Marecek, Jeanne

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Swarthmore College Works Psychology Faculty Works Psychology Spring 2002 Review Of "Women's Untold Lives: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity" Edited By M. Romero And A. J. Stewart And "Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text" By J. Long Jeanne Marecek Swarthmore College, jmarece1@swarthmore.edu This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in Psychology Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-psychology  Part of the Psychology Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Jeanne Marecek. (2002). "Review Of "Women's Untold Lives: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity" Edited By M. Romero And A. J. Stewart And "Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text" By J. Long". Signs. Volume 27, Issue 3. 920-922. DOI: 10.1086/337975 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-psychology/265 920 ❙ Book ReviewsWomen’s Untold Lives: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity.Edited by Mary Romero and Abigail J. Stewart. New York: Routledge,1999.Telling Women’s Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. By Judy Long. NewYork: New York University Press, 1999.Jeanne Marecek, Swarthmore CollegeF or the editors of Women’s Untold Lives, telling personal stories is ameans of uncovering and speaking against structures of power. Per-sonal stories can challenge master narratives that “subsume differencesand constrictions and restrict and contain people, by supporting a powerstructure in which gender, class, race/ethnicity, sexuality and ability alldefine who matters and how” (xiii). Thus, in the editors’ eyes, such storiesare “crucial work of social transformation” (xiii).Despite the imposition of a single framework, the collection runs theepistemological gamut. Many authors take their subjects’ stories to be realistrepresentations—that is, straightforward accounts of what “really” hap-pened. Others move ahead to problematize those stories by peering downthe rifts among event, experience, and narration. Some take “master nar-rative” to mean little more than “stereotype,” while others embrace thericher and more complex Foucauldian rendering of the term. Most of theauthors “disappear” themselves from their texts, but a few (such as P. J.McGann) offer a nuanced consideration of how their own sympathies andinterests intertwine with those of their subjects to give shape to the account.Some authors seem to presume that they and their subjects (but not theirreaders) float free of the spell of master narratives; others acknowledge thatthey do not. (For instance, Marixsa Alicea and Jennifer Friedman note thatMillie, a heroin-addicted mother, devises a self-portrait that refuses thecultural derogation of “drug-addicted mothers,” yet she remains enmeshedwithin the class-bound ideology of a good mother.) A few authors notethat feminist scholarship has come to have its own master narratives. (Con-sider the overworked notion of feminine care and connection, as totalizingas it is tedious.) All the authors are careful to accord agency to the womenabout whom they write. (Another feminist master narrative?) A few authorsgo further to acknowledge that a women’s agency extends to deciding whatshe will divulge to a researcher. (Amy Schulz, Paye Knoki, and Ursula Knoki-Wilson break down the researcher-subject distinction by collaborating onFaye’s story.)This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 19 Jun 2015 15:59:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsS I G N S Spring 2002 ❙ 921Women’s Untold Lives could be used as a supplementary text for anintroductory women’s studies class. Most of the stories are written withouttheoretical flourishes or disciplinary terminology, so they are suitable forbeginning undergraduates. The collection highlights the variety and com-plexity of the lives of women in the United States. Moreover, the storiesforcefully demonstrate that prevailing views of social life cover up manyaspects of women’s experience. Making women visible alters our under-standing of history, social life, and ourselves as social actors.In their introduction, Mary Romero and Abigail Stewart describe theprocess by which the collection was born. The contributors met initially asparticipants in a colloquy on life history research and then reconvened ontwo more occasions to continue the conversations that led to the volume.I wish that Romero and Stewart had described the substance of thesemeetings as well as the process. What collective ideas about methods of lifehistory research emerged? Did the group grapple with issues of represen-tation, such as how to avoid making their subjects into exotic spectacles orrendering them as exemplars of their “kind?” Did they debate the meritsof approaching their interview material as data (i.e., givens) rather than asnarrative? Did they collectively consider and set aside the panoply of currentinterpretive theories and methods (e.g., psychodynamic theory, narratology,Bakhtinian theory, discursive psychology, or phenomenological analysis)?Judy Long’s discussion of women’s life narratives takes up whereWomen’s Untold Lives leaves off. Long, a professor emerita of sociologyat Syracuse University, developed Telling Women’s Lives in the course ofteaching a graduate seminar, and it is a fine contribution to advancedfeminist pedagogy in the social sciences. Long opens her book with anexamination of the multiple social shapings of women’s autobiography.What conventions of autobiographical storytelling do women adopt,whether by compulsion or choice? What positionings are available towomen writers? What are the dynamics of the social production of ob-scurity—that is, the processes that have so often rendered women’s livesand women’s writing invisible, unintelligible, or insignificant?Long brings forward the life stories of many different women (especiallywomen from working-class and impoverished backgrounds). Thus we hearabout Boxcar Bertha (a hobo of the 1930s), alta (a poet and a welfaremother), Carolina de Jesus (a Brazilian favela dweller), as well as MargaretCavendish, Anaı¨s Nin, and Barbara McClintock. Long balances her ac-count of women’s diversity against a view of all women as similarly po-sitioned in the gender hierarchy. For Long, women share “deep com-monalities” (7) that cut across history, geography, social class, and culture.Long reads women’s autobiographies as sharing distinctively feminineThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 19 Jun 2015 15:59:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions922 ❙ Book Reviewshallmarks of dailiness, connection, emotion work, and relationship work.Women writers, she asserts, all face conflicts between self-display andfeminine modesty and decorum, between the pleasure of self-expressionand the penalties for self-assertion.Long’s nuanced efforts to recognize both sameness and differenceamong women stand in stark contrast to her rather blunt account ofwomen’s difference from men. For Long, the gender divide involves pro-found separateness and incommensurability. She argues that women’s ex-periences are so alien that men cannot understand their stories. Women,she says, cannot tell their lives in male language. Instead, they discoursein a language foreign to men, writing in codes that only women readerscan decipher. Whether critics, writers, readers, or social researchers, menseem unable to comprehend women and are uninterested in doing so.Long seldom tempers her generalizations about men with an acknow-ledgment of individual differences: men are just men. Blanket generali-zations about men are not uncommon in feminist scholarship, but arethey warranted? And do all women necessarily understand and sympathizewith one another, even across lines of difference demarcated by ethnicity,nation, generation, and class?The second part of Long’s book turns to life-telling by social scientists.Rereading three classic life histories of women, she unearths the gendereddimensions of the researchers’ understanding of their female subjects’ lives,as well as conflicts over authority and authorship. Long calls for a feministreconfiguration of the social researcher. Noting that social science writingrequires researchers to “disappear” themselves, she recasts the researcheras a narrator who figures in the text as a visible and active presence. Longalso challenges standards of objectivity that demand distance, detachment,impersonality, and “value-freedom.” Instead, she calls for researcher-subjectrelationships that involve empathic connection, parity, collaboration, andthe researcher’s imaginative immersion in the subject’s world. By juxta-posing social science life-telling and autobiographical writing, Long putsscientific accounts on a parallel with other kinds of stories. Social sciencethus becomes one of many meaning-making activities in the culture, nota privileged form of truth telling that stands apart from culture.This slender volume traverses a broad swath of feminist scholarship ofthe 1970s and 1980s, with an occasional nod to the 1990s. At times, theperspectives of this scholarship seem a bit dated. Nonetheless, with severalhundred citations, Telling Women’s Lives identifies veins of feminist worktoo rich to be left behind. It is a pleasure to revisit this work, particularlywhen it is interpreted by a scholar who is both a fine thinker and anelegant writer. ❙This content downloaded from 130.58.65.13 on Fri, 19 Jun 2015 15:59:09 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  Women\u27s Untold Lives: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity  Edited By M. Romero And A. J. Stewart And  Telling Women\u27s Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text  By J. Long

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Review Of Women\u27s Untold Lives: Breaking Silence, Talking Back, Voicing Complexity Edited By M. Romero And A. J. Stewart And Telling Women\u27s Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text By J. Long

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