LITMIR.BIZ

      INTRODUCTION

      The Grasinski Girls

      THEY HAVE BEAUTIFUL NAMES: Caroline Clarice, Genevieve Irene, Frances Ann, Mary Nadine née Patricia Marie, Angela Helen, Mary Marcelia. These are the Grasinski Girls. They are the daughters of Helen Frances Grasinski, and I am her granddaughter.

      What I remember about my grandma Helen is that she was tall and she stood tall. She kept her shoulders back and chin high. I remember her as a wanderer. I have images of her getting on and off buses, in and out of cars, with a small suitcase that was actually just a big purse, as she traveled from house to house, one-bedroom apartment to one-bedroom apartment, daughter’s house to daughter’s house. Caroline, her eldest daughter, recalls, “Mom used to say, the minute she hears the freight train she wants to pack her suitcase and go. I really don’t know if it’s a thing, a place, or whether it’s something inside you, this wandering and searching and looking for something.” She moved eighteen times in her life. She was a good traveler, everything efficiently packed in that neat little bag, and she had an ability to make a place a home in a short period of time. Caroline continued, “She would be unpacked with all the pictures on the wall by the end of the day, and then she was sittin’ there.”

      What I don’t remember about my grandmother, but what I am often told, is that she had a beautiful voice. I don’t remember her singing, but her daughters do. She sang arias while washing the dishes and folk songs while peeling potatoes; she sang Polish carols like “Lulajże Jezuniu” at Christmas and popular American songs like “Let the Rest of the World Go By” and “I’ll See You Again and I’ll Smile” while picking the grime out of the space between the floorboards with a safety pin. As a young farm girl she took voice lessons in Grand Rapids, riding twenty miles on the Interurban. She was a soprano, and if I close my eyes I can imagine a robust, resplendently piercing soprano, chin held high, neck straight, shoulders squared. At the age of sixteen she was given her chance. A professional impresario offered to take her to New York to become a concert singer. But her father said no. Instead, she married a local boy, Joe Grasinski, sang to her seven children, and spent the rest of her life moving here and there, around and about a sixty-mile ring of familial enclosure in southwestern Michigan.

      Years later, Helen found her daughter—my mother—sitting in my bedroom listening to a scratchy Crosby, Stills, and Nash tape and crying, saddened by the fact that I had gone to live in Asia for a few years. She expressed little sympathy. “Why are you crying? You were the one who let her go.” As if she had a choice. But it seems that it didn’t matter if we were kept back or let go, both Grandma and I became wanderers and we both carry small bags. My orbit is a little wider than hers, but, like her, I keep returning home, never able to walk away and keep on walking.

      . . .

      Today, Helen’s daughters are called Caroline, Gene, Fran, Nadine, Angel, and Mari. Many of you will recognize the Grasinski Girls in your own mothers, aunts, sisters, and grandmothers. They are white, Christian Americans of European descent, and therefore represent the sociological and numerical majority of women in the United States. Born in the 1920s and 1930s, they created lives typical of women in their day: they went to high school, got married, had children, and, for the most part, stayed home to raise those children. And they were happy doing that. They took care of their appearance and married men who took care of them. Like most women in their cohort, they did not join the women’s movement and today either reject or shy away from feminism. They do not identify with Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” and they are on the pro-life side of the abortion debate.¹ They give both time and money to support charitable (usually religiously affiliated) organizations working to ease the suffering of those less fortunate.² Most of them go to church every Sunday and they read their morning prayers as faithfully and necessarily as I drink my morning coffee.

      The Grasinski Girls’ immigrant grandparents were farmers. Their father was a skilled factory worker, and their children have college degrees. Their Polish ancestry is visible in their high cheekbones and wide hips, but otherwise hidden in the box of Christmas ornaments stored carefully in the attic. Theirs is a story of white working-class women.

      Who are these women who sing in church pews, hum in hallways, and cry to sad songs about miseries they do not have? Do we see their curved backs tending gardens in the backyard, or bent over sewing machines or dining room tables cluttered with their latest craft project? When I read social science literature written before the 1970s, I read mostly about men—and mostly white men. Since then we have heard more women’s voices, mostly the voices of white middle-class women. But again, that is changing, and now we hear from and about black women, Latinas and Chicanas, Asian women, and Native-American women, as well as low-income women, homeless women, and immigrant women. Traditional gender studies ignored class and race when they developed theories about all women based on the experiences of white middle-class women.³ Contemporary gender studies are more likely to acknowledge race, but too often they obscure class by folding it into race. For example, Aida Hurtado states, “When I discuss feminists of Color I will treat them as members of the working class, unless I specifically mention otherwise. When I discuss white feminists, I will treat them as middle class.”⁴ When combined with those of white middle-class women, the voices (and disadvantages) of white working-class women are lost. A similar confusion occurs when white working-class women are grouped together with working-class racial minorities and immigrants. In this case, however, white native-born privilege gets overlooked.

      When the voices of white working-class women are heard, they are more likely to be public and “classed” voices related to labor-market position. Social scientists generally examine social life in places where they can see it, that is, in the

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