storytellers, trying to capture not only the content but also the nuances of the storytellers’ style and inflections. Reflecting on the process, Deloria writes, “I have honestly tried to recapture these tales as they sing themselves to me.”39 In her ethnographic approach, Deloria inserted herself as a participant in the cultural practice of storytelling. For her, the practice of research was inseparable from the cultural context. Through her incorporation and utilization of cultural practices she sought to capture both the content and the creative generativity of Dakota stories and the storytelling process. This style characterized her engaged and interpretive approach to anthropology. For example, Deloria described the purposes of her ethnology in a funding proposal to the American Philosophical Society in 1944 as follows: Not only what a people do, but how they think and feel to make them do it, are important to an understanding of their culture as a whole. For those inner workings one must go to the people themselves. This account of Dakota life, as it was experienced by those inside it and told frankly in their own language to one of their number, who in turn can interpret ambiguities and supply illustrations from personal experience and observation as a participant of the life, will, it is hoped, be of certain value because of its first-hand character to subsequent studies of communities. 40

Deloria’s body of work has been the subject of considerable analysis and

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interpretation reflecting the “literary turn” in cultural studies. 41 Deloria has been “rediscovered” by a new generation of cultural scholars, myself included, building insights and careers from our encounters with her diverse scholarship. Even as I write, I wonder about my participation in a reconstitution of Deloria as “Native informant,” something of a romanticizing and essentializing of the Native scholar as prototypical interpreter of local knowledge. At the same time, I have found much food for thought in Deloria’s work and in others’ careful assessments of her significant contributions to anthropology. For example, literary scholar and critic Julian Rice has published three recent books that revisit Deloria’s literary, ethnographic, and linguistic contributions. Rice situates Deloria as a forerunner of interpretive anthropology and argues persuasively that Deloria’s experimental ethnographic style, her blurring of genres, and her creative use of texts as cultural critique foreshadowed the heady claims of the “writing culture” crowd by fifty years. Rice praises Deloria as a pioneer of “forthright subjectivity,” recognizing her intentional use of self in crafting oral narrative performance into written text.42 Indeed, Deloria herself acknowledged her intentionality in “interpreting ambiguities,” a bold move from the “objective and impersonal” ethnography of her mentor Boas. 43 As Rice notes, very few native speakers of Lakota could read the written language at the time Deloria was recording these accounts. In effect, Deloria was writing to an imaginary future audience, recognizing the need for a written text to keep the oral tradition alive. 44 Deloria’s very dedication to language can be seen as an act of resistance. At the moment when the use of Native languages was being officially repressed and spoken language forbidden in schools, Deloria was crafting a rich depository of cultural texts, the inscriptions of oral tradition. Like her forebears who handed down cultural history through story, Deloria, too, was crafting knowledge for future generations. And she was well aware of the power of inscription in that process. Even as Deloria incorporated subtle forms of resistance and critique while transforming oral narrative into text, she was searching for means of fulfilling her larger mission, that of making the “Dakota people” understandable to a white audience. Her novel, Waterlily, and Speaking of Indians, her popular account of traditional and contemporary life among the Sioux — projects under way in the late 1930s and early 1940s — were both directed toward that end. Interestingly, both Boas and Benedict supported Deloria in her effort to write for a more popular audience. Perhaps they had come to see, as Deloria did, the need to position oneself politically and engage a broader audience in the questions of cultural understanding. Or perhaps they saw novels and popular accounts as genres more suited to the aspirations of a skilled informant who

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would never gain entrée into the officially credentialed world of the academy. Rice argues convincingly that Waterlily can be read as a guide to Dakota Texts as it incorporates central themes and values of the oral narratives into a single cohesive story, this time designed to engage a white audience. I have written of the power of Waterlily’s presentation of the nuances of everyday life among the Dakota people, through which readers sense intimacy and connection with the characters and their engagement in gender relations and family obligations.45 In this essay I focus on the place of Speaking of Indians in Deloria’s body of work. Speaking of Indians offers glimpses into both traditional and contemporary aspects of Dakota culture. 46 As Beatrice Medicine describes, this work fit nicely into the “war effort” genre of culture and personality studies of the 1940s. 47 In effect, Speaking of Indians, published in 1944, may be thought of as a “politically correct” text of its day, with its appeals to progress, patriotism, and conciliation. However, Deloria also infused that text with a breadth and depth of Dakota cultural history and practices. Even in this, her most earnest appeal to a white readership, Deloria did not forego subtexts of irony and cultural critique. The title itself suggests irony. In 1938, Deloria found a job reading manuscripts for a publishing house. “I enjoy it very much,” she wrote Boas, “but it is amazing what people write about Indians. I have criticized both quite unfavorably; but I had to, they were so trashy, I should not like to be thought to pass on them.”48 As her frustration with the scholarly and popular discourse on American Indians grew, Deloria saw the need to talk back. Her title suggests a practice of contradiction in which, as Deloria was speaking of Indians, she was speaking against the discourse of white image makers. 49 Reminiscent of her letters to Boas, Deloria employs a shifting voice as she positions herself vis-à-vis her audience in Speaking of Indians. At times she writes using the inclusive “we,” drawing the non-Indian reader into intimacy with her while she speaks of the Indian “other.” For example, she writes, “We may know about a people, but we cannot truly know them until we can get within their minds, to some degree at least, and see life from their peculiar point of view.” 50 She then shifts; “we” is now the great American melting pot; “we” signifies Deloria and her extended Dakota family, the boundaries of belonging and difference blurred in the process. Deloria employs shifts of positioning and voice to both connect with her audience and provide a critique, as the following quote illustrates: And when we are through, your particular questions about Indians may still be unanswered. Out of this one situation there will not necessarily come the explanation of many problems deeply affecting other tribes. We in America must be realizing by now that too often all tribes, just because they are native Americans,

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are lumped together with blithe disregard of tribal differences. Do we lump all Europeans just because they occupy the same continent? Don’t we allow for the wide differences in the English, Russian, French, German temperaments? Right here in our own nation we recognize regional differences. By what precedent, then, are all Indian tribes — speaking different languages and living different lives — expected to have the same ideas and problems? And respond to exactly the same approach? 51

The organizing theme of Speaking of Indians is portrayal of a “scheme of life that worked.” Deloria sought to communicate a sense of holistic cultural integrity, marked by harmonious balance of group and individual needs and the complementarity of gender and generational roles. She offers a careful depiction of the logic of kinship that talks back to the constricted images of family and household imposed by federal Indian policy. She speaks of child rearing, the social value of multiple caretakers, and culturally grounded teaching and learning. She challenges a social and economic system based on accumulation by posing “ownership” of things against “honorship” of relatives. She crafts downhome images that connect to the everyday worlds of her readers. Consider, for example, her depiction of culture: We sometimes hear of the “fabric” of a culture as if it were woven in varicolored strands. If only it were! How easily we could pull out the red or the blue, and then examine one color after another. To me it is no simple woven fabric. It is not a fabric at all, really, but more like a marble cake. Dough in various colors — pink, green, brown — is mixed together and then baked. No matter where we lay our knife, we cut through every color, not once but many times. And that’s the kind of thing I felt I had to talk about in this book. 52

Deloria’s vivid metaphor is “thick description” of culture, capturing the depth and texture of cultural meanings as she appeals to her Betty Crocker readership. 53 The image of the marble cake speaks to the complexity of culture and the inscription of intricate cultural patterns within the person. Deloria’s accessible language and imagery convey to a broad readership a sense of the interrelatedness of the individual and the cultural. With this understanding of culture in mind, a non-Indian reader may come to better appreciate that, for Indian people, loss of Native language, for example, is not merely a loss of a thread from the cultural fabric but a threat to the integrity of the cultural whole. In the first sections of Speaking of Indians, Deloria draws her audience in, creating the intimacy of “we-ness,” illustrating the logic, values, and fundamental humanity of Dakota culture. She then confronts the reader with the harsh realities of the devastation wrought by federal Indian policy. It was disruption from the outside, not conflict from within, that threatened cultural integrity:

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It came and without their asking for it — a totally different way of life, far reaching in its influence, awful in its power, insistent in its demands. It came like a flood that nothing could stay. All in a day, it seemed, it had roiled the peacefulness of the Dakota’s lives, confused their minds, and given them but one choice — to conform to it or else! And this it could force them to do because, by its very presence, it was even then making their old way of life no longer feasible. 54

Once again, through her intentional understatement, Deloria speaks to the damaging legacy of history even as she guards the connections to her readers that she has nurtured from the opening pages. It is here she includes the testimony of the Dakota elder quoted earlier in this essay, who witnessed the Ghost Dance at Wounded Knee as a boy. It is through the innocence and confusions of a child’s-eye view that she represents to her white audience this poignant struggle for connection to history, memory, and ancestry among the Dakota people and the brutality that followed. 55 Even as she recognizes the power of this “new order,” Deloria challenges constructions of Dakota people as passive victims. She describes, instead, their capacities as creative social actors. For example, she tells of the Dakota use of government-issue muslin to line the insides of their new domiciles — log homes — in the post-allotment era: The people began to make ingenious adaptations of some elements in their old life to the new. For instance, at one period they transferred the art decorations of the tipi to the loghouse. Out of G.I. muslin they made very large wall-coverings, a carry-over from the dew-curtain of a tipi and called by the same term, ozan. On these they painted beautiful designs and made lively black and white drawings of historical scenes, of hunting or battles or peace-making between tribes, and courtship scenes, games, and suchlike activities of the past. People went visiting just to see one another’s pictographs and to hear the stories they preserved. 56

The incorporation and refashioning of the material culture of white society served to create a context of familiarity within the foreign walls of the log home. Deloria’s story merges incorporation and creativity as the muslin is taken in and made over. The story implicitly suggests resistance as the outside walls of the log homes stand stoic and silent, not divulging the activity within. The very materials of the white system become the walls of resistance and the symbols of creativity. As Deloria argues, reservation life has never been static. It is a moving picture of continuous images. And parts of that cultural dynamic were carefully covered, kept away from the intrusive and judgmental gaze of whites. Deloria uses her storyteller’s craft to create bridging images, even using these very walls of creativity and resistance as bridges to cultural understanding. 57

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Policy and Positioning Deloria also sought to position herself as a political actor in the New Deal during the 1930s and to make her voice heard in the decisions that affected Native Americans’ lives. As was the case in academic realms, Deloria’s knowledge and voice were often ignored or appropriated to give legitimacy to the work of others. She told Boas of her deep disappointment of having written to Eleanor Roosevelt in 1935 regarding her interest in Indian policy work and never receiving a reply. She indicated her reluctant support of John Collier’s administration of Indian Affairs but noted his failure to invite Native Americans, let alone Native American women, into his circle of decision makers. Once again she was left out. She wrote to Boas of her double bind of being “too educated for an Indian,” overqualified for government posts, and underqualified for a legitimate place [189], (57) in the academy. Deloria’s dilemmas as a political actor were exemplified in her 1939 collaboration on a study entitled The Navajo Indian Problem. The introduction to Lines: 633 t the reports of this inquiry identified the researchers (Deloria and three white ——— men) and represented Deloria as a “Sioux woman and an anthropologist.” Her 13.0pt P Native status was given priority in defining the legitimacy of the project. The in——— troduction further stated that “the participation of an Indian in the inquiry has Normal Pag been especially gratifying to the Phelps-Stokes Fund [the research sponsors]. * PgEnds: Eje Miss Deloria’s services have guaranteed that the interpretations and views of the Indians themselves are sincerely recognized in the conclusions presented.”58 [189], (57) Deloria was placed in the awkward political position of representing the “Indian view,” suggesting that intertribal diversity is reducible to a single voice. It is this kind of political appropriation of the Native voice that Beatrice Medicine has resisted through her writings and career, challenging the role of anthropologist as the Indian’s image maker. 59 The political context of Deloria’s work on The Navajo Indian Problem captures the contradictions faced by Native women scholars. As a “Sioux” she is asked to “stand for” her culture. As an applied anthropologist she is to infuse a liberal agenda with culturally sensitive knowledge. As a woman she is to labor above and beyond the white men who gain legitimacy through her. For example, Deloria spent six months with the Navajos, while each of her colleagues made a trip of one to two weeks to the reservation. The research, conducted in 1938 and 1939, was carried out at the behest of Collier, an avowed liberal credited with designing the self-determination policies of the “Indian New Deal” in the 1930s, yet it appears that the extent of Deloria’s participation was determined by others. Called upon from time to time to labor at the margins, offering her


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skills to inform social policy, she was never recognized as a bona fide shaper of that agenda. 60 By the post–World War II years, the reform agenda of the Collier administration was giving way to more repressive federal Indian policy focused on termination of the reservation system, displacement of Indian peoples to urban areas, and population control.61 Deloria’s efforts to communicate a vision of a cohesive scheme of life that worked were quickly eclipsed by an image of Native American as social problem. Indian people were the topic of widespread social science and, more specifically, social work attention, with numerous studies belaboring the pathology, hopelessness, and alienation of Indian life. 62 Leading child welfare organizations joined with the Bureau of Indian Affairs in sanctioning further cultural fragmentations by the systematic removal of Indian children to nonIndian foster and adoptive homes. It is perhaps no surprise that Waterlily, Deloria’s evocative fictional account of “traditional” Dakota life drawn from women’s experiences, was turned down by publishing houses in the 1950s. Perhaps against this backdrop of “social pathology,” the images of generativity, healing, and supportive bonds of kinship central to Deloria’s novel did not capture the imagination of publishers. Deloria’s lyric depictions of caregiving, the connectedness of mother — child relationships, and the cultural capacity to incorporate, resist, and create posed a political challenge to the prevailing white constructions of the “Indian problem.” Such images could not compete with those of the squalor of reservation life that justified and fueled an intensive campaign of cultural genocide through the removal of Indian children from family and community.63 Despite Deloria’s sense of urgency to generate a counternarrative to the “social problem” discourse, the voice of Waterlily, Deloria’s strong, culturally grounded protagonist, was rendered silent for forty years. Through the efforts of Deloria’s family, the Dakota Indian Foundation, the Ella C. Deloria Project, and the University of Nebraska Press, Waterlily was published posthumously in 1988, seventeen years after Deloria’s death. Deloria also did not live to see passage of the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, social policy that she would have been proud of, which sought to reverse the damaging legacy of child removal. The Power of Performance The contextual layers in which Deloria’s work is embedded reflect the constraints of intellectual and political patriarchy as well as the power of Euro-white paradigms in restricting the expression of Native American people’s voices. Ironically, Deloria wrote of a “scheme of life that worked” while her own life was subjected to the fragmenting forces of her multiple subject positionings. Con-

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tradictory disciplinary practices collided in the making of a good woman, relative, scholar, Indian, informant, and ethnographer. Deloria’s respect for Boas, her commitment to scholarship, and her urgency and understatement demonstrate her capacity to bridge these seeming contradictions and create texts that serve as “cultural alloys.” Perhaps it was in her own commitment to and practice of performance that Deloria could most fully give voice to these embodied contradictions and transform them into resources for cultural engagement and understanding. Performance is a central and contested theme in the conceptualization of culture. As Paul Bohannan writes,“Culture is created from time to time, but it is performed all the time. Once it is created, constant performance keeps the culture alive.”64 Performance has been variably conceptualized as the instantiation of culture, as the presentation of self in everyday life, or as the “doable” in social action, be that ritual acts, speech acts, daily routines, or theatrical productions. 65 According to Gary Palmer and William Jankowiak, “It is through performances, whether individual or collective, that humans project images of themselves and the world to their audiences.” 66 These various conceptualizations of performance, ranging from the mundane to the spectacular, hold in common notions of self-reflexivity, communication, audience, context, practice, and creativity. I see in Deloria’s legacy a self-conscious engagement with diverse forms of performance, encompassing presentation of self in everyday life as well as the crafting of culture, history, and memory. For example, I suggest that there was an element of performance in Deloria’s letters to Boas. Through letters, she engaged Boas in dialogue in which she spoke from her cultural position and often employed stories to teach him. Some letters are marked by a multivocality as Deloria taps the experiences and authority of other narrators. Through letters, Deloria told stories of kinship and hardship, and demanded response. Performance played an integral part of Deloria’s practice of cultural mediation. It is through performance that body, voice, and history merged in creative interaction and possibility with both Indian and non-Indian audiences. Deloria’s various references to performance in her work suggest her commitment to standing with a community and engaging its members in a participatory way, envisioning and evoking collective imagery. In her recording of Dakota stories, she tries to capture as much the enactment, and its generative force for social cohesion, as she does the content of the story. Just as she turned to the creative process of the novel and popular text to transcend the constricting limits of “objective”ethnography, so she sought to transform and transcend textual limits through performance. Throughout her life, Deloria turned to performance as a means of building

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community and a means of financial support. During her numerous stints in New York, she supplemented her income with cultural performances for social clubs and civic groups. In 1927 she wrote to Boas of her success at writing and producing a pageant, “Indian Progress: Commemorating a Half Century of Endeavor among the Indians of North America,”with students at the Haskell Indian School. She hoped to find work creating similar projects for other groups. In 1939 she was hired to plan a community program for a new community house in Flandreau, South Dakota, and in 1940 she was hired to work with a “mixed group” in Robson County, North Carolina, who, as she later wrote, “wanted to be Indians.” There had been an intensive assessment, including blood tests, cephalic measures, and tests of hair texture, but “there was no trace of Indian language among them.” Deloria helped the group organize their own community pageant, apparently to create something of their own “origin myth” and to celebrate their emerging sense of and desire for a collective identity. 67 These examples suggest that Deloria took liberties as she engaged with the risks of theater and the politics of representation therein. 68 But she was no stranger to these politics, and performance more than text offered a dynamic venue for contradicting static images. In his analysis of Deloria’s text of “The Prairie Dogs,” one of the many oral narratives she recorded in written Lakota text in the 1930s, Rice notes the role of warrior societies in the creation of community, and theater as a source for cultural vitality and generativity.69 It is this power of performance to communicate and validate culture, community, and collective consciousness that Deloria kept alive in her writing and practice. Rice praises her creative bricolage in remaking of performance into written text. Yet Deloria continually returned to the practice of performance, her own culturally grounded model for participatory teaching and learning. The very nature of performance resists the fragmenting and partializing practices to which American Indian people had long been subjected. For Deloria, performance was at once an act of resistance, incorporation, and creativity, a voiced and embodied expression of cultural knowledge, an active and reflexive practice that resists images of passivity. Deloria seemed to share Dorinne Kondo’s belief that theater (in the literal sense here) has been a vehicle of both risk and empowerment for artists and audiences in the margins. 70 Yet Deloria’s conception of performance extended beyond the literal crafting of pageantry to embrace the value of what anthropologist Faye Harrison has termed “anthroperformance,” that is, the communication of the social and cultural processes of lived experience through fiction, drama, and performance in its many permutations. 71 Deloria’s legacy speaks to the political and pedagogical power of performance, a means of claiming cultural

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history and memory and communicating it within and across borders. It is in the act of performance that I can imagine Deloria most fully engaged with the harmonies of which she wrote: Dakota woman ethnographer, storyteller, center stage, teaching and learning with her audience. It was the power of performance that cost the Ghost Dancers their lives in 1890. It was the power of performance, culture in action, that Ella Deloria was dedicated to keeping alive. Notes 1. James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 2. George E. Marcus and Michael J. M. Fischer addressed these themes in Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 3. For feminist critiques on this erasure of women’s contributions to critical and “experimental” anthropology, see Deborah A. Gordon, “Writing Culture, Writing Feminism: The Poetics and Politics of Experimental Ethnography,” Inscriptions 3–4 (1988): 6–24; Frances Mascia-Lees, Patricia Sharpe, and Colleen Ballerino Cohen, “The Postmodernist Turn in Anthropology: Cautions from a Feminist Perspective,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 1 (1989): 7–33; and Catherine Lutz, “The Erasure of Women’s Writing in Sociocultural Anthropology,” American Ethnologist 17, no. 4 (1990): 611–27. For critical reflections on the contributions of women of color see Gloria Anzaldúa, Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Color (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Foundation Books, 1990); Deborah A. Gordon, “The Politics of Ethnographic Authority: Race and Writing in the Ethnography of Margaret Mead and Zora Neale Hurston,” in Modernist Anthropology: From Fieldwork to Text, ed. Marc Manganaro (Princeton nj: Princeton University Press, 1990), 146–62; and Gretchen M. Bataille and Kathleen Mullen Sands, American Indian Women Telling Their Lives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984). On the dilemmas of “Native” anthropologists see Beatrice Medicine,“Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining ‘Native,’ ” in Applied Anthropology in America, ed. Elizabeth Eddy and William Partridge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 282–96; and Christine Obbo, “Adventures with Fieldnotes,” in Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology, ed. Roger Sanjek (Ithaca ny: Cornell University Press, 1990), 290–302. 4. The term “Sioux” remains widely used to refer generically to several Northern Plains tribal groups with diverse band divisions and dialects. According to Julian Rice in Deer Women and Elk Men: The Lakota Narratives of Ella Deloria (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), “Sioux” is a French corruption of the Ojibwa word for snake (1). Deloria, like her anthropological contemporaries, generally used the term “Dakota” to refer to all of the divisions of the Sioux people. As noted in the publisher’s preface to Deloria’s novel Waterlily (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), the term “Dakota” is no longer commonly used (xi). However, throughout

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this essay I have retained the terms used by Deloria in her writings. Likewise, when citing other authors, I employ their terminology. For discussion of the political and linguistic groups that compose the “Sioux” see William K. Powers, Oglala Religion (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 3–14. 5. Ella Cara Deloria’s works include “The Sun Dance of the Oglala Sioux,” Journal of American Folklore 42 (1929): 354–413; Dakota Texts (New York: G. E. Stechert, 1932); Speaking of Indians (1944; rpt., Vermillion sd: State Publishing, 1983); and Waterlily; Franz Boas and Ella Deloria, Dakota Grammar, Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences 23, Second Memoir (Washington dc: Government Printing Office, 1941); and Thomas Jones et al., The Navajo Indian Problem: An Inquiry (New York: PhelpsStokes, 1939). In addition, Deloria wrote a number of manuscripts, some of which are part of the Boas Collection of the American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, and some of which are part of the Deloria Family Collection, Dakota Indian Foundation, Chamberlain, South Dakota. 6. Janet L. Finn, “Ella Cara Deloria and Mourning Dove: Writing for Cultures, Writing against the Grain,” in Women Writing Culture, ed. Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 131–47. The essay compared these women’s works and lives. I am deeply grateful to Ruth Behar for her supportive guidance on this project, which began in her“Women Writing Culture”seminar at the University of Michigan in 1991. I would like to thank Deborah Gordon for encouraging me to reflect further on Deloria’s work and inviting me to participate in the panel on “Feminist Predecessors, Genealogies, and Generations” at the 1996 meeting of the American Anthropological Association. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer at Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies for the careful critique that helped me rethink specific parts of this essay. Anthropologist Beatrice Medicine used the term “cultural mediator” to describe Deloria’s work in her biographical essay “Ella C. Deloria: The Emic Voice,” melus: Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 7, no. 4 (1980): 23–30. My knowledge of Deloria’s work comes from what I have read of her published texts (in English) and from portions of her correspondence with Boas that have been published or excerpted in other unpublished works. I am unable to appreciate fully the significance of her contributions, as I am not a speaker of the Dakota languages in which she wrote. I am especially indebted to Janette Murray, who included extended excerpts of Deloria’s correspondence in her unpublished 1974 dissertation on Deloria’s literary contributions, “Ella Deloria: A Biographical Sketch and Literary Analysis” (PhD diss., University of North Dakota, 1974). 7. For discussion of women, subjectivity, subject positioning, and “positionality,” see, e.g., Graciela Hernandez, “Multiple Subjectivities and Strategic Positionality: Zora Neale Hurston’s Experimental Ethnographies,” in Behar and Gordon, Women Writing Culture, 148–65; and Linda Alcoff,“Cultural Feminism versus Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13, no. 3 (1988): 405–36.

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8. The notion of “salvage ethnography” has been used critically to describe anthropological efforts to reclaim vestiges of the “vanishing Indian” that have contributed to fixed and static images of American Indian cultural history. See Vine Deloria Jr., We Talk, You Listen: New Tribes, New Turf (New York: Macmillan, 1970), for a critique of the flat and unidimensional representations constructed by Anglo society; see also D’arcy McNickle, “American Indians Who Never Were,” Indian Historian 3, no. 3 (1970): 4–7; and Beatrice Medicine, “The Anthropologist as the Indian’s Image Maker,” in The American Indian Reader in Anthropology, ed. J. Henry (San Francisco: Indian Historian Press, 1972), 23–27. These texts specifically critique historical and anthropological literature that present Indian life as fixed in time and cultural content. 9. Paula Gunn Allen, “Who Is Your Mother? Red Roots of White Feminism,” excerpt from The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Tradition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), in The Graywolf Annual Five: Multicultural Literacy, ed. Rick Simonson and Scott Walker (St. Paul: Graywolf Press, 1988), 19. 10. Ella Deloria belonged to the Yankton group of Sioux. Her father became an Episcopal priest and served as missionary among the Tetons on the Standing Rock Reservation. 11. John H. Oberly, “Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs” (1888), in The American Indian and the United States: A Documentary History, vols. 1 and 2, ed. Wilcomb E. Washburn (New York: Random House, 1973), 420–25; and Thomas J. Morgan,“Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs” (1889, 1890), in Wilcomb E. Washburn, The American Indian and the United States, 428–35, 459. 12. Morgan, “Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs” (1890), 448. 13. Peter Nabokov, ed., Native American Testimony, an Anthology of Indian and White Relations: First Encounter to Dispossession (1978; rpt., New York: Penguin Books, 1990), 253. 14. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 53–54. 15. John Prater, “Ella Deloria: Varied Intercourse,” Wicazo Sa Review 11, no. 2 (1995): 40. 16. For biographical data see Murray, “Ella Deloria”; Medicine, “Ella C. Deloria: The Emic Voice”; and Alice Picotte, “Biographical Sketch of the Author,” in Deloria, Waterlily, 229–31. 17. Picotte, “Biographical Sketch of the Author,” 230. 18. Ella Deloria to H. E. Beebe, December 1952, cited in Raymond J. DeMallie, afterword, in Deloria, Waterlily, 237. 19. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 53–54. 20. Deloria’s work in The Navajo Indian Problem offers a good example of her willingness to grapple with here-and-now pragmatic concerns from a reformist perspective while trying to remain respectful of traditional practices and, in the process, inform others of those practices. Similarly, in a section titled “Toward the New Community” in Speaking of Indians, Deloria writes of “progress,” the need for government help, and the importance of Christian upbringing in creating a future of hope for Indian peoples (98–105). She presents a modernist view consistent with the reformist agenda

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of non-Indian policy makers of the era. Yet in the same text she provides detailed accounts to both educate her reader about traditional cultural practices and critique the violation and disruption of those practices. 21. Murray offers a more in-depth life story in “Ella Deloria,” 45–124. 22. Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 102. 23. This theme is further developed in Finn, “Ella Cara Deloria and Mourning Dove,” 137–39. 24. For a detailed discussion of Boas’s contributions to American anthropology see George W. Stocking Jr.,“Ideas and Institutions in American Anthropology: Thoughts toward a History of the Interwar Years,” in The Ethnographer’s Magic and Other Essays in the History of Anthropology (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 114– 77. Stocking discusses the tensions between history and science that shaped Boas’s ethnographic inquiry. It is important to note that Boas drew on the data gathered from his rigorous scientific inquiry to challenge the racism inherent in social evolutionism. Ironically, the epistemology and methodology he drew on to inform cultural understanding and challenge racist discourses may have limited his ability to appreciate Deloria’s culturally grounded way of knowing the world. 25. Stocking, “Ideas and Institutions,” 120–21. 26. Leslie White, in The Ethnography and Ethnology of Franz Boas, Texas Memorial Museum Bulletin 6 (Austin: University of Texas, 1963), 22. 27. Deloria to Boas, October 4, 1929, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 107. 28. Boas to Deloria, October 28, 1929, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 107. 29. Deloria to Boas, July 11, 1932, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 114. 30. Deloria to Boas, July 11, 1932, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 113–14. 31. Despite this tension, it was Benedict who assisted Deloria in the editing of Waterlily for publication. However, after Benedict’s death in 1948, the plans for publication did not materialize. By 1954 she had received rejections from publishers who did not believe there would be a large enough audience for the book. Waterlily was published posthumously in 1988. 32. In fairness to Boas, it should be noted that his own approach to the study of culture was one of description more than explanation. 33. Deloria to Boas, January 6, 1938, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 128. 34. Deloria to Boas, June 28, 1938, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 131. 35. Deloria to Boas, May 12, 1939, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 133. 36. Vine Deloria Jr., foreword, in Nabokov, Native American Testimony, xviii. 37. See Julian Rice, Ella Deloria’s “The Buffalo People” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994), Ella Deloria’s “Iron Hawk” (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), and Deer Women and Elk Men for a thorough examination of a significant body of Deloria’s previously unpublished works. I use “Dakota” here as Deloria uses the term. Rice notes that Deloria wrote extensively in several Dakota dialects. He specifically credits Deloria with writing more in Lakota language than any other scholar (Deer Women and Elk Men, 2).

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38. Deloria, introduction, Dakota Texts, ix. 39. Deloria quoted in Rice, Deer Women and Elk Men, 11. 40. Deloria, report to the American Philosophical Society, American Philosophical Society Yearbook (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1944), 221. 41. See Rice, Ella Deloria’s “The Buffalo People,” Ella Deloria’s “Iron Hawk,” and Deer Women and Elk Men; Prater, “Ella Deloria,” 40–47; Patricia C. Albers, “Voices from Within: Narrative Writings of American Indian Women,” Humanity and Society 13, no. 4 (1989): 463–70; and Finn, “Ella Cara Deloria and Mourning Dove,” 131–47. 42. Rice, Deer Women and Elk Men, 15. 43. In a letter to Virginia Lightfoot in 1946, Deloria expressed her desire to communicate to a wide audience but noted that “ethnology has to be objective and impersonal” (Waterlily, 238). This echoes the philosophy of Franz Boas. 44. Rice, Deer Women and Elk Men, 10–12. 45. Finn, “Ella Cara Deloria and Mourning Dove,” 141–43. 46. Although writers commenting on Speaking of Indians use both “Sioux” and “Dakota” in reference to the text, Deloria uses “Dakota” throughout the text. 47. Medicine, “Ella C. Deloria: The Emic Voice,” 23–30. 48. Deloria to Boas, February 12, 1938, in Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 130. 49. I borrow the notion of “contra-diction” as “back talk” from Kathleen Stewart’s “Back Talking the Wilderness: Appalachian En-genderings,” in Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture, ed. Faye Ginsberg and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (Boston: Beacon Press, 1990), 44–50. I discuss contra-diction as a form of critical practice through which people respond to conflict discourses, define what is at stake in their struggles, and challenge the bounds of the “talkable,” i.e., within the limits of sanctioned discourse, in my Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 13–14. 50. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 12. 51. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 13. 52. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 12. 53. I draw here from Clifford Geertz’s interpretive approach to culture as addressed in his essay “Thick Description: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Culture” in his book The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 3–30. 54. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 50. 55. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 54–55. 56. Deloria, Speaking of Indians, 60–61. 57. Deloria’s imagery was also an inspiration to other Native American women anthropologists. For example, Beatrice Medicine uses the G.I. muslin story to represent Deloria’s descriptive ethnographic style and her sensitivity to the tensions of change and continuity. Writing with Patricia Albers, Medicine returns to Deloria’s example to set the stage for her own exploration of Sioux women’s roles in the production of ceremonial objects. Patricia Albers and Beatrice Medicine, “The Role of Sioux Women in the Production of Ceremonial Objects: The Case of the Star Quilt,” in The

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Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women, ed. Albers and Medicine (New York: University Press of America, 1983), 123–40. 58. Jones et al., The Navajo Indian Problem, ix. 59. See, e.g., Medicine, “The Anthropologist as the Indian’s Image Maker” and “Learning to Be an Anthropologist and Remaining ‘Native.’ ” 60. For further discussion of the Collier administration and American Indian women, see Alison Bernstein, “A Mixed Record: The Political Enfranchisement of American Indian Women during the New Deal,” Journal of the West 23, no. 1 (1984): 13–20. Bernstein argues that government policy imposed a white male model in which Indian women were viewed in the same light as white women, thereby ignoring their traditional political roles. 61. Roger Herring, “The American Indian Family: Dissolution by Coercion,” Journal of Multicultural Counseling and Development 17, no. 1 (1989): 4–13. 62. For further discussion of the “social problem” approach see, e.g., Rayna Green, “Native American Women: A Review Essay,” Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and Society 6, no. 2 (1980): 248–67; and Jeanne Guillemin, Urban Renegades: The Cultural Strategies of American Indians (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). 63. See Herring, “The American Indian Family”; and Terry Cross, “Drawing on Cultural Tradition in Indian Child Welfare Practice,” Social Casework 67, no. 5 (1986): 283–89. 64. From Paul Bohannan, We the Alien: An Introduction to Cultural Anthropology, cited as epigraph in Gary B. Palmer and William R. Jankowiak, “Performance and Imagination: Toward an Anthropology of the Spectacular and the Mundane,” Cultural Anthropology 11, no. 2 (1996): 225. 65. In “Performance and Imagination,” Palmer and Jankowiak also provide a comprehensive overview of theoretical perspectives on performance and culture. 66. Palmer and Jankowiak, “Performance and Imagination,” 226. 67. Murray, “Ella Deloria,” 95, 123, 134–40; and Deloria, Speaking of Indians, i–xiv. 68. Dorinne Kondo writes of the risks of theater and the politics of representation in her essay, “Bad Girls: Theater, Women of Color, and the Politics of Representation,” in Behar and Gordon, Women Writing Culture, 49–64. 69. Rice, Ella Deloria’s “The Buffalo People,” 56–60. 70. Kondo, “Bad Girls,” 63. 71. Faye Harrison, “Anthropology as an Agent of Transformation: Introductory Comments and Queries,” in Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation, ed. Harrison (Washington dc: American Anthropological Association, 1991), 1–14.

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Writing Women at a Distance

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In previous sections, authors base their writing on personal experiences, the experiences of close relatives or “known others,” or on more distant but still firsthand accounts gathered by the authors in the form of oral histories or ethnographic interviews. These techniques open to us topics and issues as diverse as lesbian mothering and intergenerational transnational identities. In this section, authors are more distant in time and place from the women they are writing about, and the authors are writing about women who left behind some form of personal writing in the form of diaries or letters. Working without the advantages (and constraints) of firsthand experiences and encounters with living sources, these authors analyze women’s self-representations in their writings to illuminate the historical and cultural contexts in which they lived. Women’s exclusion from powerful political positions and much of recorded public life means that there are far fewer formal documents of the sort available to writers of history and biography of men, and as a result historians have — by necessity — had to rely on relatively few written sources. 1 Even when the field of writing is narrowed to diary writing, where women have been more prolific than men from the late nineteenth century onward, only 10 percent of the diaries archived in library collections are written by women.2 And, as Patricia McClelland Miller pointed out in 1979, the least visible people in history remain poor women, women of color, and lesbians — ordinary women who rarely left any written documentation of their personal lives. 3 In personal writing, as in so many other fields, feminist scholars found that they first had to distinguish women’s writings from those of men. Above all, they needed to learn how to read the significance of the commonplace. 4 The first two selections in this section are based on the diaries of ordinary women — one the owner of a boardinghouse during the Great Depression, the other an isolated rural housewife struggling with a son’s death and her husband’s drinking. Ordinary women’s lives have nearly always revolved around “women’s work” of housekeeping and child care, but for many women those tasks also provided their family’s livelihood. 5 Kari Boyd McBride, contemplating the act of “accounting” in “A (Boarding) House Is Not a Home: Women’s Work and Woman’s Worth on the Margins of Domesticity,” finds in her grandmother’s letters and household diaries documentation of the prodigious amount of women’s work she performed in running a boardinghouse during the 1930s. This “accounting” might at first be dismissed as tedious list-

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making, but it is rather, McBride contends, the act of “fashioning a self ” that justified her grandmother’s existence and worth in a society that took women’s work utterly for granted. At the same time, McBride concludes that even such a positive act of self-fashioning reinforced conformity to the mold of “domestic slave” created by women such as her grandmother, and helped to construct unfulfilling female roles. For McBride, her grandmother’s writing “personalizes theory” in a way that makes visible women’s erasure from the economy as well as the everyday struggle such women had in making their worth visible to a world that valorized only men’s work. As Pamela Riney-Kehrberg reminds us in “ ‘Broke In Spirits’: Death, Depression, and Endurance through Writing,” much of the work of women’s historians has been in recovering voices hidden and silenced. Of these, the voices of women who lived in families that coped with abuse, mental illness, and addiction are yet to be thoroughly documented. For Riney-Kehrberg, the process of recovery begins with the insights gleaned from firsthand accounts left in letters and diaries provided by women who experienced such existence in isolation. RineyKehrberg places the diary of midwestern farm woman Martha Friesen within the context of other women who confided in their diaries what they were too ashamed to confide to friends — in this case, the alcoholism of Friesen’s husband and grief over the death of her son. Although such diaries are rare, those that do exist suggest the particular burden rural women experienced in times of hardship as well as the role that writing — even for an audience of one — played in helping such women endure. Finally, working from the published writing and unpublished letters of second-generation Chinese American Flora Belle Jan and from interviews with her family members, Judy Yung, in “It is hard to be born a woman but hopeless to be born a Chinese,” explores the complexities of acculturation facing a generation that grew up in the 1920s. Jan’s life shows how history and culture shaped a self-professed rebel of her time and how exclusion by dominant white culture constrained her efforts to define a niche of her own between two cultures, including the constraints of marriage, numerous abortions, and a stint in China during escalating hostilities with Japan. Yung’s analysis illuminates the uses of biography to show how historical and cultural influences have shaped the lives of women of color and acculturated second-generation immigrants. Biography is particularly useful in showing the diversity of responses to conditions affecting a group of individuals facing similar forces of history. 6 Because of the limited number of personal writings and the limits on our own understanding, writing women at a distance will always be an uncertain business, lacking the “reality check” provided in the closer relationships described

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in other sections of this volume. But women’s history, which has grown from almost nothing to a major field in the past quarter century, depends on women writing women at a distance. As the examples in this section illustrate, we are learning to do that with greater and greater fidelity to the distant women whose lives we represent. Notes 1. Elizabeth Jameson, “Women as Workers, Women as Civilizers: True Womanhood in the American West,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 7, no. 3 (1984): 2. This article maps the challenges historians face in correcting the most entrenched dualistic stereotypes about gender and race in the American West. Jameson focuses on the necessity of understanding the nature of women’s work in an approach to rewriting western history. 2. Margo Culley, ed., A Day at a Time: The Diary Literature of American Women from 1764 to the Present (New York: The Feminist Press, 1985), 3 no. 1, 4. 3. Patricia McClelland Miller, “Three Perspectives on Method: The Individual Life,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 4, no. 3 (1979): 70, 73. Miller addresses the challenges facing biographers of women, specifically lesbian women, and the need to critically examine the genre of biography before selecting individuals as “representative” of women generally. See also Nan Alamilla Boyd, “Same-Sex Sexuality in Western Women’s History,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 3 (2001): 13–21. 4. A key text in this rethinking was Elizabeth Hampsten’s Read This Only to Yourself: The Private Writings of Midwestern Women, 1880–1910 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). Seeming to understand the ordinary writings of ordinary women, Hampsten commented, “If it is women one wants to know, traditional tools of scholarship are not necessarily prepared to help” (xi). 5. The invisibility of women’s work at home is extended into the workplace. Laurie Mercier contends that the emphasis of labor historians on male wage-workers has occluded the contributions of women and people of color in segmented industrial division of labor in “Reworking Race, Class, and Gender into Pacific Northwest History,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 3 (2001): 61–74. 6. For an overview of writing multiracial history of the American West, see Vicki L. Ruiz, “Shaping Public Space/Enunciating Gender: A Multiracial Historiography of the Women’s West, 1995–2000,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 22, no. 3 (2001): 22–25.

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A (Boarding) House Is Not a Home Women’s Work and Woman’s Worth on the Margins of Domesticity kar i boyd mcbr ide

[First Page] [205], (1) The Christmas card I received from my mother’s cousin reminisced about the old days and recalled in particular my grandmother’s zeal for cleanliness: “Your grandmother was a wonderful housekeeper,” the note said. “I can still remember her washing and drying the insides of milk bottles before putting them out on the porch.” This example of her fanaticism didn’t surprise me, for my sister and I had been working to index and transcribe my family’s letters and diaries that span the first half of the twentieth century, and my grandmother’s dedication to rigorous standards of housekeeping emerges as a theme both in her letters and in those of her daughters. Indeed, my grandmother’s need to catalog her work stands out so starkly as to make me speculate about the significance of that work to her understanding of her life and to her identity. Certainly she was not unique in the type of work she did. In the 1920s and 1930s, the lives of lower- and middle-class women revolved around “women’s work”: cleaning, cooking, laundry, and child care. But the fact that my grandmother ran a small hotel — really a boardinghouse small enough that she did most of the work rather than supervise a large staff — intensified and problematized her relationship to that work. Her three daughters, Amy, Iola (my mother), and Olivia, had been her work companions for a brief period, but when two of them left to pursue careers, my grandmother and Amy, who remained at home and who was the primary diarist, continued to perform women’s work in an increasingly non-family context that seems to have problematized my grandmother’s sense of self. After reading her letters over and over, I have come to the conclusion that she struggled with this problem of self-worth by using her letter writing as a context for coming to grips with her relationship to work, fashioning an acceptable self within that familial mode of discourse. The letters


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become a kind of accounting, one that attempts somehow to make sense of the discontinuities of her life and to make her life and her work count both within and outside the family. A host of recent studies of housework have attempted to understand and place in a larger social and economic framework the kind of work my grandmother and most other women performed. Many of those works begin with an effort to “shore up obvious gaps in existing theories,” as Dolores Hayden puts it, by situating women’s work in Marxist paradigms and fitting women’s work to established categories of labor: productive and nonproductive, alienated and unalienated. 1 Marx argued that women’s labor in the household does not necessarily result in the alienation that characterizes men’s labor in a capitalistic society; women do not, in Philip J. Kain’s words, “engage in activity that gives rise to a product, result, or institution that then escapes the control of the individuals involved.”2 By virtue of its association with child care, housework can be “meaningful and satisfying in a way that alienated factory work can never be.”3 It is only when women are excluded from social, economic, religious, or political spheres outside the family that “shape the cultural world in accord with their own dynamic,” or when women combine factory work with domestic duties, that women’s household labor become alienated and alienating. “Housework and child care, which could be ends in themselves, are turned into means to produce a commodity” when they merely support the laboring life of the wage earner, turning the home into an “alienated realm.” 4 Such analysis provides some insight into my grandmother’s alienation from her labor when it was done for non-family members. On the other hand, since there is no time in recent memory when women have not been subordinate participants in the public dialogues that “shape the cultural world” and determine the material conditions and ideologies that construct housework as a cultural practice, such a theory would seem to provide little help in understanding the pressures that determine the scope of women’s domestic lives and how their work is valued culturally. Indeed, in traditional Marxist analysis it is the lack of economic “value” that, paradoxically, gives women’s work its integrity. As Kain puts it, “A wife does not produce products that can be exchanged on a market for surplus value. Thus, however oppressive her condition, a wife does not produce surplus value and thus her husband cannot appropriate surplus value. Therefore, he does not exploit his wife.” 5 But the husband’s wages, while representing the theft of his surplus labor value rather than fair compensation, represent, at the same time, the “values” of a society that “values” what is male, public, and “productive.” Partial value is still value. Here Margaret Benston’s argument still provides a helpful analysis

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of the gendered nature of the critical problem whereby women’s work is not considered to be real work, either in Marxist analysis or in the values of the society: “In a society where money determines value, women are a group who work outside the money economy. Their work is not worth money, is therefore valueless, is therefore not even real work. And women themselves who do this valueless work, can hardly be expected to be worth as much as men, who work for money.” 6 As Marilyn Waring has argued at length, the fact that women’s labor does not count — is not seen to produce value, surplus or otherwise — is not affirming but diminishing of women’s status. 7 Androcentrism, then, is an integral piece both of the economic systems that efface the value of women’s work and of the palimpsest of economic theories that hide or romanticize its erasure. Moreover, Kain and others, like Marx himself, describe production and alienation in the context of a prototypical factory-worker family. But women, both urban and rural, cannot always be placed securely in rigidly delineated categories of class or in the idealized either/or of the private and public domains. As Rayna Rapp has noted, while most Americans identify themselves as middle class, that category is a “highly ideological construction” that bears little relation to the labor and production categories that distinguish lower from middle class in Marxist analyses. 8 And while the rise of capitalism certainly saw the articulation of gendered spheres of activity, with the cult of domesticity providing a pseudoreligious ideal for women of both middle and lower classes, the reality of many women’s lives blurred those boundaries in ways that, paradoxically, maintained the fiction of women’s domestic nature. 9 Cultural strictures could define some housework as unpaid and other as paid while consigning both to a “private” invisibility with negligible rewards. While, in Alice Kessler-Harris’s phrase, “women have always worked,” often that work allowed a woman to remain within the private sphere while contributing materially to her family’s support. 10 Indeed, Stevi Jackson and others have demonstrated how, through a kind of patriarchal imperative, trade unionism and middle-class mythology conspired to prevent women from pursuing any moneymaking task that was not under the direct supervision of the father — that is, within the home. 11 Yet those women did not cease to contribute to their family’s economies, nor did they cease to function within the limitations and dynamics of class identity and class structure. How they worked out their particular relationships to the larger socioeconomic system will remain invisible, however, until we attempt to articulate a materialist theory of women’s domestic labor that “begin[s] from the standpoint of women,” as Dorothy E. Smith puts it, not reinscribing the subordination of women in our theories but rather asking how economic sys-

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tems express themselves androcentrically to order women’s relationships and their labor.12 Smith’s approach is particularly helpful because she tracks the way that changing modes of production and the related evolution of class definition alter how housework is valued and understood from era to era. Such insights are essential in the light of the way “women’s work” has been fetishized throughout this century both in public debate and in economic theory. Such mystification tends to obscure the changing nature of the material conditions that define life and labor, making the project of understanding the struggles of women like my grandmother hopeless. Only when we take into account the constructedness and ideological usefulness of the “housewife” both in the maintenance of dominance and in women’s self-fashioning can we hope to see women’s lives as other than supplements to patriarchal economies and discourses. Smith’s work in particular makes it clear that class consciousness is produced and maintained significantly through activities unconnected to production. She shows how women of all classes are “employed” in delineating and articulating a system of codes — in home furnishing, dress style, dialect, etiquette — that distinguish one class from another. 13 When women define their lives by these codes, they act as gatekeepers within modern socioeconomic systems that provide fewer structural impediments to class mobility than, to use an extreme example, the medieval orders. I would argue that such a system of codes develops to an exquisite degree of fineness in particular global and local situations: at the margins between economic groups where income alone does not function to distinguish class from class, and in eras of economic chaos when old measures no longer apply. I would further suggest that, because of the similarity in the way their work is culturally constructed, such class coding is always more significant to middle-class and lower-middle-class women than it is to upperclass women or to men of any class. When women’s work is seen to arise from women’s nature, all women tend to look alike — they all cook, clean, and rear children. As Nancy Cott puts it,“By giving all women the same natural vocation, the canon of domesticity classed them all together. . . . Sex, not class, was the basic category.”14 So it becomes not the work itself that distinguishes class from class but rather how women within a class use cultural codes to construct their work and how they understand it, in turn, to construct them socially. Thus it is neither the nature of her work, nor her relationship to production, nor her standard of living, nor even necessarily the class status of her husband that determines how a housewife defines her relationship to class but rather her own perception of her place within the ideologies of culture that define women’s work, a perception that can arise from a variety of factors including family of origin and domestic, factory, or professional work experience that precedes her

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adult work in the home. Fictional accounts abound of caricatured house-proud women (read “determinedly middle class”) mismatched with coarse workingclass men. And I think of my own unconscious expression of middle-class codes when I was in my twenties and my family subsisted on occasional employment and welfare allotments. Though by economic standards our income did not approach a working-class level, my language, prejudices, and table settings were solidly, perhaps defensively, middle class. Understanding how women’s class can be constructed apart from the nature of their work helps me to understand the struggles of my grandmother, who, through a variety of factors, found herself on the margins between classes in the 1930s. Daughter and daughter-in-law of landowning farmers and the wife of a professional man, she viewed the world through middle-class eyes. But youthful poverty, the Great Depression, and her nearly lifelong work taking in boarders conspired to threaten her self-image as a middle-class woman, that is, a woman who controls to some extent the conditions of her labor rather than being hired out to others’ needs. Her response to this self-annihilating threat can be found in her letters and diaries, where she seems to find meaning for her work and life in contemporary ideologies of female domesticity, ideologies that we now see as ushering in a long era of repressive thought espousing a “feminine mystique.” But she affirmed these ideologies with vehemence, employing them as a means to establish her personal and social worth. By performing housework to a particular set of standards, doing it well and correctly, she articulated codes that shored up the identity by which she defined herself. Rather than working for her boarders, she worked to standards that established her as a good middleclass woman. Housework thus came to represent for her not a question of pis aller, or a final resource, but a vocation to which she devoted herself with almost religious zeal. Such an understanding of her method of self-fashioning helps explain how middle-class women in particular may have participated in the rearticulation of conservative gender roles in the economically disrupted 1920s and 1930s. Dolores Hayden has chronicled how industrial and political forces broadcast such ideologies in an attempt to shore up the economic status quo in an era of labor unrest, a kind of affirmative action for white men that aimed to eliminate white women, women of color, and men of color from the skilled labor force. While the repressive nature of these theories is evident, they were undoubtedly useful both to women who, for a variety of reasons, did not seek wage or salary work and to those who did work for subsistence wages, women whose class standing was threatened in the economic dislocation that affected everyone during the depression. Ideologies of domesticity were most women’s only ac-

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cess to societal value in that era, and it is not surprising that many of them espoused such doctrine in a world that otherwise devalued their work. The self-construction of these women may thus make use of what seems to us a blatantly subordinating doctrine of domesticity to affirm their economic and social status in the chaotic world that threatened them. Such an analysis suggests that the relationship between women and patriarchal ideology is more complex than economic and social theories often allow, and it further suggests in this case the extent to which the propaganda hyping the emerging “domestic science” of the 1930s succeeded in appropriating some women as participants in their own continuing subordination. Women whose lives offered little or no access to income or status outside the home may have found such cultural affirmation better than nothing. These reflections help me make sense of the tortured self I find in my grandmother’s letters and diaries from the years she boarded “guests.” Her work ultimately produced for her what I can only call a personal crisis, a crisis she worked out in her letters by forging a strong identity as heroic worker. While few women like her — not famous, not celebrated — have left such an extensive record of their inner struggles, I suspect that the battles my grandmother fought to carve out a personal economy of value within her circumscribed world were shared by many other women of the era, both those who lived on the borders of gendered work spaces and those whose safe — perhaps stifling — ensconcement in the domestic sphere did not give rise to the kinds of articulated struggles to which my grandmother’s words attest, but who shared her need to make visible and worthy the work that the world demeaned. Indeed, when I relate an anecdote about my grandmother’s housekeeping to women born in the early years of this century, they invariably smile knowingly and nod their approval, both of my grandmother and of the standards she kept. My grandmother, born Kari Thomasdatter (or Thomasen) Ruttum (or Rothum or Rottum) in 1881, was the second child of first-generation Norwegian Americans who left Norway in 1879. 15 (Norwegian was her first language, of course, and even that of her oldest child, Amy, born in 1905.) She was born in Rice Lake, Wisconsin, but her family moved soon after that to Menomonee on Lake Michigan’s Green Bay, where her mother and her aunt ran a boardinghouse while the men worked in the lumber camps. By the time she was three her family had settled on a farm near Astoria in Dakota Territory (now South Dakota) on land purchased from the U.S. government. My grandmother’s work life, apart from the usual round of chores that all farm children take on, began in earnest in her ninth year when her father died, leaving my great-grandmother to run the farm with the help of four young children. A family history says that my

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great-grandmother used to sell the eggs and butter from her farm by “walking a mile to a corner” to supplement their meager resources. My grandmother was pulled out of school in the fourth grade and sent out to work as a “hired girl” at a nearby farm; there her chief responsibilities were caring for a small baby she quieted with a “sugar tit” (a sugar cube in a handkerchief which the baby sucked on while its mother worked in the fields) and carrying water from the well to the house. The latter was a disheartening chore for a youngster — carrying heavy, sloshing buckets that would be half empty by the time she reached the house — and she became obsessively careful of wasting water for the rest of her life. For this work my grandmother got fifty cents a week, a sum that was not large even in 1890 economic terms. Her mother told her that it wasn’t so much the money she brought in but that they didn’t have to feed her when she was away. So perhaps my grandmother’s relationship to work was troubled from her earliest days. I know nothing else of her life until her marriage in 1904 to Ole Solem, whose family lived on a nearby farm just on the South Dakota side of Hendricks, Minnesota. By then my grandmother’s name had been Americanized to “Carrie,” which is how it appears on the marriage license. They settled initially in Astoria, where the first five of seven children were born (five of whom survived infancy) and where my grandfather managed the Sleepy Eye grain elevator and sold Reo cars. Pictures from this era show my grandmother happy in her new life as a young mother in her own home. In 1910 the family moved to Clear Lake, South Dakota, where my grandfather had been elected register of deeds and where he began to practice general contracting in earnest. Their prosperity and large new house allowed my grandmother to begin taking in boarders, as did many other women of the era. Among her earliest tenants was a fourth-grade schoolteacher named Miss Flotree. Later tenants included the town music teacher as well, for single women and men were absolutely dependent on boarding in other people’s homes in the days when apartments were unavailable in rural areas. Another early boarder, Mr. Johnson (profession unrecorded), is immortalized in letters of 1926 because of a pimple on his nose. The incident, recorded in letters written by both Olivia and Iola, shows how close-quartered boardinghouse life was. Olivia writes: “One morning Mr. Conrad Johnson came down to breakfast with a big boil on his nose. He had been to Watertown the night before and I said, ‘Gee, she must of chewed you up awfully last night.’ Of course Mamma scolded — afterwards.” Iola’s commentary on the same incident reads: “You should see Mr. Johnson. He’s got a great big boil on the end of his nose. Olivia teased him about it and he said he didn’t wish her any bad luck but he hoped she’d get one on

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the end of her nose too.” My grandmother’s letter from the same day doesn’t mention Mr. Johnson’s boil. This comic exchange symbolizes the way that the presence of paying “guests” intruded into the life of the family, blurring the boundaries of public and private spheres that contemporary ideologies strove in vain to extol. Similar experiences would have been widespread in the era, for taking in boarders, either casually into one’s own home or more formally in a self-styled boardinghouse, was a common practice contributing significantly to the economy from the nineteenth century through the depression. Kessler-Harris cites statistics from various urban and small-town areas that show between 10 and 50 percent of city and town women between the mid-nineteenth century and World War I caring for boarders as well as their own family. Such employment put women like my grandmother on the margins between classes and gendered spheres of labor, for taking rent-paying non-family members into the bosom of the domestic sphere and being paid to perform for them the very labor one performs for family members (cooking, cleaning, washing clothes) blurs the distinctions between the public and private realms in ways that traditionally define a woman’s class. Caring for your own family serves a solidly middle-class identity, but doing domestic work in someone else’s house implies a lower-class status; caring for someone else in your own house muddies those distinctions. That such women’s labor was invisible both to census takers and to family members, as Kessler-Harris demonstrates, only exacerbates the indefinability of such work. Kessler-Harris quotes a mid-nineteenth-century girl who described her father as “the only one working to support the whole family,” though her mother’s boarders provided a quarter of the family income.16 The literally liminal character of this labor, which threatens to efface class distinction, creates a special situation in which the social and economic identity of women like my grandmother is threatened. On a kind of economic threshold, my grandmother grasped at the very ideologies that mystified women’s work in order to maintain her class boundaries, constructing herself as a worker of nearly impossible standards and legendary stamina. So an entry in Amy’s diary of May 16, 1924, when Amy was nineteen, reports in a tone of adolescent boredom,“Nothing happened at all today. All we did was clean house and I washed my hair. I dont see how mamma can stand it. She gets up so early, and works all the time.” My grandmother’s capacity for work and her management skills would become increasingly important to the family’s well-being in the coming years. The depression hit the farm country early, and my grandfather struggled to find work from the mid-1920s until World War II. An entry from Amy’s diary of January 3, 1924, says, “Dad built the school house

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at Webster this summer so he had all his money in the bank there. The bank has closed so we are in bad luck.” My grandfather had to go farther and farther from home to find work, and the diaries chronicle the heartbreaking round of bids and rejections punctuated by the occasional much-hoped-for acceptance. One successful bid got him the contract to build a new schoolhouse in Oakes, North Dakota. The diary shows him commuting back and forth during the spring, but when school was out the whole family packed up and moved to Oakes for the summer, living in two tents in a campground. Amy’s diary chronicles their journey north and settling in: [Monday, June 9] Today we washed, ironed, cleaned the garden and mowed the lawn. Dad came home [from Oakes] about 8 o’clock. . . . He is going to take all our things tomorrow so we packed all evening. Iola says she isn’t going to get married but I tell her I am sure she will be married before me. [Tuesday, June 10] I got up about half past 5 and they took the load in the truck about 10:30. We cleaned up the house and got dinner ready and went down to the lake. It is fish day today. [Wednesday, June 11] We got started from home about 9:30. Was here [in Madison, Minnesota] for the . . . Banquet. Tables were set for 800 people. [Mother and Dad] paid $1.25 a plate. It was a regular norwegian dinner and they ate from 6 to 10:30. . . . We are going to stay here all night. Us 4 girls all are going to sleep in the davenport. [Thursday, June 12] Started out from Madison about 9 o’clock. . . . We got to Oakes about 2:30. Got the things in the tents and made the beds. We went down town after we had supper and got everything put away. Us girls have a tent of our own. [Friday, June 13] Had to get up about 8 o’clock because it got so warm in [the tent] that we couldn’t stand it. All we have done today is getting settled. Dad made a kind of a pantry and made walls so that the bed is closed in making a pantry. It has been awfully hot today but is cool tonight. [Saturday, June 14] We finished stratening up and we also did some baking. We went to town after supper. I am afraid we aren’t going to like Oakes at all. It rained some here today. [Sunday, June 15] We stayed home all day except that we drove down and looked over the school house. . . . They had a ball game down here today. Quite a few people were over to see us.

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[Monday, June 16] Dad went to another town to bid on a school house but didn’t get it. The Minister and his wife were down to see us also Lindlands so we have quite a few visitors. [Tuesday, June 17] We washed today. . . . It is starting to storm awfully bad. [Wednesday, June 18] Today was community day here but it rained so we didn’t go up town until late in the afternoon and then we all went to the show in the evening. The name of it was “The Steadfast Heart.” It blew so last night that we were up half the night and the rest of the time we slept in the other tent. [Thursday, June 19] Mamma and I went to ladies aid out in the country. We went out with the minister. I never went to an aid like that before. They fought all the time and 2 of the members went out of the aid. [Friday, June 20] We got our bed today so we got our tent all fixed the way we want it. We had all the boys up for supper also Johnny Lundes and we didn’t get ready with the dishes until 9 o’clock. . . . Just as I got my hair down 2 Senior boys came in. They wanted a trophies case built in the School house. That is just my luck and it made me feel so embaresed.

Living in tents in a campground didn’t seem to disrupt my grandmother’s usual round of chores; note the entry in Amy’s diary within a week of their arrival that comments, “we also did some baking.” And even in circumstances that would make caring for a large family difficult, my grandmother’s work would contribute to the family’s income, for she supplemented their resources by — what else! — taking in boarders. Entries in Amy’s diary mention the many “tourists” coming through the camp, and an unembellished entry from July 8 says simply, “We are keeping boarders now,” feeding meals and perhaps providing even some sort of simple cot. The entries from July 30 and 31 repeat the refrain that “the camp is just full of men looking for work,” and the August 4 entry adds, “The camp is just full of hoboes. There are several negroes here too.” No doubt these homeless men were my grandmother’s “boarders.” Thus the depression had different employment consequences for my grandmother than it did for my grandfather: the economic turmoil that limited his (and other men’s) job opportunities provided my grandmother with paying customers. My grandfather continued to struggle to find work over the next few years as the depression deepened, and he finally found that the family could not be supported on his shrinking income and my grandmother’s domestic efforts. So in July 1927 they assumed management of the Hotel Madison, and the family moved across the border to begin a new life in Minnesota. The official newspa-

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per announcement of their move puts the emphasis on Ole’s job prospects in Minnesota: Mr. and Mrs. Ole Solem have decided to leave Clear Lake, and are going into the hotel business at Madison, Minnesota. This estimable family have been prominent in the business and social activities of Clear Lake for a long term of years, and their departure from the city is universally regretted. During the past year Mr. Solem has followed his work as contractor at and near Madison, and has been quite successful. Opportunities have presented themselves to him which he deems advisable to accept, and as a consequence he makes the change.

Another account details their send-off by the local Lutheran congregation, at which “Mr. and Mrs. Solem received a splendid electric waffle iron. . . . [I]t is presumed this instrument will be requisitioned whenever Clear Lake friends call at Hotel De Solem in Madison, Minn.” In response to this gift, the story reports, “Mr. Solem was just about to make some remarks of appreciation when the big hail storm became so threatening that the company broke up and sought safety undercover.” In fact, my grandfather’s job opportunities alone could not have brought the family through the depression. The labor of the family women running the hotel (like my grandmother’s first job) provided little in the way of money, but it did provide benefits like food and shelter that cannot be measured in economic theories or cultural perceptions where women don’t count. While other families of like background struggled to put food on the table or found themselves without a place to stay, Carrie and Ole continued to survive and even thrive, and significantly because of my grandmother’s work. Family lore says that Grandpa never intended to stay in the hotel business, that it was always seen as a short-term measure but that the depression changed his plans. This piece of information was followed inevitably with the comment that running the hotel was what killed Grandma. The fact that nobody ever thought to comment that Grandma’s hard work helped carry the family through the depression no doubt reflects the assumptions of the era, but the image of a woman being martyred by work was also my grandmother’s creation, the person she constructed in her letters in an attempt to give purpose to work that was otherwise invisible and unvalued and to make sense of her life. Work in the hotel had ceased to be so much a family enterprise by the early 1930s, when two daughters had left home for good, but even within a year of moving to Minnesota my grandmother’s life started to change irrevocably. As early as 1928 Iola had begun teaching in a one-room schoolhouse where she boarded during the week, coming home only when the weather and roads permitted. Many diary entries describe the perils of traveling midwestern roads

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during the winter. On January 27, 1929, Iola writes, “Dad took me out to school about 6 p.m. Tho’t we were goners in the drifts once. . . . Had to push the ford several times.” Later that week she writes, “I came home. The buick had to make a track. Got stuck about ½ mi. from the 5 mi. turn [south of Madison].” When the roads became impassable, people reverted to earlier and more reliable forms of transportation. On February 3 of that same year Iola writes, “Roads are closed. I’ll need a team to get to the country. Snowing too.” Later she adds, “Clifford and Manford came in a sleigh. I got pretty cold. 9 miles is quite a long way to go in a sleigh.” By 1929 Olivia, the youngest sister, had also left home for nurse’s training in Rochester, and by 1930 Iola had saved enough by her country teaching to enroll at South Dakota State College in Brookings, where she would graduate in 1934. Both daughters came home less and less, and so they participated less and less in the family hotel enterprise. Even with a full-time cook and one or more “hired girls,” the bulk of the work fell to my grandmother and Amy, and the steady routine was exhausting. As Carrie wrote in a letter of November 12, 1933, “I baked the lefse [a large, thin potato pancake] this morning before the rest got up. We have 2 girls working here and still I have to be the first a[nd] last one as they say.” For both Carrie and Amy, the work became punishing in a way it hadn’t seemed before. That work seems gradually to separate itself from family and social life, consuming them in its inexorable round. Amy’s diary from 1931 repeats the refrains “worked so hard today” and “did a big washing today.” On February 24 she writes, “I worked so today that I am so tired. I washed windows and woodwork in dining room, washed & ironed curtains after supper.” Later entries give some idea of the extent of the work, especially when one remembers that doing laundry meant not only washing the clothes but hanging them outside or in the cellar to dry and then ironing them. Amy writes on February 27, “Mamma is sick in bed again. I washed clothes — 48 sheets,” and on May 18, “We housecleaned 11 rooms upstairs and washed some clothes tonight so I’m pretty tired.” Saturday — cleaning day — was particularly burdensome and often elicited the grim comment, “Same as all Sat. Cleaned the whole place.” And spring cleaning brought a similar response on May 25: “Housecleaned the 3 front rooms. I sure am tired of housecleaning.” But Amy was still in her twenties and could envision a future apart from life at the hotel. Indeed, she would begin a career in retail in her thirties and ultimately co-own a dress shop. But Carrie had entered her fifties, and no exciting future loomed on her horizon. She had no choice but to come to terms with the life she inhabited. If women’s work derives much of its class value by being understood as ser-

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vice to loved ones rather than as a material contribution to household economy, then both work and worker are diminished when that work is done for outsiders. Carrie’s work had ceased to operate in that idealized economy of female selflessness, especially as her husband was often away and the only daughter left at home was her co-worker. (There was a son at home in the early 1930s — Clarence, born in 1916 — and an older son, Taylor, already graduated from college, who worked the front desk of the hotel during long stretches of unemployment, but they are almost never mentioned in Carrie’s letters.) She continued to serve her children in many ways that retained the dynamic of selfless giving (e.g., they sent their laundry home throughout their college careers and even into the war years), but those contacts served often as reminders of what was lost and failed to provide meaning to the work she did. She wrote to Iola on October 26, 1941, at age sixty: “I think of all of you when you were all small. how happy I was when I had you all in bed with new nightys on. and new dresses for Christmas.” And while many women may have suffered in similar ways from the empty nest, Carrie’s situation was exacerbated by the fact that, rather than finding her workload decrease with the exodus of her children, she found herself doing more and more women’s work, but for outsiders. Even that work might have been rewarding if she could have moved into the economy of men’s work, where money and status give meaning to labor. Making the hotel successful was certainly important to her, as many of her letters testify. On January 25, 1933, she writes: Iola Dearest I have some good news for you. When we got back from Brookings Dad had rented out 3 rooms it is some Magazine agents it is 7 of them here now. and tonight we have all the rooms rented out but three that will help some. Olivia is still home waiting for a chance to go to Mpls. Today I washed the dining room floor alone and Baked 20 potet [potato] lefse 90 buns and we served buns and lefse for supper so they are all gone. Tomorrow we have to Wash clothes again but . . . if the rooms will be kept full that means some money.

But she didn’t necessarily control the money that the hotel brought in, especially in the late 1920s when the hotel was barely able to break even. In a July 1929 letter she writes: “I have spent every cent I have and can’t charge any meat so I don’t know what to do. I hope dad will send home some [money] pretty soon.” In other words, she had the responsibility of running the hotel and paying its bills, but she did not have authority over the family money. And while successfully managing a hotel might have brought status (apart from money) to a man, she was never seen in that light by virtue of her being female. I’m sure it never occurred to any of her contemporaries to question the hotel’s business cards,

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which omitted her name and effaced her labor with their assertion, “O. O. Solem, Prop.” Without the rewards of either women’s work or men’s labor, she began to lose her identity. On November 2, 1939, she wrote: “Dad has so much to do taking care of everybody elses bussiness that he has no time to take any interest in the things at home. I am feeling like a hired girl here with no one to talk to when Amy is gone.” Increasingly unrewarded in the economy of female labor and unable to function in the world of male labor, left out of the male professional world and increasingly left out of her children’s lives, she felt herself becoming a “hired girl” rather than mother or even hotel manager. Such a change in class status would not merely have been a theoretical question for her — indeed, I’m sure she never thought theoretically in terms of class — but must have recalled very real memories of her own work as a hired girl in [218], (1 another’s household when she was young. She responds to this crisis in her writing, where she attempts to construct an alternative economy that would give meaning to her work and provide her with an unimpeachable identity: neither Lines: 12 hotel proprietor nor hired girl nor young mother, but a worker of heroic propor——— tions whose strength and determination were equal to the rigors of any chore, 9.4pt P who could outwork and outlast anyone in her household or her community, ——— maintaining those standards that set her apart from hired girls. Normal Her most powerful tool in this project was quantification; if her work would * PgEnds: yield neither money nor status, her letters made that work “count” nonetheless, forcing it to yield its value in pure numbers. Dozens of letters written during [218], (1 the 1930s demonstrate this process. Here are just a few. January 24, 1932 [to Iola] I am going to tell you some of my disappointments today. Dad Clarence & I started for Brookings [where Iola was at school] at 9:30 this morning drove out 17 miles and it started to blow and it drifted so dad got cold feet and we turned back. I baked sour cream pie this morning to take along for you took it out off the owen and put it in a box and held it in my lap. . . . We asked Andrews and Does for supper served chicen dressing meat loaf sweet Potatoes Angel food cake besides the other eats that goes with a supper served the same for the boarders to. I have had such a cold last night I was all in. . . . I cleaned the Parlor Denn serving room after suppar friday night and got the loby ready for scrubing after 11 oclock got up and had it washed before 6 oclock Saturday morning I cleaned all the bedrooms halls back steps and the washroom down the basement before dinner. and Ironed while they served dinner helped wash the kitchen floor to I done all the clothes washing alone Friday I got through before dinner. Love from Mother


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August 29, 1937 Dearest Iola I was so lonesome yesterday after you left. I told Amy I could just go to bed and cry. After you left we washed dishes and Amy Cleaned her room and I changed linens and made the beds and straitened up in the closeth down stairs and put away a few things and Amy cleaned down stairs and I got dinner and I went upstairs and finished cleaning and Amy finished downstairs. We bot rested for awhile and started canning we made 5 quart of peache sauce and 2½ quart of peache pickles and 1½ quart of peach small pieces that we are going to use for jam than we started with the tomatoes, we strained them for juice got 7 quarts, and we had a cooked dinner. so I think we done pretty well in one day, and not eather of us feeling first rate. [letter mailed] July 24, 1939 Dearest Amy July 19 Cleaned upstairs all but the Bathroom and Hall. rented out the east room for a short time. Went up town in the afternoon. Called on Gale and had lunch. July 20 Baked doughnuts 3 loafs of Graham bread 51 biscuits and cleaned the Kitchen. took a bath and all through by 4:30 picked fresh flowers so I am all set for Anas to come. We are going to have french toast and bacon for supper. July 21 I fixed Pot roast for dinner with carrots and onions & Potatos so it was easy to prepare. . . . July 23 Sunday I baked blueberry Pie pork roast Peas what I caned Jello salad cellery dark Bread and hot Biscuits. July 24 Picked Beans and Peas this morning canned 4 quarts of Beans and enough left over for a meal. I washed out the clothes, and the silk things Dads pants and stockings I rinsed out so they are done to take in. It will be that much less tomorrow. I had to fix up the cradle again so I have thirteen Sheets one spredd and one table cloth and about 1½ Doz napkins so I don’t think that I will wash and Irone the same day. July 31 1939 Dear Amy Dad wants me to write a few words to you. he is doing some drawing and have the fan going. It has been so hot today. I am sitting on the high chair with the bread bord on my lap trying to write. . . . I washed today, had the clothes out and every thing cleaned up before nine oclock so you can see I can still work. for dinner we had meat balls mashed potatoes gravy scalloped corn cookies Pies & pickels for supper we had sandwiches with meat on and cake and wht was left of corn & Potatoes and cookies. . . . Tomorrow I have to bake bread and irone and bake a

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a (boarding) house is not a home cake I got the stove fixed so we had waffles for supper. You must not worry about me. I know how to take care of myself. . . . Love from Mother August 7, 1939 Dear Amy I have been so busy lately. Arnt and Arvin have a room here and I give them Breakfast. The electrician just came back I don’t know how long he will be staying. Lucian Gray was here today and he spoke for a room again. fridy I washed out in all the windows both up and down stairs washed and cleaned the front porch back porch and cleaned the pantry and kitchen and baked a cake. Saturday morning I got a special delivery letter from Mrs Perkins stating they would be here at 1:30 For dinner on Sunday. I got up at 5 Sunday morning and sponged bread. I had 3 Doz biscuits baked a Graham cracker Pie fried two chicens peeled Potatoes made a Jello salad fixed the lettuce and cellery and the table set before 12 oclock so you can se I did not waste any time. We washed the dishes and left the utensels till after they had gone. We were through eating about 3 oclock.

This last account of her preparing Sunday dinner provides a particularly interesting comment on her relationship to work in the light of her religious scruples about working on the Sabbath. For example, she avoided using scissors on Sunday and would repeat direfully to her daughters, “A child would rather not be born than have her hair on Sunday shorn.” Rising at 5:00 a.m. to cook and bake until noon does not seem to have counted as work in that analysis, yet it certainly counted in her own self-construction. One letter in particular demonstrates the intentionality of this project of self-fashioning. Late in 1933 a road crew was working in the Madison area and boarding in the hotel. The size of the crew taxed the hotel’s — and Carrie’s — resources, forcing her to work double shifts and call in extra help, including my grandfather. While writing a letter to Iola, one that quantified her work in typical fashion, she fell asleep many times, blotting and marring the letter each time. Yet rather than starting over again or putting the letter aside, she sent it with these signs of her exhaustion, as if that were part of the message she needed to communicate. The letter is dated November 2: Dearest Iola Recieved your letter today for white [which] I thank you very much. I went to sleep so tht is why I made so many marks. You know I get up at 2 and work till time for bed it makes long days. We have served Pheasants twice this week we had soup & ducks & pheasants for supper tonight it seems that we never have enough for meals any more we had 26 for supper for a while beside our own family we have served from ten to 18 Breakfast at 3:15 & Audrey & dad gets up and help and

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I fix lunches while dad and Audrey washes dishes & then they go back to bed & sleep till time for school I stay up & do some Baking [scribble] I sleeped again & at six the other bunch comes and we serves dinner at ten and than at twelve. so the fornoon is all cut up Kathryn Froilund is here & working now & I have a girl from Dawson help wash dishes and so forth. Mrs M Hoff was killed in an auto axident have not hea[rd] how it hapened. I can’t think of any news to tel you but hope I can do better next time I think you can count every time I went [to] Sleep on the job — Lots of love from Mother

Here the number of times she falls asleep writing, as well as her work, counts. The purposeful nature of this self-fashioning and its limited rewards are underscored in a description Iola sketched of her mother (and other family members) at the beginning of 1937. These portraits of her family plus a listing of the movies she saw that year are all that remain of a diary my mother kept. She evidently destroyed the rest of it — a surprising act of destruction for the woman who was the preserver of most of the family diaries and letters — except for the three final entries for December on the back of the page headed “What we are doing!” The sketch begins and ends with an acknowledgment of Carrie’s life of relentless drudgery, showing how definitive that portrait was within the family circle. But my mother’s diary includes details one would never guess from Carrie’s letters alone, showing them to have been a very selective self-portrait. Iola writes: This is mother’s fifty-sixth year, and although she seems no older to me, she is very gray, yet has as much enthusiasm for work as ever. I do feel concerned about her state of mind, because she has many little worries and petty jealousies which she magnifies. We are still her whole life — it might be better if she’d cultivate more outside interests. She secretly likes to have me make her up with rouge, lipstick, and powder, and at Christmas she would dance with me. She gave us all very elaborate gifts from her own savings — each of us girls a dress besides other little things. Just now she is interested in getting some new furniture. Mother likes wine and served it to all her guests at Christmas from her new wine set. She’s a very dear mother who had a hard life of work for so long that it is still hard for her to play.

The rouge, lipstick, dancing, and wine add unexpected color to the self-portrait Carrie constructed in her letters. But even more surprising is the existence of the savings account, a detail that indicates the improving economic picture of 1937 but also reveals the significance of personally controlled money to the woman who had attempted to make her work alone count. The money, however, has been spent on her daughters, not on the hotel’s bills

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or on herself (at least directly), a significant distinction that emerges again in a 1941 letter of my grandmother’s. There it is clear that the work she did had become an important (if small) source of personal income, so that even when the family had moved out of the hotel and she was living in her own home again, she continued to board relatives to earn money that she alone controlled, spending it on the things she valued: her home, her family, and the church. Of course, these are the very things she was expected to value by those social codes to which she subscribed, but her ability to support these values independently is, nonetheless, significant to her. In March 1941 she writes to Iola: I got the blues today and don’t know what to do for it. . . . [T]his is the third week Arnt [her brother-in-law] is [staying] here. I think he will finnish tomorrow it makes more work for Amy & me, but than we get a little money to call our own. I hope Dad will get plenty work so we can get some bills payed. I think it bothers me more than Dad to get all those letters in the mail. The last five [dollars] you sent me I bought groceries. and last week Arnt payed up and I got ten. I gave Amy 2 and bought a Birthday gift for Dad it was from Amy and me both. we got him a hat which I payed 3.00 for. and the last five I am going to save so I can pay for my [Ladies] Aid dues and penny a meal box and my Mission Box.

This new kind of catalog — of money under her control dispensed by her own choice — leads her into a remarkable reflection on the importance of her daughter’s nascent career: “I am still sewing carpet rags. it seems like it’s no end to it. Ardell [her niece] is home [from college] this week. they are busy making spring clothes for Ardell. I think she gets more clothes then you did when you went to College. but that is not all you got the grades in your work and that is what counts.” So while Iola had experienced her as too dependent on her children — and her letters do show her wishing they would visit and write more often — she affirmed her daughter’s presence in the public economy where success is measured by the external criteria of grades, promotions, awards, and, ultimately, income. Indeed, though only one of her daughters married during her lifetime — Iola married at age thirty-nine, and I was the only grandchild Carrie (briefly) knew before her death at age seventy-two — she never suggests in her letters that my mother’s career is in any way inferior to women’s more traditional roles. However useful she may have found such ideologies in maintaining her own sense of identity, she didn’t wish her own life on my mother. The fact that we can track my grandmother’s struggles and her method of self-fashioning through her writing provides a means of understanding how women in similar circumstances may have constructed their identities as domestic slaves, how they have participated in the social construction of the mid-

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dle-class housewife, yet how inadequate and ultimately unrewarding that restricted life could be. The particular circumstances of such women’s lives constrained them in a world of housework that produced little measurable reward and often served to blur rather than maintain the class identities they found essential to their own self-image. Men’s work — work that the ideologies and economic changes of the twentieth century consigned increasingly to the public sphere — functions in an economy of public rewards and value. A worker enters that economy on its own fixed terms, and in good times the work provides expected, measurable, and visible rewards. The extrinsic nature of those rewards was probably a liability to men of the depression, for when no work was available they often lacked the inner resources women had developed for constructing self-worth outside those rewards. But the depression that destroyed men’s careers and lives provided more work for women like my grandmother who fed and sheltered the displaced and underemployed. Carrie’s increased work, however, allied as it was to the private, domestic sphere, brought its own problems of identity, problems that she attempted to solve, at least in part, by drawing on codes of middle-class domesticity. Like my grandmother, many women of the era may have turned to ideologies of domestic feminism in an effort to create economies of meaning for the privatized world of women’s work, giving a cultural presence to what was unvalued and invisible in the public sphere. If my grandmother’s method of self-fashioning was and is practiced by many women whose work continues not to count in economic theory or practice, then studying the conditions that prompted her written self-construction can help us articulate economic and social theories that allow more fully for the complexity of women’s lives. Perhaps most important for me is the way this study personalizes theory. Reading my grandmother’s account of her work helps me to understand women’s erasure from the economy not as a disembodied problem for academicians but as the day-to-day struggle of women like her to claim their worthiness in a world that devalued them, to make their work visible in a world that ignored it. My insights into her life, however limited they must be across more than half a century, give purpose to my efforts to discern the androcentricity of traditional analyses, which mask many women’s erasure from the economy and allow no place for their work or their struggles, and join with others’ efforts to construct theories that offer the possibility of giving voice and visibility to women’s lives. Notes This study benefited from the comments and suggestions of Jeanne Snyder, Judy Nolte Temple, and the readers of Frontiers. Reconstructing my grandmother’s life would not

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have been possible without the copious memory of my sister, Marni White, and her enthusiastic contribution to the work of the project. 1. Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: mit Press, 1981), 308. 2. Philip J. Kain, “Marx, Housework, and Alienation,” Hypatia 8 (1993): 122. 3. Kain, “Marx, Housework, and Alienation,” 126. 4. Kain, “Marx, Housework, and Alienation,” 129, 130, 131. 5. Kain, “Marx, Housework, and Alienation,” 133. 6. Benston quoted in Peggy Morton, “Women’s Work Is Never Done,” in The Politics of Housework, ed. Ellen Malos (London: Allison & Busby, 1980), 135. Morton uses Benston’s argument as a springboard for her own analysis, which aims to integrate women’s public and private work in materialist theory. 7. Marilyn Waring, If Women Counted: A New Feminist Economics (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988). 8. Rayna Rapp, “Family and Class in Contemporary America: Notes toward an Understanding of Ideology,” in Rethinking the Family: Some Feminist Questions, ed. Barrie Thorne and Marilyn Yalom (New York: Longman, 1982), 180. 9. Karen V. Hansen employs the term “social” rather than “private” to express the permeable quality of the domestic threshold that other theorists have seen as more absolutely delineating the female domain. A Very Social Time: Crafting Community in Antebellum Near England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). “Social” certainly describes small-town life in the Midwest and serves to correct artificially rigid categories separating women from their communities, but the term does not account for the invisibility of women’s labor within their society. 10. Alice Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked: A Historical Overview (Old Westbury ny: The Feminist Press; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). 11. Stevi Jackson, “Towards a Historical Sociology of Housework: A Materialist Feminist Analysis,” Women’s Studies International Forum 15 (1992): 153–72. 12. Dorothy E. Smith, “Women, Class, and Family,” in The Socialist Register (London: Merlin Press, 1983), 3. 13. Smith, “Women, Class, and Family,” 19–20. Rapp also discusses upper-class women’s role as gatekeeper (“Family and Class in Contemporary America,” 182). 14. Cott quoted in Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution, 13. 15. A family history says that they came from the Sør-Trøndelag country near Stören and Singsas, south of Trondheim, where they had a farm. My grandmother’s parents, Thomas Johnsen Ruttum and Ingeborg Arnstdatter Rogstad, emigrated with his brother and her sister, who were also married (their offspring were, as a result, double cousins), and with another sister. 16. Kessler-Harris, Women Have Always Worked, 49.

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“Broke in Spirits” Death, Depression, and Endurance through Writing pamel a r iney-kehr berg

[225], (21) Women’s history has often been described as an attempt to recover lost and hidden histories. Within those hidden histories are the voices of generations of mothers and grandmothers, women who may have been too reticent to share many aspects of their lives, even with those closest to them. Although the parameters of women’s history have widened considerably since the 1960s, many facets of the female experience have yet to be explored fully. The public lives of American women are fairly well documented, as women in government and in the workplace left tangible, visible evidence of their presence. But the private lives of women and their families are another matter altogether. The evidence of how women lived their lives within the home tends to be scattered and fragmentary, often leaving questions of enormous interest to historians unanswered. This is particularly true of taboo subjects, such as how families coped with mental illness, alcoholism, and abuse. These topics, because of the shame associated with their experience, often remained hidden within the family and undocumented. Linda Gordon, in her groundbreaking work on the history of domestic violence, turned to the records of child protection agencies for evidence. Caseworkers for various governmental and private organizations gathered volumes of information about individuals and their troubled family relations. Gordon’s work, however, illustrates some of the problems facing historians wishing to delve deeper into these topics. In the eighty years from the 1880s to the 1960s, social workers recognized four forms of abuse: child beating, child neglect, incest, and wife beating. 1 Persons who suffered a type of abuse that did not fall into these categories, such as emotional abuse, might very well fall outside of the realm of the historical record.

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Scholars have often found information on these topics in autobiographical and fictional literature. Women authors, reflecting on their families’ pasts, and the possible pasts of their literary creations, have found the words to discuss topics that rarely have found a voice in other types of historical evidence. As Melody Graulich writes in The Women’s West, authors such as Mari Sandoz, Agnes Smedley, Meridel Le Seur, and Tillie Olsen have openly addressed family violence. Likewise, Susan Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers” chronicles emotional abuse and isolation and their horrifying effects. 2 Historians wishing to recover firsthand stories of these types of family experiences have also turned to the diaries and letters of individual women. 3 One such diary, kept for thirty years by Emily Hawley Gillespie, provides the details of a deeply troubled marital relationship. Although Gillespie did not divorce her husband, James, they separated as a result of his increasingly frequent violent outbursts, which Gillespie described as “raving mad fits.” 4 Near the end of her life, Gillespie often reflected on the pains of marriage: Were I to have known of the hypocricy of which people are possessed, and the cunning used to dupe one’s reason untill they get one lured from happiness to the cares and sorrows of married life, I most surely would never again be more than once disappointed by a young man’s not being punctual to meet their promises, for they grow worse and worse, & worse, untill all confidence is lost, heartbroken and then dispair. 5

Gillespie, however, left the biggest mystery of the diary unsolved, cryptically writing, “I have written many things in my journal, but the worst is a secret to be burried when I shall cease to be.” 6 What was her “secret to be burried”? Historians will never know, although the diary’s editor, Judy Nolte Lensink, suggests that it was a sexual secret linked to the diarist’s relationship with her abusive husband. 7 The Gillespie family’s well-documented history of violence continued into a second generation. Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, Emily Gillespie’s daughter, kept a diary too. Her writing confirmed the abuse in her parents’ marriage. On one occasion, she wrote, “I question myself — is it right for us to live with such a person.” 8 Huftalen’s father, however, was not the only abusive male in her life. After a happy marriage ended by widowhood, and a satisfying teaching career, Huftalen attempted to make a home for her increasingly erratic older brother, Henry Gillespie. He was more than likely mentally ill, living as a hermit, refusing to change his underclothes for months at a time or to bathe for years at a time. 9 By 1915 he was showing signs of his father’s influence, or perhaps genes, verbally harassing his sister. “It is a terrible blow,” Huftalen commented.10

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“Henry all but drives one to despair.”11 She experienced years of nervous strain and depression caused by her brother’s behavior and worsened by his eventual use of physical violence. Throughout this ordeal, Henry Gillespie continued to assert his innocence: “He says he wants everyone to know how kind he is to me. He does not say he has been abusive, — denies it but he hisses at times that sounds exactly like a serpent.”12 Huftalen clearly wished, however, to have the last word about her father’s and brother’s behavior. Before her death in 1955 she carefully deposited both her mother’s and her own diary with the State Historical Society of Iowa. She preserved a record, spanning more than half a century, of long, painful struggles with abuse. Despite the limitations within such documents, and the knowledge that diaries are indeed “constructed autobiography rather than . . . mere recorded narrative,” the diaries of Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespie Huftalen provide an entrée into the life of the individual woman rarely available in any other type of historical source. 13 Other familial disruptions, such as death, have also found a record in personal writings. Women have created a literature of grief, using their diaries, letters, poems, and stories to cope with loss. Martha Laurens Ramsay, experiencing the death of a child, family crises, and a serious depression, poured her sorrows out upon the page. Her diary, written largely between 1791 and 1808, began at the time of the death of her third child, Frances Henry Ramsay. It was a “written conversation with God” and a “literary tranquilizer.” 14 Writing served to calm and heal her and was a highly personal activity. Only on her deathbed did she inform her husband of the diary’s existence. Nineteenth-century mothers, mourning the loss of infants and children, created “consolation literature.” That literature, often in the form of poetry, also served a healing purpose. 15 Unlike the very private writing about domestic violence, consolation literature found a wide, popular audience in books and periodicals — and even newspapers, perhaps because so many mothers and families had endured the same experience. When Martha Schmidt Friesen died in 1955, at the age of seventy, she left behind a husband of fifty years, two surviving adult children, and the family farm she had lived on for most of her life. She also left behind a diary. That diary, covering the period from 1936 to 1955, is the chronicle of a life lived outside of public view. Friesen was a farm woman, a wife and mother, and a resident of an extremely isolated community. Hers was a life that would have remained outside of the realm of historical scrutiny had she not chosen to record her days in a journal and had her family not saved the lengthy manuscript, written in pencil on lined notebook paper.16 Martha Friesen’s diary extensively documents the problems of a woman living with an adult child’s death, her own depression,

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a spouse’s alcoholism, and his attendant abuse. It also illustrates the degree to which these shaming and isolating conditions were exacerbated by the rural environment of western Kansas. On February 17, 1884, Martha Schmidt was born to her German immigrant parents on their farm in McPherson County, Kansas. Her parents, Wilhelm and Mata, raised a family of eight children. On September 1, 1904, Martha married George Friesen, a member of the Mennonite community of McPherson County. After the birth and subsequent death of their first child, a son, in 1905, the couple moved to Lamont Township, Hamilton County, Kansas, in April 1906. They migrated west with several other families from McPherson County’s Mennonite community. They named their settlement Menno and erected the Ebenflur (prairie) Church. Menno was a short-lived experiment, but when most of the other members of the Mennonite community moved on, the Friesens remained. On their farm in Hamilton County, Martha bore and raised her children and was a partner to her husband in the running of the family farm. Martha Friesen was an avid diary writer, but only those portions written after 1936 still exist. One of her daughters remembered that her mother had kept a diary for a number of years previously, simply noting weather conditions and daily work schedules. The diary had a place of prominence on the kitchen table and was available for consultation by all family members. 17 Occasionally, a daughter added a word or two to the text. These early writings, however, have disappeared. At some point prior to 1936 the diary became a more elaborate document, recording not just weather and work patterns but also other information that interested Friesen. Martha began to write about the programming on the radio, the comings and goings of family members, and her family’s struggles with hard times. As the years passed and the trials facing her accumulated, Martha’s writing became more personal and less detached. Even as the diary became more individual, it remained a fairly simple document, written in simple language. Lensink’s generalized comments about rural women’s diaries hold true for Martha’s writing as well: “Intensity of experience is usually signalled by quantity of language rather than by metaphor.”18 The origin of the diary as a family “story” may account for some of its idiosyncracies, such as Martha’s use of the third person in reference to herself. As a general rule, in the years before the occurrence of serious family crises she wrote of herself as “she,” “Mo,” or “Ma” and of her husband as “Po” or “Pa.” References to herself as “I” in the early portions of the diary are quite rare and appear to be momentary lapses, as it was not until 1942 and 1943 that she began to refer to herself consistently in the first person. Her use of the first person

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increased, and then became regular, as family problems mounted. Her writing was no longer a family chronicle; her family had been broken. The diary had become a highly personal and individual story of grief, sorrow, and despair. Friesen’s diary has other idiosyncracies as well. Martha’s spelling, punctuation, and grammar were quite erratic, consistent with her education and background. She spoke German in the home as a child and had only a third- or fourth-grade education. The eccentricities of her spelling and grammar are reproduced in this article because they say a good deal about the writer. As Lensink wrote in her introduction to the diary of Emily Hawley Gillespie, a diarist most likely wrote as he or she spoke. The use of Martha’s own, uncorrected, highly individual writing is part of an attempt to recover and preserve the “voice” of a shy and retiring woman who seems to have expressed herself freely only in her journal. 19 The earliest surviving portions of the diary, covering the latter half of the 1930s and the very early 1940s, tell the story of a mature family. Martha was in her fifties, the mother of three adult children. She generally devoted her time to work within the household — churning, ironing, cooking and baking, washing, sewing, and preserving food. Some of her favorite activities included quilting and sewing rag rugs. She also raised a large flock of chickens and fetched water and wood. The couple worked together caring for their milk cows. Friday, October 10, 1941, was a fairly typical day for Martha. She “rolled out” before six in the morning and had breakfast on the table at 6:45. Over the course of the day she served two more meals. Although she claimed that she had “accomplished a little more . . . for once,” her tasks were not terribly different than those recorded on other days: “She cleaned the pantry shelves also the cupboard. & put a blanket on the knew ironing board. & ironed Pops blue suit & a great deal more. She also baked a nice batch of bread. Made slower progress, as usual. & washed some under things silks & cotton socks also the tan shirt for George, which she forgot.” This day, like most summer and fall days, ended between nine and ten in the evening with well-deserved rest. 20 During the years of the Great Depression, the Friesen children left home seeking work, and Martha adapted to their migrations. Her elder daughter’s family moved to Oregon, as did her son. Martha and George struggled against the environment and the economy and endured when the same conditions forced many of their neighbors to leave the Dust Bowl for good. These were difficult years, yet they were filled with the small pleasures of visiting grandchildren, soap operas on the radio, shared jokes, and occasional respites from hard times. Although Martha’s mood was often grim, a persistent ray of hope shone through her daily writings. 21

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As the 1930s drew to a close, better times seemed to be on the horizon. In 1939 the Friesen’s elder daughter, her husband, and two children returned to farm in southwestern Kansas. In 1939 World War II began in Europe, and in 1940 normal rainfall returned. Conditions were ripe for a return to prosperity. By harvest time in 1940, the depression on the southern plains, and for the Friesen family, was over. 22 Ironically, the depression represented the calm before the storm in the life of the Friesen family. Although they recovered from the economic woes of the 1930s, the war years were destined to be much more difficult. Will, their son, had remained in Oregon. On May 17, 1941, Martha and George received word that he had been critically injured in a sawmill accident. Martha wrote: “This was the awfuliest day of all times when . . . Sally told us about our poor boy got his leg broke later they called & said gangerreen had set in I couldnt stand to think about it. 23 Will died on May 21 and was buried “in his grave beneath the big Hill on the Kendall Cemetary.”24 It would be a number of months before the Friesen family’s routine resumed its normal contours. Martha quit writing for a number of days surrounding Will’s death and burial. 25 Her entries in June and July were sporadic. She eased back into her work around the house as well, making use of the services of a hired woman for the first time recorded in her journal. Eventually, she returned to her chores. On June 16 she wrote that “this was the first day she went back to her old routeen, where she left offs weeks ago.” Four days later, she “churned for the first time to-day in nine weeks,” and on June 24 she began to bake again. 26 Immediately following Will’s death, Martha wrote very little about her emotional state, except when she was confronted with the inescapable proof of his passing. She hid in the privy, evading a tombstone salesman, and probably would have liked to avoid the insurance company’s representative when he came to deliver a $1,200 check, the proceeds from Will’s life insurance. 27 As the initial shock of Will’s sudden death wore off, so did her relative silence. As the weeks passed, she expressed her sorrows more freely. For the next four years, Martha’s diary was largely a chronicle of grief. She had lost a beloved child, her only son, and her pain was almost unbearable. As she wrote about the experience of losing a son, Friesen would reproduce a pattern of writing common to many grieving writers. Like other similarly distressed diarists, she continued to write about her son’s death for a number of years, particularly noting the anniversaries of his death and other special dates in his life.28 In practically every place and event in her life she saw the reflection of the son she had lost. During the years immediately following Will’s death, Martha generally wrote about grief and grieving at least three times a week. Typical was the week of

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March 15 to 22, 1942. On Monday, March 16, she described the day as a “blue Monday . . . a broken day with so much grief that my eyes when full of mist most of the day. O how my heart did ache.” 29 On Wednesday “Mas [Ma’s] day was so broken her heart was torn all to pieces she suffered so . . . Again after turning in she sobed way into the night, and George had long fallen into slumber.”30 On Friday she turned to a regular source of solace, the radio, for a broadcast from Unity Village, near Kansas City: “I listened to the Unity Man & did he give a good talk on comfort for folks.” 31 Two weeks later she ordered a religious tract on bereavement from Unity Village. Although Martha’s depression was ongoing, some days were more difficult to endure than others. The anniversaries of Will’s death were particularly devastating. On May 21, 1942, Martha went to the basement to examine some of Will’s possessions: “I got very dirty to-day packing and ridding out some things which shant get wet. I found the box where our dearest one had all his valentines, also his box of little dishes and purties, which he had since he was a little boy. Trappers books, also other articles. So Ma & Po was all broke up & couldnt shook the tears back.” 32 Although she made no mention of the anniversary in 1943, that of 1944 was no easier. She resented the month of May in general, commenting, “well this month has traveled along the road of tragic and grief, it only has brought to us sorrows and heart aches.”33 The lilacs blooming in the farmyard were the same lilacs “which was in full when we had to be on our trip to get his body.” On May 22 she was again cleaning out trash and discovered a letter he had written while in Oregon:“But to see his name signed to it just broke my day all to shreds eyes where welled with tears to think how he was taken out of this life young & deprived of so many things how sad sad it all is in this old torn world.” In 1945 she commemorated the day of his accident, writing, “Well this is the most cruchial day of my life it brings those tragdic memmories back in my life when I suffered so deeply over the one that got hurt my eyes are wide with tears just to think of that cruchil moment.” The month of May would be permanently scarred with unpleasant memories. 34 Unfortunately, most other months also held unpleasant associations. Nearly every family event or holiday would end in tears because of the memories conjured up by togetherness. As she wrote, the “family circle had been broken,” and no gathering was complete without Will. 35 In February 1942 she suffered over Valentine’s Day. Later in the year she mourned his loss through Thanksgiving, commenting,“this was a horriable Thanskiving this day was It was broke in spirits.”36 Christmas, perhaps the family’s most important holiday, was particularly difficult. In 1943 she wrote that she “was so much broke up, cause the missing one of our family as Xmas drew nigh.” Equally important to Martha was Will’s

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birthday, April 4: “And, this awful day is only filled with sorrow & heart aches, on this speical birthday the 4th all day. only ones heart ached through out the day. I was so very glad when the day was finished.” 37 There were many family events that Martha merely endured because of the memories they evoked. Memories also made her home a painful place in which to live. Visual reminders throughout the house and in the farmyard constantly recalled to her that she had lost a child. While completing her daily chores she often ran across “some of his belongings and keepsakes,” an event that might make her “heartsick” for the entire day. 38 Any item might trigger memories; handling his old phonograph records “just almost killed me.”39 A trip into the basement generally destroyed the whole day: “This day was broke on account of being in the Basement to much that awful place where all the remants of memories have been stored.” Because they had stored Will’s possessions there, that area of the house, more than any other, symbolized her loss. Going into the farmyard, too, was a terrible trial, since “the painfull little coupe,” Will’s car, was parked there. George eventually hid it behind a haystack so that it would be less visible to both of them. 40 Martha saw his death all around her and was unable to escape it in even the most familiar and comfortable of environments, her own home. Because Martha was a farm woman, her home was also her work environment. Although hired help sometimes aided with her chores, a luxury that had not been available during the 1930s, she held herself responsible for most household tasks. 41 Predictably, her struggle with grief and depression adversely affected her ability to carry out her duties within the home. Her comment on one such grief-filled day was that“mentily she was weighted with grief her spirits where all broken tried to do things not much success.” On other occasions she took to her bed in the middle of the day, leaving the pies for dinner unmade and generating additional chores, such as the dishes, for the hired woman.42 The one task that she could generally accomplish, depressed or not, was making rag rugs. Perhaps tearing up the rags and beginning a new rug was therapeutic; on several days when she suffered acute distress she “butchered up” items of clothing to be incorporated into her projects. 43 Martha also perceived the physical environment outside her door as hostile and as a contributing factor in her depression. The howling of the western Kansas wind intensified her anxiety. The wind on an April day “a busslin & squeeking . . . make it a gloomy and sobbing day with life all cluttered up.” It was the “whistling whooring wind sound” that made her feel “mornfull.”44 She interpreted even the cheerful elements in her environment, such as the morning glories planted around the farmhouse, in a negative manner: “The beautiful blue morning glories bloomed so nice yesterday all, day also today I couldnt look

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at them enough. I knew they’d soon stand there all grey and weather beaten.”45 She perhaps described her own state of mind inadvertently while commenting upon the demise of one of her flock of hens: “A Hen took a notion to drown herself was tired of living.” 46 While Martha never suggested that she might be contemplating suicide, it was obvious that she, like the hen, was tired of life. Martha’s writings make it clear that both she and her husband suffered greatly from their son’s death. Both parents mourned, but apparently in quite different ways. While Martha suffered from a serious depression and poured out her grief in daily diary writings, George began to drink heavily, distancing himself from his grieving wife. He could deal neither with his son’s death nor with his wife’s resulting depression. Their marriage, and Martha’s life, would never be the same. The portion of Martha’s diary concerning her life from May 1941 until her death in 1955 underscored the grim realities of life within a family seriously eroded by alcoholism. George and Martha’s marriage began to suffer seriously in the summer of 1942, just over a year after their son’s death. Martha’s grief was overwhelming, and the strain was evidently too much for George. As the summer wore on he spent less and less time at home, abandoning his wife for longer and longer periods. On July 27 Martha prepared a large meal, expecting her husband to bring several guests home for supper. George and his guests never arrived, prompting Martha to write in her diary, “All I am is just a slave, and nobody. 47 In the summer of 1942 there was no indication that George’s problems were directly related to the use of alcohol. He simply appeared to be distancing himself from his wife and from the family farm. By September 1943, however, the situation had changed, and Martha was aware that her husband was drinking heavily anytime he was away from home. Even so, she was not as concerned as she would become in the months to follow. 48 By the spring of 1944 George’s drunkenness was a regular occurrence, and he remained inebriated for long periods. In January, February, and March 1946, Martha wrote in her diary about multiple incidents of her husband’s drunkenness. As this entry indicated, these were not always discreet events: “My what a day Pop all tanked up looked like a mad man & sorta has been that way ever since all week along.” 49 George’s alcoholism would continue for the remainder of his life. By the mid-1940s, “going to town” had become a coded expression for “going to drink.”Although Kansas was a dry state, George evidently found local sources of liquor. He could also travel across the state line to Holly, Colorado, a wet community. As Martha commented, “buisness to atend to town is Pops weakness at all times lotta excuses to find.”50 This often led to “tomcaten sprees,” and George would stay away from home for days at a time.51 Martha’s use of the term

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“tomcatting” would seem to indicate that her husband’s adventures away from home included illicit sexual behavior, although this remains unclear. Martha never wrote explicitly about any such incidents, but the following excerpt from April 1945 suggests that she worried about the possibility: “This man Haris [the hired man] soon after at 8 he got up and told things about the dance at Ben Maraks wimen drunk as well as men one couple went to Bed, & Mable wasnt there Mrs. Charley Marak stayed hom. Was three this morning when the men got in & Pop had such cold feet was about 9 when we’d completed breakfast Pop was half shot & my, my, how I did feel when Harris told what he did about the dance.”52 The hired man alleged that George had been present when scandalous activities occurred. Whether George participated or not was left unsaid. Another issue even more critical to Martha was at stake in George’s wanderings. George knew how to drive, while Martha did not. When he drank he took the family car and left her on the farm without transportation. In the summer of 1942, George began to exclude Martha from his trips to surrounding farms and to town. Whether he did this by design or through inattention, it was a terrible situation for Martha, and her plaintive written comments underscore the hardship that isolation posed for her: “The tractor quit at 6:20 he then came in. . . . So at 7 supper was ready, so after he went to Wayne Rogers to bring his level home. And with out giving me a chance to go along.” 53 Six weeks later, after George went to visit one of their daughters, she wrote, “He drove down to see [them]. gave him ½ gal. Milk Me not knowing that he was going there I’d like to have went along.”54 Although the family owned several automobiles and trucks, they had no horse and wagon, so even that mode of transportation was unavailable to Martha. She lived in a very small world, made smaller by a husband who preferred to exclude her from his travels. Furthermore, his alcoholism in itself was shaming and isolating. This type of behavior ensured that Martha was truly alone, far more than an urban woman would have been under the same circumstances. The often equally unpleasant alternative to abandonment was to accompany George on his travels. George obviously did not want Martha’s company, and Martha received little pleasure from the trips. She often found herself in town and alone, waiting for George outside the local bar. She commented, “I got so tired of sitting in the Car and Pop not considering me as a human being.” 55 Getting him to leave at the end of the evening could be a battle: “Pop was determain to stay so I just took it. he was in such terriabe state of mind to hatefull to convince him eny other way . . . he did curse me.” 56 Verbal abuse generally followed as they made their precarious way home: “Well Pops tongue bit and burned like fire on our way home was very hatefull.” 57 They were

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fortunate never to be involved in a serious accident when George was drunk and driving. Whatever route she chose, Martha was in a bind. She seemed to be afraid to be left alone, but she was none too happy about how her husband behaved when she accompanied him to town. Her writing on November 11, 1951, seems to indicate that a day without the meaningful company of her husband was a lonely day: “George was really sick this day all he got in his stomache all day was a cup coffee & he vomited it up later he drank a glass of milk I listened in on severel preachers cause George was in bed all that time and almost all day o he was sick coughed & gagged all through the day was a dismal day no companion ship just my silent partner to pray to & have on my mind or concentrate on him.”58 When he was away from home or indisposed, she had God to talk to, but no one else. On the other hand, when he was with her in both body and spirit his presence could be extremely painful. On Christmas Eve 1951 she was more than happy when he finally decided to go to bed: “Did Pop ever get me told in his dirty filthy state of mind. So finally he went to Bed at 8 I was glad that that stinging tongue finially got tired of wagging & closed up.” 59 His verbal attacks became more difficult to bear as Martha’s health deteriorated. Shortly before her death she wrote, “Such harsh words to content with not being ficezly able.”60 Emotional stress surely complicated the physical deterioration she was suffering. As the years passed, George no longer always traveled away from the farm to drink. In addition to his rambles to local towns, he went out to the “roundtop,” a building on the farm, and drank there. As Martha wrote: “Well Pop had a very sociable time in the roundtop to satisfy his wants & needs.” 61 He sometimes stayed out most of the day, coming in only to warm his feet and eat his meals. Less than a month before her death, Martha noted that George had “took the old rocker down & two chairs his bed roof & batchlors din it is.”62 He came to the house to be fed and to get clean clothes, but he did not always come into the house at night. When Martha died in August 1955, she died alone. Martha’s diary, of course, provides only her perceptions of her ongoing marital problems, and it is even incomplete in its recording of her reactions to her husband’s behavior. The degree to which Martha shared her concerns with George is entirely unclear. Her family remembered her as a kind, generous, shy, and uncomplaining woman. Her obituary lauded her as a woman who gave of herself constantly, never complaining about her lot. 63 She rarely recorded in her diary any overt attempts to modify George’s behavior. The following entry, written in October 1950, is quite unusual: “At about 4 George took along walk

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& later he got mad & wouldnt eat eny supper Cause I told him that if I’d go to Syracuse & he’d go to Lakin to get his teeth finished he might get a bottle and then I wouldn’t know whether he’d come & get me or not. So then he told me I was the Boss Cause I locked the Car & kept the keys & left him afoot. So was he ever contrary.”64 Standing up for herself in this manner did not seem to be Martha’s usual style. She generally wrote about avoiding conflict rather than confronting George’s problems directly. What may have been true was that she was using the diary to communicate with George. The diary, at least in the beginning, had been a family document that sat on the kitchen table, and George occasionally took it out to read about the previous years’ events. Martha may have been writing in the diary, hoping that her complaints would reach George’s eyes and his heart. No matter how her concerns reached him, they evidently did not modify his behavior. The rift between the two never healed. 65 Because there are so few family documents like that of Martha Friesen, it is almost impossible to know to what degree her problems were common to rural women. Recent work in that field, however, would suggest that although Martha suffered alone, her suffering was not unique. Deborah Fink, in her study of Boone County, Nebraska, found that a husband’s alcoholism troubled the life of many a farm woman. Given their isolated, rural location there was little that could be done to ameliorate their condition. Women did not generally consider divorce an option and were often far from family and friends who might have been able to help. 66 Instead, year in and year out, they put up with physical and emotional abuse. In the case of Martha Friesen, she recorded no physical abuse. Her husband’s repeated abandonment of her in their isolated rural location and verbal tirades, however, certainly qualified as emotional abuse. She was miles from town, she could not drive, and she could hardly admit to anyone or anything outside her diary the truth of her condition. Alcoholism within the family could lead to terrible social isolation. Western Kansas was home to a large population of evangelical Christians whose churches enforced strict rules against drinking and whose members voted regularly for prohibition. 67 Outside evangelical circles, however, excessive use of alcohol was hardly more acceptable. A Nebraska farm woman, recalling her experiences with an alcoholic husband in roughly the same period, commented that she never felt she could confide her problems to her neighbors: “I didn’t because I thought it was my own problem.” When her second husband died of cancer, however, her neighbors came readily to her aid.68 Cancer was socially acceptable; alcoholism was not. Evidence that Martha Friesen’s problems were more common than she knew

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is also present in the political history of prohibition. In 1948 Kansas finally reconsidered the issue of constitutional prohibition, more than a decade after it had ceased to exist in most of the nation. Farm residents, and particularly those in areas with low population densities, voted to continue prohibition. Farm women over the age of fifty were prohibition’s strongest supporters, voting nine to one in favor of the law. 69 Although the historian can only speculate why individual farm women supported prohibition, it is abundantly clear why they might. Women’s isolation in rural communities made them particularly vulnerable to the problems associated with male drinking and the potential for abuse stemming from drunkenness. As Fink notes, “farm women’s enthusiasm for temperance is one sign of how much they suffered from alcohol and how pervasive drunkenness was.”70 Both Emily Hawley Gillespie and Sarah Gillespie Huftalen were actively involved in temperance activities, although the impetus for their involvement is unclear. 71 Martha Friesen’s life is a part of that lost and hidden history of American women — lost and hidden because she was a farm wife, far from the public view, and because she was a member of a family torn apart by problems considered too shameful to share. By keeping a diary, however, what was invisible had the potential to become visible. A relatively impersonal accounting of weather and work became a far different type of record, a personal record that revealed the terrible repercussions of a family tragedy. While the reader will probably never know the extent to which Martha’s life was representative of others in her time and place, the evidence suggests that her experience was far more common than Martha — or any other woman — would have wanted to believe. In a larger sense, Martha Friesen is a part of a sisterhood of writers, women who turned to pen and paper to work out pains almost too great to bear. 72 Diaries were a substitute, albeit an incomplete one, for absent women friends. They provided an “empathetic audience” for sorrows that were perhaps too personal and too raw to share. 73 Diaries provided a sense of community and solace, even if it was only a spare, silent community of one. Writing helped these women to endure the seemingly unendurable, and to emerge, if not victorious, then as survivors. Notes The nucleus of this article was presented at the 1995 Western Historical Association meeting in Denver. My thanks particularly to Professor Elliott West for his insightful comments. I would also like to thank the editorial staff and referees at Frontiers for their excellent suggestions and helpful advice. 1. Linda Gordon, Heroes of Their Own Lives: The Politics and History of Family Violence (New York: Viking Penguin, 1988), 6–7.

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2. Melody Graulich, “Violence against Women: Power Dynamics in Literature of the Western Family,” in The Women’s West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 111–26; Susan Glaspell,“A Jury of Her Peers,” in The Best American Short Stories, ed. John Updike (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), 18–37. 3. An equally interesting and historically useful document from an earlier era is Abigail Abbot Bailey’s memoir. This eighteenth-century woman’s memoir details Asa Bailey’s physical abuse of his wife, Abigail, and his sexual abuse of his daughter, Phebe. Abigail was eventually able to obtain a divorce. Ann Taves, ed., Religion and Domestic Violence in Early New England: The Memoirs of Abigail Abbot Bailey (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 4. Judy Nolte Lensink, “A Secret to be Burried”: The Diary and Life of Emily Hawley Gillespie, 1858–1888 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989), 334. 5. Lensink, “A Secret to be Burried,” 342. 6. Lensink, “A Secret to be Burried,” 336. 7. Lensink, “A Secret to be Burried,” 369. 8. Suzanne L. Bunkers, “All Will Yet Be Well”: The Diary of Sarah Gillespie Huftalen, 1873– 1952 (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1993), 83. 9. Bunkers, “All Will Yet Be Well,” 243. 10. Bunkers, “All Will Yet Be Well,” 190–91. 11. Bunkers, “All Will Yet Be Well,” 196. 12. Bunkers, “All Will Yet Be Well,” 232–33, 243. 13. Lensink, “A Secret to be Burried,” 392. 14. Joanna Bowen Gillespie, “Martha Laurens Ramsay’s ‘Dark Night of the Soul,’ ” William and Mary Quarterly 48, no. 1 (1991): 81, 87. 15. See Wendy Simonds and Barbara Katz Rothman, Centuries of Solace: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Popular Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992). 16. The diary is privately held and used by permission of Thelma Warner and Verna Gragg, Syracuse ks. All punctuation and spelling are reproduced exactly. At the diary owners’ request, all names used in connection with the diary are pseudonyms. 17. This “spare style,” Elizabeth Hampsten argues, is not only characteristic of rural women’s diaries but is intentional: “In a well-regulated life, nothing ought to happen, and astonishments are likely to occur by mistake. Keeping the pattern intact day after day is a woman’s mark of success.” “Tell Me All You Know,” in Teaching Women’s Literature from a Regional Perspective, ed. Leonore Hoffman and Deborah Rosenfelt (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982), 56. 18. Judy Nolte Lensink, “Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism: The Diary as Female Autobiography,” Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (1987): 41. 19. Lensink, “A Secret to be Burried,” xxiii. 20. Friesen diary, October 10, 1941. 21. For a more comprehensive discussion of Martha Friesen’s experience of the 1930s see

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Pamela Riney-Kehrberg, “Separation and Sorrow: A Farm Woman’s Life, 1936–1941,” Agricultural History 67, no. 2 (1993): 185–96. 22. Evidence for the relative prosperity of the 1940s is in the Chattel Mortgage Records of Hamilton County. In 1942 the family borrowed nearly $3,500, evidently for an addition and electric wiring for their home. In 1943 — a year before the note came due — they repaid the debt in full. Chattel Mortgage Records, Hamilton County, Kansas, 1942. Register of Deeds Office, Hamilton County Courthouse, Syracuse, Kansas. 23. Friesen diary, May 17, 1941. 24. Friesen diary, June 24, 1941. 25. The original sections of the manuscript that were recovered did not include any material from late May 1941 until February 1942. After consultation with the diary’s owners, we concluded that the material had been destroyed. Since then that portion of the diary has been found, contrary to the information reported in my article “Separation and Sorrow” (see n. 21). 26. Friesen diary, June 16, 20, 24, 1941. 27. Friesen diary, June 3, 24, 1941. 28. Systematic study of nineteenth-century diaries has indicated that mourning over such a period of time was not at all unusual and that the marking of anniversaries was common to grieving diarists. See Paul C. Rosenblatt, Bitter, Bitter Tears: NineteenthCentury Diarists and Twentieth-Century Grief Theories (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 16–31. 29. Friesen diary, March 16, 1942. 30. Friesen diary, March 18, 1942. 31. Friesen diary, March 20, 1942. 32. Friesen diary, May 21, 1942. 33. Friesen diary, May 6, 1944. 34. Friesen diary, May 16, 22, 1944, May 17, 1945. 35. Friesen diary, December 19, 1942. 36. Friesen diary, February 12, November 26, 1942. 37. Friesen diary, April 4, 1945. 38. Friesen diary, July 17, 1942. 39. Friesen diary, August 24, 1943. 40. Friesen diary, July 8, 1942. 41. Although she needed help, Martha was not always happy to share her work with a hired woman. She was very displeased with one helper in the summer of 1942 and rejoiced when the woman left on July 20. “Miss Boss is gone now,” she wrote in her diary that day. 42. Friesen diary, April 14, 1942, June 29, July 26, 1942. 43. Friesen diary, April 14, October 26, 1942. 44. Friesen diary, April 14, October 11, 1942. 45. Friesen diary, October 11, 1944. 46. Friesen diary, February 3, 1942.

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47. Friesen diary, July 27, 1942. 48. Friesen diary, September 4, 1943. 49. Friesen diary, March 10, 1946. 50. Friesen diary, October 9, 1944. 51. Friesen diary, March 12, 1945. 52. Friesen diary, April 15, 1945. 53. Friesen diary, September 1, 1942. 54. Friesen diary, November 11, 1942. 55. Friesen diary, April 3, 1952. 56. Friesen diary, November 10, 1951. 57. Friesen diary, March 11, 1952. 58. Friesen diary, November 11, 1951. 59. Friesen diary, December 24, 1951. 60. Friesen diary, July 14, 1955. 61. Friesen diary, January 1, 1950. 62. Friesen diary, July 22, 1955. 63. Obituary, Syracuse Journal, August 18, 1955. 64. Friesen diary, October 17, 1950. 65. Lensink writes that Gillespie used her diary to create a persona for herself: “Her chosen persona of the sufferer was perfectly enacted in the autobiographical form of the diary, kept privately and relentlessly while she silently endured life’s hardships. When she was ultimately silenced by death, her diary, passed through generations, would proclaim her angelic sacrifice more movingly than any words on a headstone” (“Expanding the Boundaries of Criticism,” 52). While it is highly unlikely that Martha Friesen was creating so self-conscious a narrative and legacy for herself, this attempt to leave a positive literary legacy may have been a factor in her later writing as well. 66. Deborah Fink, Agrarian Women: Wives and Mothers in Rural Nebraska, 1880–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 80–81. 67. Robert Smith Bader provides a useful overview of this subject in Prohibition in Kansas: A History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1986), 263. 68. Fink, Agrarian Women, xvi–xvii. 69. These statistics are based on a Wichita State University poll of five thousand Kansas voters (Bader, Prohibition in Kansas, 251–52). Martha Friesen voted in the election of 1948, but her diary does not indicate how she voted. George, however, seems to have celebrated by getting drunk the next day. 70. Fink, Agrarian Women, 80. 71. Lensink, “A Secret to Be Burried,” 7, 24, 211–12; and Bunkers, “All Will Yet Be Well,” 26, 150–51. 72. My thanks to the anonymous reviewer for Frontiers who suggested the idea of a “sisterhood of diarists.” 73. Gayle R. Davis,“Women’s Frontier Diaries: Writing for Good Reason,”Women’s Studies 14, no. 1 (1987): 8–9.

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“It is hard to be born a woman but hopeless to be born a Chinese” The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan judy yung

[241], (37) In 1924 the U.S. Congress passed the National Origins Quota Act, aimed at excluding undesirable immigrants, namely those from southern and eastern Europe, and all aliens ineligible for citizenship, specifically the Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans. That same year, a group of sociologists was investigating the “Oriental problem,” or the causes of racial conflict on the Pacific Coast. Under the direction of Robert E. Park of the University of Chicago, the Survey of Race Relations staff employed the life histories method, interviewing more than three hundred predominantly Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans about their early lives, immigration experiences, aspirations, worldviews, cultural conflicts, and relationships with other groups. 1 Among them was Flora Belle Jan, the seventeen-year-old daughter of the proprietor of the Yet Par Low chop suey restaurant in Fresno’s China Alley. In a one-hour interview with investigator Merle Davis held at her father’s restaurant, Jan said: When I was a little girl, I grew to dislike the conventionality and rules of Chinese life. The superstitions and customs seemed ridiculous to me. My parents have wanted me to grow up a good Chinese girl, but I am an American and I can’t accept all the old Chinese ways and ideas. A few years ago when my Mother took me to worship at the shrine of my ancestor and offer a plate of food, I decided it was time to stop this foolish custom. So I got up and slammed down the rice in front of the idol and said, “So long Old Top, I don’t believe in you anyway.” My mother didn’t like it a little bit. 2

As she explained further, it was not just Chinese conventions that she disliked and attacked, but American hypocrisy as well. Flora Belle told Davis that she had already written an article in the local newspaper poking fun at her Chinese male friends (“The Sheiks of Chinatown”) and a skit that ridiculed the

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the life and times of flora belle jan

modern woman in American society (“Old Mother Grundy and Her Brood of Unbaptized Nuns”). She also criticized the “snobbishness” of sorority girls at her college for allowing only rich girls into their organizations, adding matterof-factly, “Of course being a Chinese girl, I’m not eligible to membership in a sorority, but some of the girls are awfully good to me.”3 Davis was evidently fascinated by Flora Belle’s keen intellect, outgoing personality, and unconventional outlook, for he quickly wrote Park that “Flora Belle is the only Oriental in town apparently who has the charm, wit and nerve to enter good White society. . . . She is both a horror and source of pride to her staid Chinese friends, and is quite the talk of American town.” 4 In other words, she was living proof that, contrary to popular nativist and racist opinions, Asians were assimilable and could become good Americans. She therefore confirmed Park’s theory that all groups, regardless of race or ethnicity, would eventually become integrated into mainstream American life, according to his postulated race relations cycle of contact, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation. Becoming assimilated, in Park’s view, meant Anglo conformity and the erasure of one’s ethnicity. 5 Clearly, here was a Chinese American woman who stood out among her second-generation peers. On the whole, American-born Chinese who came of age in the 1920s aspired to become acculturated or adapted to American middleclass life. 6 They were, after all, U.S. citizens by birth, educated in American public schools, and influenced by their teachers, peers, and the popular media to be Westernized in appearance, outlook, and lifestyle. However, their ability to acculturate was constrained by intergenerational and cultural conflicts at home and racism, sexism, and economic segmentation in the larger society. Having to negotiate between cultures, between American ideals of democracy and the realities of socioeconomic and political exclusion, Chinese Americans, like their Mexican American and Japanese American contemporaries, responded in a variety of ways based on the interplay of historical forces, cultural values, family circumstances, and individual personalities.7 Many who were busy with survival just toed the line, acquiescing to the expectations of conservative parents and the limitations placed on them by the larger society. The majority of secondgeneration Chinese Americans chose to adopt a bicultural lifestyle — a blend of what they took to be “the best of the East and the West” — while maintaining a segregated existence from mainstream society. Some, imbued with a strong sense of Chinese nationalism, looked to China for gainful employment, social acceptance, and political participation. 8 Few rebelled as Flora Belle Jan did in rejecting Chinese customs, claiming an American identity, and critiquing social hypocrisy among her peers. She was what was called a “flapper” in the Jazz Age

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of the 1920s — a woman who defied social control and conventions, who was modern, independent, sophisticated, and frank in speech, dress, morals, and lifestyle. 9 At this time the only well-known Chinese American flapper was Anna May Wong, who broke convention by becoming a Hollywood actress. She appeared in The Thief of Baghdad (1924) and made more than one hundred films in her thirty-seven-year career, most of which typecast her in the limited role of Oriental villainess. The image she projected in the movie magazines, however, was that of a beautiful and modern woman who lived in her own apartment, dressed in the most up-to-date fashion, and spoke the latest slang. 10 Although they never met, Flora Belle, when shown some of these articles, remarked,“More power to any Chinese girl who dares to buck the conventions.” 11 In her own way, Flora Belle was just as unconventional, independent, and frank. She made her “flapperism” known through her pen, which she wielded with vengeance, leaving behind a trail of letters, romantic poems, short stories, and caustic articles that were published in the Fresno Bee, San Francisco Examiner, and Chinese Students’ Monthly. Her plan to become a famous writer, however, was cut short in 1932, when she went to live in China with her husband. There she experienced transnational dislocation, the hardships and turmoil of war, job discrimination, and a deteriorating health condition caused by stress, a number of abortions, and a difficult childbirth. She passed away in 1950, a year after she returned to the United States. What made Flora Belle Jan such a daring rebel for her time, and how did she negotiate an identity amid generational and gender conflict at home, racism and sexism in American society, and socioeconomic dislocation in war-torn China? Based on interviews I conducted with three family members (Flora Belle’s sister and daughters), letters Flora Belle wrote to her childhood friend Ludmelia (“Ludy”) Holstein from 1918 to 1949, 12 and her published writings, I hope to reconstruct Flora Belle’s life story and show how history, culture, power, and personality shaped her identity at different points of her life. 13 By so doing, we can come to appreciate the complexities, contradictions, conflicts, and constraints of Flora Belle’s life and times as well as the diverse ways that her generation chose to deal with them. At the same time, her story provides us with a multiracial dimension to our understanding of the flapper generation that led the cultural revolution in the 1920s, ushering America into the modern age. 14 Ultimately, although Robert Park saw Flora Belle as a confirmation of his assimilation theory, her outcome proved him wrong. As acculturated as she was to the American way of life, she could not assimilate as long as the dominant group excluded her on the basis of race. 15 Caught in the webs of

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two cultures and marginalized by American and Chinese society as well as the Chinese American community, Flora Belle sought to define her own identity, to find her own cultural niche. Her life story and writings reveal a complicated individual, a noteworthy social critic, a talented writer, and a feminist ahead of her time. Flora Belle Jan was born on September 22, 1906, in Fresno, California. Her parents were immigrants from Guangdong Province in southeast China and operated the Yet Far Low restaurant in China Alley. They had a total of eight children — five girls and three boys. Flora Belle was their third child and oldest daughter. As Flora Belle’s sister Bessie recalls, the family grew up in a poor but integrated neighborhood of Mexicans, Japanese, blacks, and European immigrants. All the children were expected to help at the restaurant and with the housework, but there was time for visits to the public library, music lessons, and church activities. “We didn’t have any discipline, advice, or anything [from the parents],” said Bessie. “We just grew up.” 16 The father worked long hours at the restaurant, and the mother was described as being old-fashioned, superstitious, and in failing health. Yet they evidently did try to maintain some parental control over their children. According to letters she wrote to her best girlfriend, Ludy Holstein, Flora Belle often had disagreements with her parents over her aspirations and behavior. They did not approve of her writing, her plans to go away to college, or her active social life. At fourteen, when she was scolded for leaving home to visit relatives in San Francisco without their permission, she wrote Ludy: Since I’m just back from a 2-weeks’ trip, I have loads of work to do and besides, even if I haven’t, I’ll have to stick around the house because that mother in this house is continually nagging, and Dad says that he’ll be glad if I never come back. Yes, Lud, he means that, and I’m, oh, I’m just ill about it. He even told me to buy my own stamps in the future. He isn’t home now and didn’t tell me — but mother — and she, naturally, told everything. I got six dollars to go to “H”, and he scolded. Oh Lud really I wish I were dead, even in spite of my advice to you. When I went to “B” [Berkeley] I got loaded with patriotism, and now my ambition is to graduate from U. of C. [University of California] and go back [to China] and teach. Lacy told me that (She’s been back there) teachers were in terrible demand in China now. Oh, Lud, help me! I want to get thru, and out of this house forever! I hate my parents, both, now, and I want to show than that I can do something in spite of their dog-gone skepticism, old-fashionism, and unpardonable unparentliness. Ludy, will you help me? Mother, or that woman, rather, has just finished saying for the ninth time, “Why did I come back for? What am I doing in this house?”

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Ludy, if you only knew! Goodnight, dear chum. Hope to see you soon. Love from Flo. 17

Like most Chinese immigrant parents, Flora Belle’s parents wanted unquestioning obedience from their daughter and control over her comings and goings. But as the above letter shows, they had difficulty communicating this to Flora Belle, who, resentful of their authoritarian ways, was already considering her options, including “going back” to China to teach as some of her peers were doing. Although they had never been in China before, the tendency was for the second generation to talk about “going back” because their parents and America’s discriminatory practices had led them to believe that they belonged in China, not America. Yet, throughout her life and in her writings, Flora Belle always identified herself as an American. Admittedly, Flora Belle was a difficult daughter to manage and quite different from any of her siblings and peers. Young Chinese American women then were busy helping their families make ends meet and, aware of racism and sexism, looking toward developing some practical job skill or marriage for economic security, but not Flora Belle. She was planning on college and a writing career. One reason for the difference may have been her geographic location. In contrast to the segregated life of Chinese Americans in San Francisco, for example, living in Fresno provided more opportunities for someone like Flora Belle to interact with the larger society. As her letters to Ludy reveal, she was more influenced by books, popular culture, her teachers, and peers than by her family upbringing. According to her sister Bessie, Flora Belle was the ambitious and outgoing one in the family, the only one to graduate from college. She was studious, resourceful, had a vivid imagination and flair for writing, was popular with boys, and was regarded as special by many of her teachers. “She kept up friendships with her teachers,” her sister said. “They liked her. All through her whole life, they would write her when she was in China, wherever she was.” 18 An avid reader, Flora Belle was always going to the library or buying books with money earned from her part-time jobs as a house cleaner, factory worker, or salesgirl. At twelve she was reading Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, corresponding with a number of girlfriends of different ethnic backgrounds about books, China Alley, and boys, and writing stories, poetry, and songs. Encouraged by her teachers and friends, she wanted to become a famous writer. When admonished by Ludy for taking too much interest in boys, she wrote back: Oh, dear me! Please, dear chum, don’t say such an awful, awful thing. You are going to discourage me, utterly dishearten me, and take away all my ambition. Don’t say that I will be married before you finish college. It will be impossible to

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the life and times of flora belle jan adapt myself to a settled-down condition. Oh, how can I bear it, to be a mother and take care of children and live an uneventful life, and die,“unwept, unhonored, and unsung,” by the world of Fame; only by friends and relatives! No, Ludy dear, I can not, simply will not do it. You must encourage me, and tell me constantly that I must achieve fame and fortune before I consider my task is done. 19

Flora Belle was serious about pursuing a career in writing. She joined literary clubs, worked on student publications and as a newspaper correspondent, and submitted poems and stories for publication. But her attention was easily diverted by her love for fashion, romance, and a good time — values promoted by the mass media during a period of postwar prosperity and consumerism. Indeed, as Vicki Ruiz points out in her essay on Mexican American flappers, U.S. consumer culture served as a catalyst for change, affirming women’s desires for greater autonomy and a freer heterosexual environment. 20 Because of strict parents or the reality of poverty and prejudice, few could become the flappers they saw on the silver screen or read about in magazines, but Flora Belle could, to a certain extent. Her parents may have been strict, but they were either too busy with work or did not know how to keep her under control. Although the family was poor when she was born, living conditions improved after her father’s restaurant business began to prosper. The spending money she got from her parents, when combined with the money she earned from part-time jobs, allowed her to indulge her interests in reading, writing, playing tennis, and dressing fashionably. To outfit herself as a bridesmaid for a wedding when she was fourteen, she wrote Ludy, “I bought my own white kid shoes. They’re high heel and have a ribbon bow; very much in style now. I know you will be shocked, but why not? — It’s my own money not mother’s nor daddy’s. It’s a fourteendollar shoe, but being on sale, it only cost me ten dollars.” 21 For the (Chinese American) Native Sons’ Dance in San Francisco she went out and bought “a stunning $27.50 blue tricotine suit, blue and gray chin-hat and veil, and twotoned gray suede shoes.” 22 At one point she admitted to taking money from her father’s cash register to pay for her extravagant purchases. This is how she rationalized it to Ludy: “You must think I’m awful, and your opinion is justified, but dear girl, let me explain our Chinese Girls’ Situation to you. Our mothers don’t believe in pampering their daughters with too many American clothes, so we, in order to keep pace with Dame Fashion, must resort to schemes and stealing to be thoroughly up-to-date. Literally, ‘we lie to live.’ ”23 Flora Belle’s brazen behavior with boys and outspoken criticism of social conventions were other markings of her flapper identity. This was noted by her Sunday-school teacher, Amy Purcell, in an interview with Merle Davis:

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She is an unique girl. Very keen, unconventional, bright student, good writer. . . . She writes satires and take-offs on Chinese life and customs, and has roused much opposition in her family and in the Chinese community. She wrote for the Fresno Republican such caustic articles on Chinatown that the Tongs compelled her to stop. . . . She would like to go on with her education at the University of California, but her parents objected. She needs the advice and help of a good friend. She runs around with the native young Chinese boys, who are as American as she. Last night I saw her go tearing along in a big car with a boy’s arm around her neck. At the same time I think Flora Belle is amply able to take care of herself and will not get into serious trouble. 24

Purcell also observed in the interview that Flora Belle was as critical of Christianity as she was of Chinese religion and customs. She no longer attended Sunday school and “openly scoffs at Christianity and our mission.” Flora Belle said as much in one of her letters to Ludy: Miss Purcell told me she was going to Asilomar in August with her chum for a vacation; and she asked me if I would like to go. “Of course,” I said. Then she told me it’d cost about twenty dollars. . . . And Lud-melia! — she darkened the horizon by saying there would be Bible Study in the afternoons. I didn’t say a word; but I just know in my secret heart that I won’t spend twenty dollars to go to a religious convention. I’d rather be a vamp and have a Theda Bar-ist time in S.F., and besides, is there a mortal in this world who could live through the tortuous month of July, without a single bit of excitement and suddenly find herself in the tame regions of a religious camp?!!! No sirree!! 25

As her letters written during her adolescent years indicate, Flora Belle was no different from other flappers who defined “excitement” as dating and partying. At the age of eleven she wrote about going out on an automobile ride with a girl and some boys. 26 At thirteen she wrote that “G.” had bitten her in several places and called her his “F” (“future”). 27 A stream of Chinese American boys pursued her, and she wrote about going out with them for automobile rides, dances, and picnics. In high school she was the only female officer in the Chinese Students’ Club, and when her play, “Miss Flapper Vampire,” was performed at the ywca she created an uproar by dancing with white boys and inviting her white girlfriends to dance with the Chinese boys. 28 Aside from mentioning that she saw no harm in “necking” with boys, there is no indication that she was as sexually permissive as flappers were reputed to be. Nor was she into smoking or drinking. A number of times she wrote Ludy about how she cleverly avoided meeting a suitor alone in the park or how she worked around the efforts of some boys to get her drunk at a party. Flora Belle evidently set her own moral

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standards somewhere between those of her parents and those of her notorious peers. Her published writings at this time show Flora Belle to be a romantic dreamer with a vivid imagination. The heroines in her stories have much to say about the author’s own self-image and pursuits in life. In “Romance on the Roof,” Maizie Edmunds (“the bewitching, dark-haired, dark-eyed, rosy-cheeked, ‘slangy’ girl of the tenements”) is discovered by Ted Hilton (“a captivating young man with wavy auburn hair, dark violet eyes, and a complexion that indicated the athlete”) while singing on a rooftop in the slums. Conveniently, Ted happens to be the son of a philanthropist and offers to finance her studies at a music conservatory. But rather than accept his help, Maizie succeeds on her own. The story ends with their chance meeting five years later at her debut performance as a budding opera singer. It was after the reception and on the roof garden of a famous hotel. The night was coal black, but the flowers in the baskets were snow white. Darkhaired, glowingeyed Maizie stood like a queen in a gown of shimmering white, looking at Ted, and smiling. “It is like a dream to see you again,” she said. “I tried hard to succeed so that somewhere in the distance you would hear of me, and be glad.” “It is not a dream. It is real,” said Ted, taking her hand. “You will never go away again, will you?” And Maizie answered, “No, unless you go with me.”29

In a short story titled “Afraid of the Dark,” the heroine, Ming Toy, closely resembles Flora Belle in a number of revealing ways. Ming Toy is the daughter of a “chop suey palace proprietor” in Chinatown Alley. She is beautiful and brazen, refusing to honor her ancestors, traveling alone in a sleeper car on a train, writing outrageous stories about Chinatown society, behaving like an American flapper, and leaving home for a college education. Moreover, “Ming Toy has never seen China and has no desire to see China. Ming Toy was born in Chinatown, but she has no desire to live in Chinatown. Ming Toy is an American.” One night she is found cowering on the steps of a university building because she is afraid to go home in the dark. Here the story becomes even more imaginative: Ming Toy is afraid of the dark because that is when she sees the Chinese ghosts that once haunted her grandfather. But what she doesn’t know is that her grandfather was the village executioner and these ghosts were ghosts of the men he executed. And because of that, he was driven to insanity before he died — a story that no one dares tell Ming Toy for fear of disgracing her. 30 In addition to writing such fanciful short stories for student publications, Flora Belle submitted articles to local newspapers. On March 27, 1924, she began

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a short stint with the San Francisco Examiner, which billed her as a “Chinese flapper [who] has roped and tied the English language in a manner that would have made Noah Webster marvel.” 31 In these articles, Flora Belle went out of her way to write in English slang and showcase her views on Chinese American life “for the edification and entertainment” of the Examiner readers. Although her article “Chinatown Sheiks Are Modest Lot” was criticized by some of her peers for being harmful to their image, it might have actually helped to break stereotypes of American-born Chinese men.32 Contrary to the prevailing images of the emasculated Chinese coolie or the diabolical Fu Manchu, she described them as knowing how to “shimmy ‘Chicago,’ and tango . . . buy candy for the Shebas, take them to the theater, sing them all kinds of ‘I’ve got the blues’ songs, and do everything else that American sheiks indulge in; but they’ll be dawgoned if they want the world to know about them!” Furthermore, “Oriental sheiks do not pollute their vocabulary with expressions like ‘bees’ knees,’ ‘fleas’ whiskers,’ and ‘come on, babe, let’s cheese it to the Saturday night hop.’ ” Rather, they know the graces of etiquette, enjoy writers like Gertrude Atherton and Ruby Ayres, and are not pretentious about being highbrow. “But say,” she concluded defensively, “if anyone insinuates that they are a million miles from the highbrow, I’ll take off my French heels and knock him for a set of mah jongg!” 33 But the Examiner was not impressed. She was soon let go for being “too inexperienced for a metropolitan daily.”34 Upon graduating from Fresno Junior College, Flora Belle moved to San Francisco to pursue her dream of attending the University of California at Berkeley and becoming a journalist. Although increasing numbers of American women were attending college in the 1920s, there were few Chinese Americans among them because of the prohibitive costs involved and the dim possibility of finding a job in any professional field upon graduation. Among the Chinese Americans who attended college, most of the men chose to major in engineering, chemistry, and the biological sciences, while the women chose to concentrate in the social sciences and medical fields. Very few pursued the literary arts as Flora Belle did. 35 To support herself through college, Flora Belle worked first in a Japanese ice cream parlor and later as a check girl at the Mandarin Cafe, jobs that were not considered respectable by Chinatown standards. “My brother says all Chinatown is horrified,” she wrote Ludy, “but I merely retorted: Horrified, why? Because their own lives are so saintly that the sight of a girl behind a soft drink counter would give them paralysis of their nerves?”36 Living on her own in the city gave Flora Belle free rein to indulge her youthful whims, although she faithfully wrote Chinese letters home to her father. She joined the Chinese Students’ Club, signed up to write for the college newspaper,

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went to fraternity parties, and competed for the title of Chinatown queen. 37 Although she was known as “the belle of Berkeley” among her Chinese American peers, she found it difficult to take part in the flapper movement on the college campus. As in Fresno, she could not join any of the white sororities or date any of the white fraternity boys, an issue that she later takes up in her short story “Transplanted Flower Blossoms.” 38 Within a year, too much partying, automobile rides, romantic relationships (once with an engaged man, another time with a Japanese American), and “scandalous” articles had earned her a bad reputation in the closeknit, conservative Chinatown community. She had just met Robert Park through her employer at the Mandarin Cafe and, at his suggestion, decided to transfer to the University of Chicago. 39 As she reported to Ludy, And, Ludy, listen to this — I have been out with so many people for the past few years that I can’t help but be known and notorious, and those that I meet now, whom I really care to associate with, feel that I am a friend to too many people, and I cannot be limited to them, so better friendships are impossible. I put this mildly. My reputation, while not at stake, is winked at by many people. I didn’t use to care — but I can’t help it now. Of course I am never so wicked as they regard me — but what is the use of virtue when it isn’t recognized? Anyway, I am tired of everybody here — and I want to go away to Chicago, where the distractions of the multitude will not hurt me. There I can perhaps write, and become a worthwhile personage. Here — mediocrity and the lowering influence of the masses are harmful. There is no incentive to rise, one has to be like the others or be criticized. 40

In Chicago, Flora Belle lived with the Parks and worked part-time as a waitress at the Guardwell Tearoom while attending the university. As she complained to Ludy, it was not easy work:“I have been waiting on tables (the hardest, most nerve-wrecking job in the world). But Mrs. Hernick, the proprietor, thinks I am too slow and so last night she made me carry biscuits and water. I dropped the tray full of glasses and cut my hand and she sent me home.”41 Fortunately, she ran into a relative who owned a restaurant and who insisted on giving her some financial assistance “in return for the help my aunt and uncle gave him when he was younger and needed money,” she wrote Ludy. 42 So, according to plan, Flora Belle pursued writing. She became literary editor of the Chinese Students’ Monthly, joined the Poetry Circle, American Literary Association, and Order of Book Fellows, and was a feature writer for the Chicago Daily News. Her story “Murdered by a Chinese Slave Dealer” was published in Real Detective Stories. 43 And she evidently fell in and out of love, for many of the poems and short stories she wrote during this period made references to herself as a “pure

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lily” in search of the perfect love, only to be repeatedly disappointed by empty promises. 44 At twenty she was already writing in the voice of someone who had experienced the vicissitudes of life and unrequited love: Please, God Please, God, will you create a soul Again for me? I want my present soul to mold — To cease to be. My soul has veins that hold just tears, And when released They flood my eyes, my face, my hair, And will not cease. I want a soul that cannot feel Nor hate, nor love. Nor sympathize nor want to steal The things of love. My ideal soul will not regret Nor dream nor sigh. Then disillusion cannot let The tear gates fly.

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[251], (47) Please God, if you can’t make that soul, Don’t let me weep For a better one; just take this soul, And give me sleep. 45

Yet she still continued to identify herself as an American flapper. In an article she wrote for the Chinese Christian Student on “Chinese Girls of the East and West,” she remarked on the “peculiar” appearances and behavior of female students from China at the University of Chicago: “They are shy and retiring, their hair is seldom artistically arranged, they have little sense of color harmony, they lack campus spirit, they have no style whatsoever.” In comparison, native-born coeds like herself “powder and rouge, marcel their hair, trip gaily on impossible French heels, talk slang, flirt openly with boys, dance, drive cars, and go out late unchaperoned.” As she explained the difference, the ideals and standards of each group were molded by the world around them. For those native-born like herself who found “standards of the East lacking, they naturally would adopt the best that they can find in the country of their birth.”46

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Most importantly, Flora Belle fulfilled her goal of graduating from college with a degree in journalism, quite an accomplishment for a Chinese American woman. There was only one other Chinese American journalist at the time — Louise Leung, who had just been hired by the Los Angeles Record as a reporter. 47 Flora Belle was finally in a good position to launch her literary career, but then she fell in love with a handsome graduate student from Henan Province, China, who was studying psychology at the University of Chicago, and decided to marry him. Interestingly enough, her husband strongly resembles Lang-Toa in her short story “Transplanted Flower Blossoms,” just as Flora Belle resembles the heroine, Ah Moy. The story opens with Ah Moy’s parents leaving China for America. Ah Moy is born soon after their arrival, and they attempt to raise her to be a gentle Chinese lady skilled in the domestic arts. But influenced by what she learns in school, Ah Moy rebels, saying, “I can’t be a thorough Chinese, not here in America.” She insists on her flapper ways, refuses an arranged marriage, and leaves home to attend college. After being jilted by Jimmy Hilton, a “tall American youth with deep brown eyes and chestnut hair,” and pursued by a summer job employer who turns out to be a married man, Ah Moy meets and falls in love with Lang-Toa, a student from China who is described as “unusually tall, unusually fair, with eyes more Occidental than Chinese, and a mouth that suggested the chiseled perfection of the imaginary lover of the willow plate.” When he proposes marriage, Ah Moy wavers over the prospect of living with him in China — “the land of ancient and established traditions, of sordid realities.” But when he agrees to bring her back should China not suit her, she finally accepts his offer of marriage: Ah Moy was thrilled: she felt submerged in the light of his eyes. She had not expected this: to her the thought of going back to China had meant the end of happiness. He had said she could come back. It was a safe venture. “What is your answer, Ah Moy?” asked Lang-Toa again. Ah Moy went to a table and plucked a Chinese lily from a bowl. Smiling, she offered it to Lang-Toa. “This lily is my way of answering,” she said. “Mother, don’t you believe that love is like this flower — not that it dies, but that it is pure?”48

Like Ah Moy, Flora Belle also had reservations about living in China. Although she had mentioned earlier in a letter to Ludy that she had plans to go teach English in China, it was only in order to escape her restrictive home life, not for nationalist reasons or employment opportunities as in the case of her Chinese American peers.49 In fact, Flora Belle was rather dubious about whether Chinese Americans could really find success and happiness in the fatherland, as she indicated in her article on the differences between the China-born and the

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American-born. 50 She apparently also knew that she, for one, was too much of an American flapper ever to adapt to life in China. When Ah Moy’s father threatens to send her to China, she replies, “If I should go back to China, I’d feel lost because I have been with Americans for eight[een] years. You see, father, I can’t go back.”51 According to her daughters, Flora Belle really had little choice in the matter, because their father had every intention of returning to China for work once he completed his education. 52 Continuing where Ah Moy’s story ends, Flora Belle’s marriage was far from perfect; her husband did not always prove to be as considerate and understanding as Lang-Toa. While he finished up his graduate studies at the University of Chicago, Flora Belle worked at odd jobs to support him. They had a son a year after their marriage. Then, because he irresponsibly refused to practice birth control, Flora was forced to undergo five abortions within four years, resulting in the deterioration of her health. As she later confided in a letter to Ludy: I have been thinking that I have given the six best years of my life to a man who is not worth it. I have just found out through reflection the reason for our having made no progress in life since [my husband] and I met. Everything I began, everything I attempted was doomed to failure. When I first met him, I was idealistic and enthusiastic and ambitious. I had a body that was sound and healthy. Now I am completely disillusioned, entirely lacking any enthusiasm and utterly devoid of ambition. And my poor body is a mass of nerves and pain. . . . I had my first abortion in September, 1928, at a time when I was pathetically struggling with some editorial work for which I was never paid. The next abortion came the following spring. Then in September, 1929, I was fortunate enough to get a job at the Methodist Book Concern, the salary from which helped [my husband] to go back to school. In January, 1930, I had my third abortion. My memory is a bit hazy but I think the fourth came in December of 1931. I struggled with contraceptives, begged [my husband] to use condoms for added precaution but he stubbornly refused. Then I had a fifth abortion in January, 1932. For these abortions, I have pawned my mother’s jewelry, modelled in art schools, slaved at office routine, stood the boresome company of a Chinese newspaper editor whom I taught English, neglected my son to go out to work, gone without the decencies of life and the clothes I long for with all the fever of youth. Why have I had to undergo this torture? Because of a man who prides himself on his intelligence that is hopelessly lacking in understanding. 53

Why did she tolerate this, especially in the light of the sexually liberating times when divorce rates were on the rise and women were taking the initiative in controlling their sex lives? It is likely that, similar to the Nisei women in Seattle whom Sylvia Yanagisako studied, Flora Belle regarded her marriage as a synthesis between the opposing categories of American and Chinese marriage;

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that is, romantic love entered into the relationship, but so did a degree of duty and commitment. 54 According to their older daughter, “There were times when they seemed very happy to me, and there were times when they fought and she was rather mercurial.” 55 Although their marriage was stormy, the subject of divorce never came up in her letters to Ludy, probably because of her strong sense of duty and obligation. At a high point in their marriage, she wrote Ludy, “I admire [my husband] more than ever. I appreciate what he has had to endure and he cares more and more for me. He won’t even look at anyone else. We get along very well on the whole except for my occasional fits of temper.” 56 It was apparently not easy living with a temperamental flapper like Flora Belle. Remarkably, between her numerous abortions Flora Belle managed to juggle her work and household responsibilities and support her husband through graduate school. “Dishwashing and parading around with the vacuum cleaner will not last forever!” she wrote Robert Park. “I would not advise any one to plunge into domesticity if one has ambitions for a career.”57 Nevertheless, this period of her life proved to be the most productive in terms of her literary career. She made time in her busy schedule to write poetry, short stories, and articles for the Chinese Students’ Monthly, Chinese Christian Student, and Chicago Daily News. Indeed, she considered reading and writing poetry therapeutic. “There is nothing like poetry,” she added in a postscript to Park. “When it is graceful and cheerful, it makes us glad. When it is melancholy and pessimistic, it chimes in with our moods. It is the best escape from Life.” 58 One poem in particular showed her newfound appreciation for Chinese motherhood, perhaps because her own mother, whom she had never spoken well of in her letters, had recently been committed to a state mental institution; or it could have been because she herself had become a mother. In any case, “To a Chinese Mother” is one of the few times that Flora Belle had anything positive to say about Chinese culture. Small in stature, glossy-haired, Young in face, though wan. Forgotten have you how you fared In your bridal caravan? Skin of velvet, luscious eyes, Wide in childlike gaze — How are you able to disguise The sorrow of those tortured days? Was love a duty, or duty, love, When brides were tagged a price

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And sent to market in a drove Fat purses to entice? Ten years have gone, and you are free, Your sons your only care. How could those years of slavery Still leave you young and fair? You smile at questions, shake your head, And work the silken floss Of the multi-colored petal threads. Mute, on the years you’ve lost. Can it be you think it folly To mourn over what must be. That our lives are mapped out wholly By the Gods of Destiny?

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If from your face, serene and calm, I can gain your philosophy, I would fear no torrents of grief or pain. From all desires would I be free! 59

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In 1932, a year after her husband received his PhD in psychology, the couple and their four-year-old son sailed for China, but only after Flora Belle had made certain that she would be able to return to the United States. By marrying “an alien ineligible to citizenship,” she had lost her U.S. citizenship according to the Cable Act of 1922, a racist piece of legislation aimed at discouraging Chinese immigration and family life in America. A 1931 amendment to the Cable Act, thanks to the political efforts of the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, made it possible for her to regain her citizenship through naturalization. 60 The only problem was that she did not hold a birth certificate because there was no doctor present at her birth. As she explained in a letter to Ludy: “I must have my birth certificate. After that, I must apply for citizenship since I lost it by marrying an alien according to a recent law. I am permitted to apply for it by paying a $10 fee and passing an examination, providing that I have my birth certificate. I must go through this before I ever dare leave America because once I am out of the country, as an alien, I’ll have a devil of a time trying to get back. And I know that I will always want to come back because it is my home.”61 Fortunately, the judge believed her and allowed her to “repatriate” even without the birth certificate. 62 As indicated by this letter, despite efforts on the part of the U.S. government to


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exclude her, Flora Belle still held on to her identity as an American and to the United States as her home. Although the family left the United States in debt, their first years in China were relatively good ones. Her husband was able to find a position at the Catholic University in Beijing, where he taught psychology and statistics, and on his salary alone they were able to rent a nice house with a courtyard, hire a cook and four house servants, and live comfortably. But Flora Belle refused to adapt to life in China. According to her older daughter, born in Beijing in 1934, “The years in Peking were good ones for my father but not particularly for my mother, mainly because she was an American and she did not like China. She could neither read nor write the language. She also had many pregnancies which were very detrimental to her health. So on the whole, she was not happy in China. She didn’t like the country. She thought it was filthy. She boiled everything. She was always interfering in the kitchen because she thought the servants were too dirty for her standards.” 63 Flora Belle refused to learn Mandarin Chinese or to associate with the Chinese elite, whom she found snobbish. Instead, she insisted on speaking English at home, dressing the children in American clothes, cooking and eating American food, and inviting English-speaking diplomats, businesspeople, and students to parties that she hosted. Her younger daughter, born in Beijing in 1938, remembers her mother making American candy and doughnuts and taking her to see American movies like Bambi, Westerns, and Jane Powell musicals.64 In contrast to other Chinese Americans who were better prepared for life in China and thus able to effect rapid social and occupational mobility there, Flora Belle was a social misfit. 65 She was also driven to work and to write, making her life more hectic than it needed to be. “She was not a contented housewife,” her older daughter remarked. 66 It didn’t help matters that war broke out in China while she was there. In her letters to Ludy, Flora Belle spoke of these trying times, of how the outbreak of Japanese hostilities in the country severed communication with the outside world, caused a food scarcity, and inflated the cost of living. In addition, a complicated pregnancy and difficult childbirth took its toll on her health and nerves. At one point she was hospitalized and diagnosed as having a kidney infection, anemia, and high blood pressure. “This past year has been a year of judgement upon me,” she wrote Ludy in November 1938. “I survived for what reason I do not know. But at least pain and illness will bring me one kind of freedom — sterility. [In poor health at the time of her third child’s birth, she had her tubes tied.] “And with that freedom, I hope to come back to America to remake my shattered life.”67 But her plans to return home were thwarted by the escalation of war. The

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worst was yet to come. In September 1939 she wrote, “I am dumb before the chaos and confusion that confronts me.” Their family life had been totally disrupted by the war. Driven out of their home in Beijing, they moved to Xi’an, Chongqing, and then Shanghai. At one point their son boarded in a high school in Xi’an, the older daughter in a middle high school in Nankai (ten miles away from Chongqing), the younger daughter in a missionary primary school on the south shore, her husband held a government job in Chongqing, and Flora Belle lived on the outskirts of town in a rat-infested room with a leaky roof close to the U.S. Office of War Information, where she worked as a secretary. Their combined salaries could not keep up with the inflated cost of living. They owed the university for medical bills, and food prices were rising so fast that “we don’t have a cent even to buy a pair of stockings with,” she wrote Ludy, who managed to send her care packages. 68 Compounding Flora Belle’s problems was the job discrimination she faced as a Chinese American and woman journalist in China. Because of her Chineselanguage limitations, she could only find work with English-language publications and firms — the Shanghai Herald, Daily Tribune, China Weekly Review, China National Aviation Corporation, and the Office of War Information. Her letters to Ludy were filled with complaints about white male supervisors who treated her unfairly in terms of work assignments, wages, and promotional opportunities. While employed at the Office of War Information (later changed to U.S. Information Service) in December 1944, she wrote Ludy: My education and previous experience were not considered when I came here. I was given a stenographic test like any China born and I was paid like them. Although after one month of work as a permanent staff member, I was given a $24 raise U.S. because I had shown efficiency. I am still getting a smaller salary than four other girls, two of whom have never been out of China. All around me are staff members who are no older than I and who are no better educated, who hold executive positions with four times my salary, good living quarters, and a living allowance. You wonder I am dissatisfied? It is hard to be born a woman but hopeless to be born a Chinese. There is nothing to hold me here. I shall go at an instant’s notice. 69

Holding a superior attitude toward the local Chinese and toward American employees whom she considered less qualified, Flora Belle came smack against the harsh reality of racism and sexism in the work world. From her own marital relationship, she also came to a new realization about her racial identity: “I have much respect and affection for him [her husband] but can never be completely happy married to a Chinese as I have a white complex,” she wrote Ludy in April 1945. 70

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As desperate times continued with the ongoing war and as she watched others less worthy reap benefits and rewards because they were white men or because they were women who knew how to flatter the boss, Flora Belle became more cynical and determined to return home, as the following excerpt from a July 1947 letter to Ludy indicates: I have become philosophic about life and somewhat of a social recluse. I don’t have the acute enthusiasm of my youth, nor the abysmal disappointments. I have learned to control my temper and am generally calm and collected. Often I wonder about what pays off in this mortal world and what price, talent and ability and conscientious effort? Our values are all wrong. What usually counts most is hidden and unrecognized. What pays off is vulgar, shallow, and cheap. . . . Somewhere, Ludy, there are green hills, calm blue skies, a musical running brook, a cow grazing contentedly on the pasture, and a clean white cottage where peace and goodness dwell. I shall not give up until I find this place on this awesome, other earth. I cannot say when I am coming back to America, but I shall come if it is just to die. 71

Realizing that her earlier reservations about China had proven correct — she would never belong there72 — Flora Belle had tried a number of times to return home to the United States, only to be met with emigration barriers of one kind or another. During the war years the Japanese authorities, who did not recognize dual citizenship, refused to let her leave. Then, after the war was over, Flora Belle had a change of heart, placing her family’s interest above her own. After all, her husband and three children had all grown up in China and belonged there even if she did not. On the other hand, if they did not return to the United States soon, the girls would lose their right to U.S. citizenship and a chance “to live in a well-ordered world where they can study and learn a profession.”73 As conditions in China remained unstable and civil war between the communists and nationalists broke out, she made preparations to leave. Her husband and son were unsuccessful in gaining permission to accompany her, but they all agreed it was best for her and the two daughters to leave first. 74 The prospect of returning home refueled Flora Belle’s ambitions to pursue a writing career. Newswriting would be the means by which she would support herself and her daughters in the United States. She hoped to “some day [find happiness] in an independent literary effort, and still further in the future, in some kind of sociological work that will help repay the world for the blessings it has given me.” 75 Prior to departing, she began making contacts through her employers in China with news and travel agencies in the United States. She wrote Ludy about the exciting prospects of working for United Press International or Pan American Airways, both of which had expressed interest in her.

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According to her younger daughter, her typewriter — the one thing she insisted her husband buy for her in China — remained her constant companion during their voyage home from Shanghai to San Francisco in December 1948. 76 After a brief visit with her family in San Francisco, they went to live with Ludy in Yuma, Arizona, where Flora Belle found work as a secretary and spent all her spare moments composing at her typewriter. But her health never recovered from the hardships she had suffered in China, and on January 22, 1950, at the age of forty-three, Flora Belle Jan died of high blood pressure and kidney failure. Her children had inscribed on her gravestone: “A journalist and feminist before her time. A talent and beauty extinguished in her prime. Our beloved mother.” Flora Belle Jan’s worst fear — that she would “live an uneventful life, and die, ‘unwept, unhonored, and unsung,’ by the world of Fame” — was not unfounded given the socioeconomic and political barriers she had to confront in both the United States and China. Although she did not achieve literary fame, she did live an eventful life as an American flapper who rebelled against both Chinese and American conventionality and social restraints. As her correspondence and publications indicate, she was a talented writer, a noteworthy social critic, and a strong woman who stood up for what she believed in. Despite the constraints of her time, she lived life to its fullest, held on to her American identity and dreams, and left a legacy of writings about her time and generation for posterity. Her life story reminds us of the different responses that Chinese Americans have brought to bear on cultural conflicts and the high costs that women of color have had to pay for the racial and gender inequities of our society. As well, Flora Belle Jan’s biography illuminates the transformation of identity at different points in one’s life due to the interplay of history, culture, power, and personality. And finally, it points to the diversity of experiences that make up Chinese America and the flapper generation of the 1920s. Notes My special thanks to the following colleagues for their helpful suggestions on this article: Colleen Fong, Ruthanne Lum McCunn, Valerie Matsumoto, Peggy Pascoe, Mitziko Sawada, K. Scott Wong, Shelley Wong, and Henry Yu. 1. Funded by the Institute of Social and Religious Studies in New York and other private donations, the Survey of Race Relations was to gather information that would (it was hoped) lead to improved race relations in the United States. However, the research project terminated in 1925, the year after it started, for lack of funds. One set of the survey’s reports, correspondence, and interview transcripts was deposited at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace at Stanford University (hereafter cited as srr). Two key players in the project eventually published books based on

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the work of the survey: Eliot Grinnell Mears, Resident Orientals on the American Pacific Coast: Their Legal and Economic Status (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1928); and William Carlson Smith, Americans in Process: A Study of Our Citizens of Oriental Ancestry (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers, 1937). For an intellectual history of Robert Park and the institutional construction of the “Oriental problem,” see Henry Yu, “Thinking about Orientals: A History of Race, Migration, and Modernity in Twentieth-Century America” (PhD diss., Princeton University, 1995). 2. “Interview with Flora Belle Jan, Daughter of Proprietor of the ‘Yet Far Low,’ Chop Suey Restaurant, Tulare St. and China Alley, Fresno,” box 28, folder 225, 1924, srr. 3. “Interview with Flora Belle Jan.” 4. Davis to Park, June 1, 1924, box 12, srr. 5. Robert E. Park, Race and Culture (Glencoe il: Free Press, 1950). For a discussion of Flora Belle Jan as a confirmation of Park’s assimilation theory, see Yu, “Thinking about Orientals,” 41–54. Flora Belle Jan’s life story and writings are also discussed in Judy Yung, Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), chapter 3; and Judy Yung, Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 6. I take this meaning of acculturation from Eileen H. Tamura’s study of second-generation Japanese Americans in Hawaii, in which she makes a clear distinction between acculturation and Americanization: “Acculturation refers to the adaptation of a group to American middle-class norms and assumes that the process entails the persistence of ethnic identity. Americanization, on the other hand, refers to the organized effort during and following World War I to compel immigrants and their children to adopt certain Anglo-American ways while remaining at the bottom of socioeconomic strata of American society.” Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 52. Tamura’s study clearly shows that the Nisei in Hawaii gradually acculturated into American life while retaining elements of their Japanese heritage. 7. See George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Vicki Ruiz, “ ‘La Malinche Tortilla Factory’: Negotiating the Iconography of Americanization, 1920–1950,” in Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies, ed. Gary Okihiro et al. (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1995), 201–16; Vicki Ruiz, “ ‘Star Struck’: Acculturation, Adolescence, and Mexican American Women, 1920– 1950,” in Small Worlds: Children and Adolescents in America, 1850–1950, ed. Elliott West and Paula Petrik (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1992), 61–80; Tamura, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity; and Valerie Matsumoto, “Desperately Seeking ‘Deirdre’: Gender Roles, Multicultural Relations, and Nisei Women Writers of the 1930s,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 12, no. 1 (1991): 19–32. 8. For studies on the acculturation of second-generation Chinese Americans, see Kit King Louis, “A Study of American-born and American-reared Chinese in Los Ange-

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les” (master’s thesis, University of Southern California, 1931); Marjorie Lee, “Hu-Jee: The Forgotten Second Generation of Chinese Americans, 1930–1950” (master’s thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1984); and Yung, Unbound Feet, chapter 3. 9. For an examination of youth culture in the 1920s, see Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); Vicki Ruiz,“The Flapper and the Chaperone: Historical Memory among Mexican-American Women,” in Seeking Common Ground: Multidisciplinary Studies of Immigrant Women in the United States, ed. Donna Gabaccia (Westport ct: Greenwood Press, 1992), 141–57; and Valerie J. Matsumoto, “Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s,” in Over the Edge: Remapping Western Experiences, ed. Valerie J. Matsumoto and Blake Allmendinger (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 291–306. 10. See Judy Chu, “Anna May Wong,” in Counterpoint: Perspectives on Asian America, ed. Emma Gee (Los Angeles: Asian American Studies Center, University of California, 1976), 284–88; and Alice L. Tilderley,“ ‘I Am Lucky That I Am Chinese,’ ” San Francisco Chronicle, June 3, 1928, 13. 11. Flora Belle Jan to Ludmelia Holstein, September 21, 1931. 12. Ludmelia Holstein was born in Fresno, California, in 1905 and died of a stroke in Yuma, Arizona, in 1976 at the age of seventy-one. She was Jan’s confidante since grammar school. The two shared life experiences and aspirations to become famous writers throughout Jan’s lifetime. After Jan’s death in 1950, Holstein returned all of Jan’s letters to Jan’s older daughter, who later generously shared some of them with me. 13. Here I am borrowing from cultural critic Stuart Hall, who wrote that cultural identity is as much a matter of becoming as of being: “Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power.” By “power” he means the dominant group’s power “to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other.’ ” Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), 225. 14. Most literature on youth culture of the 1920s, such as Fass’s The Damned and the Beautiful, have failed to address other groups outside white, middle-class youths. For studies on Mexican American and Japanese American flappers see Ruiz,“The Flapper and the Chaperone”; and Matsumoto, “Japanese American Women and the Creation of Urban Nisei Culture in the 1930s.” 15. Here I am making a distinction between acculturation and assimilation according to Milton M. Cordon’s Assimilation in American Life: The Role of Race, Religion, and National Origin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964), in which Cordon argues that a group can acculturate (change values, customs, and cultural forms) but not

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assimilate (change primary and institutional relationships) unless it is accepted and allowed to do so by the dominant group. 16. Bessie Hung, interview by author, June 30, 1989. 17. Jan to Holstein, July 17, 1921. 18. Hung, interview. 19. Jan to Holstein, August 20, 1920. 20. Ruiz, “The Flapper and the Chaperone,” 149–51. 21. Jan to Holstein, August 20, 1920. 22. Jan to Holstein, August 17, 1921. 23. Jan to Holstein, August 17, 1921. 24. “Flora Belle Jan,” box 9, folder 9, 1925, srr. 25. Jan to Holstein, June 28, 1920. 26. Jan to Holstein, September 3, 1918. 27. Jan to Holstein, August 20, 1920. 28. According to a Merle Davis letter to Robert E. Park, “There is now quite a furore in the town at this breaking of cast and the Y.W.C.A. is catching it.” See Merle Davis correspondence to Dr. Robert E. Park, srr. 29. Flora Belle Jan, “Romance on the Roof,” The Trailmaker, March 1924, 55–58. 30. Flora Belle Jan, “Afraid of the Dark,” The Interpreter, September 1927, 17–19. There is a Chinese belief that people who die before their time, such as murder victims or suicides, often return as malicious ghosts to haunt those from whom they seek revenge. 31. San Francisco Examiner, March 27, 1924, 9. 32. According to Amy Purcell, the story created such a commotion among some of the Chinese male students that they fought over it. Some felt that Jan had attacked the honor of China; others felt that it was a ridiculous caricature of Chinese American life. See “Flora Belle Jan,” box 9, srr. Later, in a letter to Ludy from San Francisco dated July 6, 1924, Jan wrote; “A worker at the Y.W.C.A. disapproves of my articles — said they did more harm than good. So do other people — but, who’s paying me — the ‘Y’ or the Ex!! Can’t be worried!” 33. Flora Belle Jan, “Chinatown Sheiks Are Modest Lot: Eschew Slang, Love-Moaning Blues,” San Francisco Examiner, March 27, 1924, 9. 34. Jan to Holstein, July 16, 1924. 35. See Beulah Ong Kwoh, “Occupational Status of the American-born Chinese College Graduates” (master’s thesis, University of Chicago, 1947). 36. Jan to Holstein, July 18, 1924. 37. “Chinese Girls Vie for Fete Queen Honors,” San Francisco Examiner, April 5, 1925, 13. 38. Flora Belle Jan, “Transplanted Flower Blossoms,” Chinese Students’ Monthly, May 1929, 324–28, and June 1929, 351–66. 39. Park took an interest in mentoring Chinese American and Japanese American students to pursue higher education. A significant number of them were recruited to

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the University of Chicago to study sociology with him. See Yu, “Thinking about Orientals.” 40. Jan to Holstein, November 27, 1925. 41. Jan to Holstein, January 9, 1926. 42. Jan to Holstein, January 24, 1926. 43. “Fresno Girl Wins Success as Feature, Story Writer,” Fresno Bee, June 23, 1932. 44. See the following articles in the Chinese Students’ Monthly: “To the One Who Supplanted Me,”January 1928, 58;“Self Delight,”February 1929, 170;“Transplanted Flower Blossoms,” May 1929, 324–28; “Vows,” June 1929, 349; “The Absolute,” June 1929, 366; and “Tragedy Found in Painting Artist Goes; Maid Dies of Love — Famous Masterpiece Here,” December 1929, 60–61. 45. Flora Belle Jan, “Two Poems,” The Survey, May 1, 1926, 164. 46. Flora Belle Jan, “Strangers Who Have Met — Chinese Girls of the East and West,” Chinese Christian Student 2 (1927): 10–11. 47. See Louise Leung Larson, Sweet Bamboo: Saga of a Chinese American Family (Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 1989), 213–15; and Louise Leung Larson, Linking Our Lives: Chinese American Women of Los Angeles: A Joint Project of Asian American Studies Center, ucla, and the Chinese Historical Society of Southern California (Los Angeles: Chinese Historical Society of Southern California, 1984), 73–74. 48. Jan, “Transplanted Flower Blossoms,” 366. 49. Most second-generation Chinese Americans who went to China in the 1920s and 1930s did so not only out of frustration over racial discrimination in America but also in answer to China’s call for help in building a stronger nation. For a discussion of the Chinese American debate over “Does my future lie in China or America?” see Yung, Unbound Feet, 157–60. 50. Jan, “Strangers Who Have Met,” 10. 51. Jan, “Transplanted Flower Blossoms,” 325. 52. The names of Flora Belle Jan’s husband and daughters are withheld by request of the daughters; interview by author, August 6, 1989. 53. Jan to Holstein, January 20, 1934. 54. See Sylvia Junko Yanagisako, Transforming the Past: Tradition and Kinship among Japanese Americans (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1985), 107–9. 55. Interview with daughters, August 6, 1989. 56. Jan to Holstein, February 11, 1929. 57. Jan to Park, January 13, 1927, Robert Ezra Park Papers, Joseph Regenstein Special Collections, University of Chicago. I am indebted to Henry Yu for sharing this letter with me. 58. Jan to Park, January 13, 1927. 59. Flora Belle Jan, “To a Chinese Mother,” Chinese Students’ Monthly, March 1930, 160. 60. For a discussion of the Cable Act and its effect on Chinese American women, see Sucheng Chan, “The Exclusion of Chinese Women, 1870–1943,” in Entry Denied: Ex-

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clusion and the Chinese Community in America, 1882–1943, ed. Sucheng Chan (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 128–29; and Yung, Unbound Feet, 168–69. 61. Jan to Holstein, September 23, 1931. 62. Flora Belle Jan, folder 2070/174, Chinese Departure Case Files, Chicago District Office, Immigration and Naturalization Service, National Archives, Chicago. I am indebted to Henry Yu for sharing this file with me. 63. Interview with daughters, August 6, 1989. 64. Interview with daughters, August 6, 1989. 65. For a discussion of how other Chinese Americans adapted to life in China, see Yung, Unbound Feet, 144–46. 66. Interview with daughters, August 6, 1989. 67. Jan to Holstein, November 30, 1938. 68. Jan to Holstein, September 5, 1939. 69. Jan to Holstein, December 22, 1944. 70. Jan to Holstein, April 1945. 71. Jan to Holstein, July 16, 1947. 72. In a letter to Ludy dated October 1937 she wrote, “So fiery and mercurial and temperamental as she [her older daughter] is, she will never get along in China just as I didn’t.” 73. Jan to Holstein, December 3, 1948. The Nationality Act of 1940 stipulated that a person born outside the United States of a parent who is a U.S. citizen can claim derivative citizenship providing that child resides in the United States for five years between the ages of thirteen and twenty-one. 74. The son, being a U.S. citizen, was soon able to join his mother and sisters. Flora Belle’s husband, however, was only able to emigrate after her death in 1950 as the surviving parent of two minor children. 75. Jan to Holstein, June 21, 1945. Jan had always wanted to fulfill Park’s expectations of her. When she heard of his death in 1944, she wrote to Ludy: “I was very depressed by a letter from Mrs. Robert E. Park, who told me of Dr. Park’s death. . . . The underlining reason for my depression was that I had not accomplished anything during his lifetime. He had expected so much of me and had hope that I would write something worthwhile, but here I am beginning all over again, somebody’s stand-on with security as far away as Mars” (December 1944). 76. Interview with daughters, August G, 1989. In a letter to Ludy in October 1937, Jan wrote: “This very typewritter I am using — a good portable Corona — was loaned by a friend who sympathized with my ambitions and was willing to let me take it to America to use. But I will not merely borrow it. I want [my husband] to buy it for me. He has agreed and will pay for it later.”

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Appendix Alternative Grouping by Topic

Work/Gendered Labor Aronson, “Potties, Pride, and pc” Grim, “From the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to the Urban Communities of the Midwest” McBride, “A (Boarding) House Is Not a Home” Reincke, “It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness” Riney-Kehrberg, “ ‘Broke in Spirits’ ” Shalinsky, “Gender Issues in the Afghanistan Diaspora” Sneed, “Two Cherokee Women” Sosa, “Sense and Responsibility” Storrs, “Like a Bamboo” Sutherland, “Of Milk and Miracles” Yung, “The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan” Family Relationships Aronson, “Potties, Pride, and pc” Broughton, “Filming Nana” McBride, “A (Boarding) House Is Not a Home” Mulcahy, “Weave and Mend” Reincke, “It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness” Riney-Kehrberg, “ ‘Broke in Spirits’ ” Shalinsky, “Gender Issues in the Afghanistan Diaspora” Smith, “Fragments from a Family Album” Sneed, “Two Cherokee Women” Storrs, “Like a Bamboo” Sutherland, “Of Milk and Miracles” Yung, “The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan” Cultural Difference Finn, “Walls and Bridges”

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appendix

Grim, “From the Yazoo Mississippi Delta to the Urban Communities of the Midwest” Mulcahy, “Weave and Mend” Reincke, “It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness” Shalinsky, “Gender Issues in the Afghanistan Diaspora” Sneed, “Two Cherokee Women” Sosa, “Sense and Responsibility” Storrs, “Like a Bamboo” Lesbian Identity Aronson, “Potties, Pride, and pc” Reincke, “It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness” Women in the Academy Finn, “Walls and Bridges” Reincke, “It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness” Sosa, “Sense and Responsibility” Sutherland, “Of Milk and Miracles” Yung, “The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan” Adolescent Experience Shalinsky, “Gender Issues in the Afghanistan Diaspora” Sneed, “Two Cherokee Women” Sosa, “Sense and Responsibility” Storrs, “Like a Bamboo” Yung, “The Life and Times of Flora Belle Jan” Theoretical Approaches Aronson, “Potties, Pride, and pc” McBride, “A (Boarding) House Is Not a Home” Reincke, “It Takes a Global Village to Raise a Consciousness” Storrs, “Like a Bamboo” Sutherland, “Of Milk and Miracles”

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Contributors

Susan H. Armitage, former editor of Frontiers, is a professor of history at Washington State University. She is best known as the coeditor (with Betsy Jameson) of two important anthologies on western women’s history, The Women’s West (University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) and Writing the Range (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997). She first found her way into the history of women in the American West through oral histories with women that she conducted and directed in the 1970s.

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Anne Aronson is an associate professor in the Department of Communication, Writing, and the Arts at Metropolitan State University at St. Paul, Minnesota. She teaches courses in composition, women’s studies, professional writing, and rhetorical theory. Her research interests include the writing of adult students, feminist approaches to composition, and the intersections of professional and creative writing. Connie Broughton is part owner, with her husband, Irv Broughton, of Mill Mountain Productions, a company that has produced a literary magazine, poetry chapbooks, short films, and film documentaries (but not a lot of revenue). Located in Spokane, Washington, Broughton worked for fifteen years as an audiovisual writer-producer and has also taught composition and American literature at local colleges. She earned her mfa in creative writing from Eastern Washington University and is pursuing her PhD in American Studies from Washington State University. She works for the Washington State Board for Community and Technical Colleges as the managing director of WashingtonOnline, an online consortium of thirty-four community and technical colleges. Janet L. Finn is an associate professor of social work and adjunct professor of anthropology at the University of Montana. She earned her msw at Eastern Washington University in 1982 and her PhD in social work and anthropology

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at the University of Michigan in 1995. Finn serves on the editorial board of Affilia: Journal of Women and Social Work. She is the author of numerous articles on gender, welfare, youth, and community, and of the book Tracing the Veins: Of Copper, Culture, and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata (University of California Press, 1998). Finn has recently coauthored, with Maxine Jacobson, a social work text entitled Just Practice: A Social Justice Approach to Social Work (Eddie Bowers Publishing, 2003). She is presently documenting work of women’s grassroots community organizations in western Montana and in Santiago, Chile. Valerie Grim is an associate professor of African American Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She is a historian and teaches courses on African American experiences in America. She researches and publishes in the area of African American rural and agricultural history. She has published articles in numerous journals as well as book chapters in a number of edited works. Patricia Hart holds a PhD in American Studies. She is a faculty member in Journalism and Mass Media and co-coordinator of the American Studies Program at the University of Idaho. She is the former managing editor of Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies at Washington State University. She teaches classes in editing and publishing, contemporary American social and cultural movements, and media history. She is the author of A Home for Every Child: Relinquishment and Adoption at the Washington Children’s Home Society, 1895– 1915 (University of Illinois Press, forthcoming) and, with Ivar Nelson, Mining Town: The Photographic Record of T. N. Barnard and Nellie Stockbridge from the Coeur d’Alenes (University of Washington Press, 1983, 1991), among other publications. Kari Boyd McBride teaches in the Women’s Studies Department at the University of Arizona. Her recent publications include Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study in Landscape and Legitimacy (Ashgate, 2001) and the edited collection Domestic Arrangements in Early Modern England (Duquesne University Press, 2002). Joanne B. Mulcahy holds an ma in anthropology and a PhD in folklore. Her work has appeared in various journals and anthologies, the latter including Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives (Mayfield, 1998) and The Stories That Shape Us: Contemporary Women Write about the West (Norton, 1995). Her biography of Alutiiq healer Mary Peterson, Birth and Rebirth on an Alaskan Island,

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is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. Mulcahy teaches writing, anthropology, and gender studies at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. Nancy Reincke is an associate professor of English and Women’s Studies at Drake University at Des Moines, Iowa. She earned her PhD from the University of Iowa. Her areas of scholarly emphasis are twentieth-century American literatures, postcolonial literatures, and feminist studies. She is also interested in gay and lesbian studies. Her performance criticism piece, “read our lips: A Re(media)l Short Course on Liberating Lesbianism,” is published in Performing Gender and Comedy, edited by Shannon Hengen (Gordon and Breach, 1998). Pamela Riney-Kehrberg is an associate professor of history at Iowa State University, Ames. She is author of Rooted in Dust: Surviving Drought and Depression in Southwestern Kansas (University Press of Kansas, 1994) and editor of Waiting on the Bounty: The Dust Bowl Diary of Mary Knackstedt Dyck (University of Iowa Press, 1999) and Childhood on the Farm: Work, Play, and Coming of Age in the Midwest (University Press of Kansas, 2005). Audrey C. Shalinsky is a professor of anthropology at the University of Wyoming, Laramie, where she has been a faculty member since 1980 and has served as department head since 1996. She conducted field research in Afghanistan in 1975 and 1976–77 and worked with Afghans in Pakistan for a sabbatical research project in 1990. She received a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University in 1979. Shawn Michelle Smith is a professor in the Department of American Studies at St. Louis University and author of American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 1999) and Photography on the Color Line (Duke University Press, 2004). Her photographic work, Fragments from a Family Album, which appears on the cover and inside this collection, has been exhibited in major cities. Roseanna Sneed attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where she received a master’s degree in counseling and consulting psychology in 1985. She was a school counselor at the Cherokee Elementary School for thirteen years before taking a position with Western Carolina University as director of the Cherokee Center. She and her family reside on the Qualla Boundary, home of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, in the Birdtown Community.

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Maribel Sosa lives in Tucson, Arizona, with a misanthrope and his two gatitos. She works as a technical writer. Debbie Storrs is a faculty member in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Idaho. She teaches courses on race and ethnic relations, gender and sexuality, and social stratification. Her research interest is the construction, maintenance, and performance of identities. Her research has focused on mixed-race, contemporary white, and Asian identities. Katherine Sutherland completed her PhD in English in 1993 at York University in Toronto, Canada. She returned to her hometown, Kamloops, British Columbia, to work at the University College of the Cariboo, where she is an associate professor, teaching women’s literature and postcolonial literature while continuing to research and write about these areas. Karen Weathermon completed her PhD in English at Washington State University in 1999. She now works in wsu’s Campus Writing Programs, where her interests include writing across the curriculum and faculty development. She currently serves as book-review editor for Issues in Writing. She was assistant editor for Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies from 1995 to 2000. Judy Yung is Professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is coauthor of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, 1910–1940 (University of Washington Press, 1980) and author of Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (University of California Press, 1995) and Unbound Voices: A Documentary History of Chinese Women in San Francisco (University of California Press, 1999).

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Index

Page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. acculturation, 260n6, 261n15. See also assimilation Adams, Patricia, 161 adoption, 83, 124 Afghanistan, 133, 136–38, 145–51 “Afraid of the Dark” (Jan), 248 African Americans, 156–58, 163–64, 166, 168 Aiken, Katherine, 108 alcoholism, 233–37 Allen, Paula Gunn, 177 American culture, 241–42, 246–47 Americanization, 260n6. See also assimilation Americans, 93–94 androcentrism, 207, 208, 223 Armbruster, Sophie, 108 Aronson, Anne, 69 assimilation, 241–44, 260n6, 261n15. See also acculturation; cultural ideologies autobiographical ethics, 67–68 autobiography, 3, 5, 227 autonomy, 92–95 Behar, Ruth, 99, 176 Belfast, 8 Benedict, Ruth, 181–82, 185, 196n31 Benston, Margaret, 206–7 Billups, Linsey, 162 Black, Bernice, 161 Blum, Linda, 30 boardinghouses, 212 Boas, Franz, 178–85, 191, 196n24 Bohannan, Paul, 191 Boland, Eavan, 12

Bourke, Angela, 11, 15, 16 Brah, Avtar, 89 breastfeeding: history, 29–30; language, 31–33; miracle, 44–45; nature and science, 36–37; political issues, 30–31; spirituality, 39–41 Brecher, Jeremy, 58 bridal showers, 148 Broughton, Connie, 68–69 Brown, Delores, 163 Broyles, William, Jr., 52–53 Bullock, Shirley, 167 Bunch, Charlotte, 48 Bunka embroidery classes, 96, 98 Bureau of Indian Affairs, 190 Burke id, 68–69, 103, 108 Burns, Ken, 106–7 Bush, George H., 57 Bushotter, George, 179 Butler, Judith, 33, 37 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 39

Cable Act (1922), 255 Cameron, Anne, 9, 15–16 cancer survivors’ group, 10 caoineadh, 11 Carr, Ruth, 7–9, 11, 18 Catfish Park neighborhood, 114, 115 Catholic Bogside neighborhood, 9 Cherokees, 71–72, 76 childbirth, 36, 97 childlessness, 83 China, 252–53, 256–58 “Chinatown Sheiks Are Modest Lot” (Jan), 249, 262n32

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Chinese American Citizens Alliance, 255 Chinese Americans, 241–43, 249, 251–53, 256– 59, 263n49 Chinese culture, 241–42, 254–55, 262n30 “Chinese Girls of the East and West” (Jan), 251 chora, 34, 36, 42 Christian church, 39–41, 247 Christian Family Movement (cfm), 40 Civil War, The, 106, 107 Clegg, Lee, 9 Clifford, James, 131, 134, 175 Climbing Bear, 71–72 Coleman, Canary, 159, 162, 167 Coleman, Clementine, 157 Collier, John, 189–90 communities, construction of, 117 complicity, 51–53, 62–63 consolation literature, 227 Contemplacion, Flor, 49–50, 57–59 contra-diction, 186, 197n49 Costello, Tim, 58 Cott, Nancy, 208 craic, 9, 10 crime, 165–66 cultural hybridity, 4 cultural ideologies: betrayal, 94; Japanese, 92– 93; marriage, 95; personal narrative, 99; public and private spheres, 212; resistance, 98; restrictions, 82, 84–85; women’s work, 208–10, 223. See also assimilation “cultural mediator,” 194n6 “Dakota,” 193n4 Dakota Indian Foundation, 190 Dakota Texts, 184, 186 dancing, 150, 154n22 “Dark Island, The” (Bourke), 16 Das Gupta, Monisha, 99 dating, 85–88 Daughters of Copper Woman (Cameron), 9, 15–16 Davis, Lucyann. See Wolf, Lucyann Davis Davis, Merle, 241–42, 246 Davis, Rita, 158 Dawes Act (1887), 177

day care, 117–19 death, 227–28, 230–33 death drive, 34–35, 42, 43 Deloria, Ella Cara, 131; background, 177; contributions to ethnography, 175–77, 184–85; cultural performance, 190–93; education and career, 178–79; explanation of Native American culture, 186–88; kinship relations, 179–81; political activities, 189–90; professionalism, 182–84; reformist perspective, 195n20 Deloria, Rev. Philip, 178 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 184 depression (economic), 212–15, 223, 229–30 depression (mental), 230–33 Derrida, Jacques, 34, 41–42 Derry, 7–9, 13, 18n1 Derry Well Woman Centre, 10–11 deterritorialization, 133 Dhomhnaill, Nuala Ní, 9, 12 diaries, 201–2, 226, 227, 236–37 diaspora, 133, 142 Dillard, Liza, 165 displacement, 153n5 documentary films, 106–8 Dogeaters (Hagedorn), 5, 54, 56–57 domestic violence, 225–27 Donegal, 9 Draperstown, 14–17 Easter, Jessie, 157 economy, 206–10, 212, 223. See also money Ella C. Deloria Project, 190 employment. See work endurance, 99–100 engagements, 144–45 English language, 21–22 Errol (Nadia’s husband), 142–44, 146–47 ethnography, 129–30, 175–77, 195n8 family, 67–70, 94–98, 163, 166–67, 225–28, 230–33. See also kinship relations fashion, 164–65 Female Line, The (Carr), 8 Feminist Dilemmas in Fieldwork (Wolf), 129 feminists, 129

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index

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, 12 field-workers, 22–23 Filipinas, 49–50, 56–58 filmmaking, 69, 105–8, 110–11 Fink, Deborah, 236 Finn, Janet L., 131 Fire Thunder, 183 Fitzpatrick, Rebecca, 165 flappers, 242–43, 246–49, 251 Fountain, Joyce, 163, 167 Fountain, Rosie, 157, 160 Frenilla, Emilia, 50 Freudian theory, 33, 34, 43 Friesen, George, 228, 233–36 Friesen, Martha: beginning of diary, 227–29; context of diary, 202; death, 235; Great Depression, 229–30; marriage problems, 233–36 Friesen, Will, 230–33 gaijin, 90 gaman, 98 Ganguly, Keya, 79 gender discrimination, 160, 161, 257–59 gendered identities, 124–25, 130, 134, 136, 141, 152, 209, 243 Getting Specific: Postmodern Lesbian Politics (Phelan), 116 Ghost Dance, 177–78, 188 gift giving, 85–86 Gillespie, Emily Hawley, 226, 227, 237, 240n65 Gillespie, Henry, 226–27 Glaspell, Susan, 226 Glenn, Eva, 156, 166 Global Village or Global Pillage (Brecher and Costello), 58 Gordon, Ann, 159, 161, 163 Gordon, Deborah A., 176 Gordon, Linda, 225 Gough, Liz, 17 Graulich, Melody, 226 Great Black Migration, 169 Greencastle, 13 Greenway Women’s Centre, 8–9 Grim, Valerie, 130–31 Grosskurth, Phyllis, 41, 43

273

Hagedorn, Jessica, 5, 54, 56–57 Hall, Stuart, 261n13 Hampsten, Elizabeth, 203n4 hardships, 99–100. See also kuro Harris, Annie, 162 Harrison, Faye, 192 Harvey, Clodagh, 11 Haskell Indian School, 179, 192 Hayden, Dolores, 206, 209 healthcare, 157–58 Hearon, Ann, 160 Hegerty, Tricia, 13 Heidegger, Hegel, 41–42 Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, 67 historians, 106–8, 110–11 History of the Breast, A (Yalom), 30–31 Holstein, Ludmelia (“Ludy”), 243–47, 249, 252, 254–59, 261n12 “Holy Men’s Society,” 182–84 homophobic society, 116, 118–19 hooks, bell, 3 Hooper, Sherri, 162 Hotel Madison, 214–18 housework. See women’s work Huang, Nicholas, 49–50 Huftalen, Sarah Gillespie, 226–27, 237

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Idaho Humanities Council, 106 identity: changeability, 130, 133–34, 150; cultural, 243–44, 259, 261n13; gender, 124–25, 130; interracial marriage, 99–100; loss, 218. See also self construction ikigai, 95 immigrants, 95–96, 98, 245 immigration, 143, 241. See also Cable Act (1922) Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), 190 Indian New Deal, 189 “Indian Progress: Commemorating a Half Century of Endeavor among the Indians of North America,” 192 interracial marriage, 79, 89–92, 99–100. See also war brides Ireland, 11, 17 Irish Troubles, 7, 12–13, 17 Irish women, 8, 17

274 index

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Ishikawa, 90–91 Islam, 138, 149–50, 153n14 Jackson, Rose, 160 Jackson, Stevi, 207 Jan, Flora Belle, 202; abortions, 253; assimilation, 241–43; career ambitions, 245–46, 249, 254, 258; Chicago, 250; childhood, 244; citizenship, 255–56, 258; cultural identity, 245; death, 259; education, 249–52; employment, 257–58; legacy, 259; marriage and family, 252–57; rejection of Chinese culture, 241–42; social life, 245–48; subjects of writing, 248–51; typewriter, 259, 264n76 Jankowiak, William, 191 Japan, 83, 85–89 Japanese agency, 92–93, 97, 100 Johnson, Maxine, 164 “Jury of Her Peers, A” (Glaspell), 226 Kain, Philip J., 206 Kansas, 237 Karachi, Pakistan, 139 Kessler-Harris, Alice, 207, 212 Killybegs, 9, 13 Kim Phuuc, Phan Thi, 52–53 “King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter, The” (Bourke), 16 kinship relations, 179–81. See also family Kitano, Harry H., 98 Klein, Melanie, 4, 31–35, 38, 41–44 Kondo, Dorinne, 192 Kristeva, Julia, 30, 34–37, 42, 45 ksps (public television station), 106 kuro, 83–84, 97–98 Lakota language, 184, 185, 196n37 La Leche League, 30, 36–37, 39–40 language: Afghanistan, 137–38; breastfeeding, 31–33; culture, 4; diaspora, 142; Lakota, 184, 185, 196n37; lesbian mothers, 119; linearity, 43; obstacle to research, 80–81; significance, 20–22 Laqueur, Thomas, 45 Laramie wy, 140 Lensink, Judy Nolte, 226, 228, 229

lesbian community: hegemonic structures, 125; models, 116, 123–24; processes, 116– 17; visibility, 116, 119–21. See also lesbian mothers’ group lesbian mothers’ group: breathing room, 116–19; functions, 115–16; origin, 114–15; political activities, 125–26; writing about, 69 Le Seur, Meridel, 226 letter writing, 205–6, 220–23 Leung, Louise, 252 Levertov, Denise, 52 life drive, 34–35, 38, 42 Lindsey, Doris, 161 linearity, 41–43 Linen Hall library, 11 Londonderry. See Derry Loving in the War Years (Moraga), 55 Maga, Della, 49–50, 58–59 Magnuson, Anne Dunphy, 103, 105 Mahbuba. See Nadia mahr, 145–46 maids, 54, 56–57 malida, 149 maquiladoras, 57 Marcos, Imelda, 54, 57 Marcus, George, 175 marriage: arranged, 88–89, 101n23, 140– 48, 153n6; interracial, 79, 89–92, 99–100; Japanese women and U.S. servicemen, 85– 92, 94, 101n13; narrative frames, 94–98. See also war brides; weddings Marx, Karl, 206–7 McBride, Kari Boyd, 201–2 McKay, Ann, 12, 13 McWilliams, Linda, 161 McWilliams, Monica, 8 McWilliams, Willie Ester, 157 Medicine, Beatrice, 186, 189, 194n6, 197n57 Menno, 228 mental illness, 226–27 Mercier, Laurie, 203n5 Mexican ethnicity, 25–26 Miller, Aine, 17 Miller, Patricia McClelland, 201

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“Miss Flapper Vampire” (Jan), 247 Mitchell, Juliet, 34, 43 “Modes of Being” (Levertov), 52 Moffett, James, viii–ix Moi, Toril, 30 money, 221–22. See also economy Moraga, Cherríe, 62; Loving in the War Years, 55 Morgan, Thomas J., 177 Morrison, Toni, 70 mother-daughter relationship, 68, 79–81 motherhood, 121–23 Mulcahy, Joanne B., 3–4 Mulford, Chris, 31, 36 “Multistoried Women,” 13–14 “Murdered by a Chinese Slave Dealer” (Jan), 250 Nabeoka, Yoshiko, 82–85, 84, 87 Nadia: background, 134–35; education, 138– 40; homelife, 136–39; marriage and family, 142–51; move to United States, 139–46; name, 140; work, 140–41 nakodo, 88–89, 101n23 narrative frames: American wealth, 93–94; definition, 82; Japanese women, 85–89; marriage, family, and work, 94–98; race and nationalism, 89–92; Yoshiko Nabeoka, 82–85. See also personal narrative nationalism, 84–85, 89–92, 99–100, 130. See also transnationalism Nationality Act (1940), 264n73 National Origins Quota Act (1924), 241 Native Americans: federal policy, 176, 187–90, 198n60; images, 186, 190; women scholars, 189 Native Sons’ Dance, 246 Navajo Indian Problem, The (Jones et al.), 189, 195n20 New Deal, 189 Newmann, Joan, 12, 13, 17 Newmann, Kate, 13 nikah, 145 Nisei women, 253 nonbiological moms, 119, 121, 124 Norwich, Julian of, 40

275

nostalgia, 151, 155n24 nursing. See breastfeeding nutrition, 158–59 Oakes nd, 213–14 objectivity, 105–6 Office of War Information, 257 Olsen, Tillie, 226 oppression, 55–56, 58, 78–79 oral history, 105–6, 109–11, 130–31 Other, investigation of, 129 “Prairie Dogs, The” (Deloria), 192 Pakistan, 139 Palmer, Gary, 191 pan pan girls, 88. See also prostitution Park, Robert, 241, 243, 250, 254, 262n39, 264n75 Pashtuns, 154n16 peace, 9 performance, cultural, 190–93 personal criticism, 4 personal narrative, viii, 3–5, 79, 99. See also narrative frames phallus, 31, 32, 45 Phelan, Shane, 116–17, 119, 121, 123–26 Philippines, 50, 54 Philosophy and the Maternal Body (Walker), 36 photo albums, family, 69, 112 placelessness, 152n1 poetry, 250–51, 254–55 political issues, 3, 10, 30, 125–26 potty training, 122, 123 prohibition, 237, 240n69 prostitution, 85, 86, 88 Purcell, Amy, 246–47, 262n32 Qualla Reservation, 72 racial taxonomies, 102n25 racism: Boas, 196n24; China, 257; cultural assimilation, 241–44; Japanese women, 84– 85, 89, 99–100; narrative frames, 89–92; rural South migrants, 156, 160–61; women of color, 259. See also ethnography

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index

Ramos, Fidel, 50 Ramsay, Frances Henry, 227 Ramsay, Martha Laurens, 227 Rapp, Rayna, 207 “Reconstructing Motherhood” (Weiner), 36 recreation, 164 Reincke, Nancy, 4–5 religion. See Christian church; Islam researcher—subject relationship, 79–81, 135, 180 reservation system, 178, 188, 190 resilience, 78–79 resistance, 98, 141, 188 Rice, Julian, 184–86, 192 Rice, Linda, 162 Rich, Adrienne, 59 Riney-Kehrberg, Pamela, 202 ritual performances, 29 Robinson, Linda, 163 Robson County nc, 192 Rogers, Dollie, 164 “Romance on the Roof ” (Jan), 248 Rosca, Ninotchka, 57 Rousseau, Henri, 30 Ruiz, Vicki, 246 Rukeyser, Muriel, 15 rural women: family, 163, 166–67; fashion, 164–65; healthcare, 157–58; living conditions in South, 156–57; nutrition, 158– 59; preservation of culture, 163–64, 166; problems, 236–37; racism, 156, 160–61; reasons for migration from South, 156, 168; recreation, 164; segregation, 162–63; sexual exploitation, 166–67; social class, 160, 165 Ruttum, Kari (Carrie) Thomasdatter: boarders, 211–12; early life, 210–11; economic control, 221–22; Great Depression, 212– 15; hotel, 214–18; identity, 218–20, 222–23; marriage, 211 “salvage ethnography,” 176, 195n8 Sandoz, Mari, 226 San Francisco Examiner, 248 Saudi Arabia, 143, 154n20 Scealaiocht, 11

school integration, 162–63 Scott, Irene, 167 Seanchas, 11 segregation, 162–63 Selected Melanie Klein, The (Mitchell), 34 self construction, 79, 99, 202, 205–6, 209, 220–23. See also identity self-interest, 58–59 sen’ soo hanayome, 89–92. See also war brides separation, 31, 35, 40–42, 99–100 separation, crises, 29–30 sexual abuse survivors’ group, 10–11, 14 sexual exploitation, 166–67 sexuality, 89 Shalinsky, Audry C., 130 Shannon, Catherine, 17 shikata ga nai (“it can’t be helped”), 92–93, 97, 99 Showings, 40 “Sioux,” 193n4 Smedley, Agnes, 226 Smith, Dorothy E., 207–8 Smith, Shawn Michelle, 69 Smith, Sidonie, 3, 4, 67–68 Smith, William Blaine, 73 Smyth, Ailbhe, 12 Sneed, Roseanne, 68 social class, 93–94, 101n15, 160, 165, 207–9, 212, 216–17, 222–23 social mobility, 93–94 Solem, Ole, 211, 214–15 Sosa, Maribel, 4 South, rural, 156, 168 Spanish language, 20–22 Speaking of Indians (Deloria), 185, 186 Spurr, David, 42 “Stabat Mater” (Kristeva), 30, 35 Stacey, Judith, 80 State Historical Society of Iowa, 227 Stocking, George W., Jr., 196n24 Storrs, Debbie, 68 storytelling, 184. See also personal narrative subjectivity, 4, 29–30, 32, 34, 38, 40–43, 45, 79 Sun Dance, 179–81 Survey of Race Relations, 241, 259n1

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1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Sutherland, Katherine, 4 Tamura, Eileen H., 260n6 Tan, Abby, 50 technology, 159 Thief of Baghdad, The, 243 Thomas, Estella, 156 “To a Chinese Mother” (Jan), 254–55 Trail of Tears, 71 transnationalism, 133, 152. See also nationalism “Transplanted Flower Blossoms” (Jan), 250, 252 Tsa li di, 68, 71–72 Tucker, Mary, 159 Turkey, 143 University of Chicago, 250–51 University of Nebraska Press, 190 Untitled Grid from Fragments from a Family Album, 113 U.S. servicemen, 85–92, 94 Uzbekistan, 153n8, 154n20 veiling, 134 “Verdad es Muda, La,” 27n2 Vial, Noelle, 9, 13 Vietnam War, 51–53 violence of the letter, 34–35 Visweswaran, Kamala, 133 Walker, James R., 179, 182–84 Walker, Michelle Boulous, 36 Walkowitz, Daniel, 107 Wallace id, 104, 108 Walters, Deborah, 163 war brides, 68, 79, 82–83, 89–92 Ware, Bernice, 158 Waterlily (Deloria), 176, 185, 186, 190, 196n31 Watson, Julia, 3, 4, 67–68 “Weaning” (Klein), 44 weddings, 136–38, 145–52. See also marriage wedding videos, 147, 154n19 Weiner, Lynn Y., 36, 40 West, Annie, 157 White, Jessie Mae, 159

277

Wildish Things: An Anthology of New Irish Women’s Writing (Smyth), 12 Williams, Annie, 163 Williams, Betty, 160 Williams, Dollie, 158 Williams, Fannie, 165 Williams, Faye, 167 Williams, Mae Liza, 156 Williams, Mary Alice, 156–57, 159, 164 Williams, Teresa, 82 Wlaring, Marilyn, 207 Wolf, Diane, 129 Wolf, Lucyann Davis, 68, 72–77 Wolf, Owen, 73, 75 Womanly Art of Breastfeeding, The (La Leche League), 30, 31, 33, 39–40 women of color, 130–31, 202, 203n5, 259. See also African Americans; Cherokees; Chinese Americans; Native Americans Women’s West, The (Graulich), 226 women’s work: documentation, 201–2, 205, 218–20; invisibility, 203n5, 207; social and economic significance, 206–10; social class, 207–9, 216–17, 222–23; as vocation, 209; Western history, 203n1 Women Writing Culture (Behar and Gordon), 176 Wong, Anna May, 243 Word of Mouth, 17–18 Word of Mouth (group), 11–13 work, 94–98, 165, 203n5, 212. See also women’s work Wounded Knee, 177–78, 188 writing, approaches, viii–ix Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Clifford and Marcus), 175 Yalom, Marilyn, 30–31 Yanagisako, Sylvia, 253 Yankton Sioux tribe, 175–76 “Yar Yar,” 148, 154n20 Yazoo Mississippi Delta, 156, 160 Yung, Judy, 202 zakat, 149 Zinsser, William, 67

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