daughter conflict in feminist gerontology

Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 113 – 128

The uninvited guest: mother/daughter conflict in feminist gerontology Ruth E. Ray* Department of English, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI 48202, USA

Abstract In this paper, I argue that the tensions between generations of women—particularly mothers and daughters—can be used to initiate change and growth for both generations. I introduce the subject of developmental conflict between women through fictional images from a Scottish film called The Winter Guest and then show how these conflicts have occurred in my own ethnographic research on older women. I argue that feminist gerontologists need to be working—always on the personal and professional levels—to recognize, explore, understand, critique, and theorize generational differences among women. Otherwise, we are at risk of promoting the very sexist and ageist attitudes that we are ostensibly working against. My aim is to alert readers to the generational conflicts that can occur in empirical research, as well as in the politics and theorizing of academic feminism, when women act unconsciously from generational positions or ‘‘age identities’’ that precondition them to challenge and resist each other. I conclude that mothers and daughters need alternative models for relating to one another outside the ‘‘family plot’’ and suggest that life story groups might help us develop these collaboratively. D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Generational culture; Age identity; Humanistic gerontology; Feminist gerontology; Ethnography and aging; Intergenerational storytelling

1. Introduction In the 1997 Scottish film The Winter Guest, actress Emma Thompson and her real-life mother Philippa play a sparring mother/daughter duo against a stark winter landscape. The * Tel.: +1-313-577-7696. E-mail address: [email protected] (R.E. Ray). 0890-4065/02/$ – see front matter D 2002 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 8 9 0 - 4 0 6 5 ( 0 2 ) 0 0 0 9 4 - 4

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daughter is mourning the death of her husband, and the mother comes one morning to visit, unannounced. Upon entering the house, mother puts the butter in the refrigerator, picks up clothing from the floor, and calls out, ‘‘Frances, are you all right, Cherub?’’ Frances hastily retreats to the bathroom. She has recently cut her hair very short, a decision that her teenage son Alex informs us will be a ‘‘bloody battleground’’ between the two women. Indeed, when Frances finally emerges from the bath, mother gasps that she looks ‘‘boyish, mannish’’ and, even worse, ‘‘It doesn’t make you look any younger.’’ Frances rejoins defiantly, ‘‘The time has come for me to embrace my years, don’t you think mother? Welcome them, not fight them anymore?’’ (She says this while putting on make-up.) Mother: Why should you embrace your years? No one else does. It’s a kingdom of youth that we’re living in, Frances. I never thought you’d let yourself go. Frances: Say something nice, mother. Try. Mother: You’ve always had good bone structure. You get that from me. I’ll make a beautiful skeleton when my time comes. . . We know from this encounter and several others that mother is appalled by her own aging (‘‘I get a fright when I look in the mirror. I hate my old face.’’) and that Frances, despite her glib response, is equally appalled (‘‘Don’t wave your hands about,’’ she says of her mother’s palsy. ‘‘Don’t.’’) They shuffle around these issues, avoid each other’s gaze. We feel them struggle to identify themselves, both within and outside their relationship as mother and daughter. When mother inquires, yet again, about her welfare, Frances asserts, with some force, ‘‘You don’t have to keep checking up on me. I don’t need you!’’ To which her mother replies, with even more force, ‘‘Don’t you ever say that to me! I was a young woman when I had you, with a young woman’s preoccupations. You taught me to care. My God, you taught me to look after you 24 hours of the day. Step by step, the two of us went. So what do you expect? Just because you’re all grown up, I have to stop all that caring?’’ The Winter Guest dramatizes a significant psychosocial concern: how to develop and sustain loving connections when the roles of mother and daughter twist and turn. This dilemma—both gendered and generational—entails the mother’s lifelong desire to care and nurture (her need to be needed) and the daughter’s desire to break away, complicated over time by the mother’s growing dependency and the daughter’s ambivalence about assuming the caregiving role. There are other age and gender negotiations orbiting around this central issue in the film. We follow the conversations of two prepubescent boys agonizing over sexual development and their future in the adult world; we watch Alex and a young woman play at being boy and girl, man and woman together, in a house still haunted by the image (literally—there are photographs everywhere) of Alex’s father; and we observe two old women, long-time friends, on their way to a funeral. Each pair faces its own conflict, but the point is always the same: despite our differences and the fears they evoke, we need each other. The tensions between us initiate the next phase, either growth or death. I use these fictional images to ease into a complex subject—the conflicted relationships between women of different generations, particularly mothers and daughters, and the

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influence of these relationships on knowledge making in feminist gerontology.1 My claim is this: feminist gerontologists need to be working—always on the personal and professional levels—to recognize, explore, understand, critique, and theorize generational differences among women. Otherwise, we are at risk of promoting the very sexist and ageist attitudes, what Mary Wilson Carter (1996) calls ‘‘sexagism,’’ that we are ostensibly fighting against. Having said this, however, I repeat the caveat originally issued by feminist critic Elizabeth Ermarth (1992): ‘‘Talk is cheap; feminist behavior is something else again’’ (p. 231). My aim here is to alert readers to the generational conflicts that can occur in empirical research, as well as in the politics and theorizing of academic feminism. The Winter Guest introduces with poignant clarity the problems I wish to examine: (1) women often act unconsciously from generational positions or ‘‘age identities’’ (Gullette, 1997) that precondition us to challenge and resist each other, and (2) mothers and daughters need alternative models for relating to one another—models based on care, friendship, and genuine respect for differences that may move us outside the family paradigm. It falls to feminist gerontologists to create these models. I begin by surveying literature from several disciplines that helps explain generational conflicts between women. I then follow with a story from my own ethnographic research on older women’s writing groups in which the mother/daughter conflict was enacted, using it to explore various responses to these generational dynamics.

2. The generational divide From a psychoanalytic perspective, what divides women along age lines is what feminist literary critic Marianne Hirsch (1989) calls ‘‘the mother/daughter plot.’’ In this femalecentered Oedipal story, the generations are inevitably opposed. The story goes like this: the role of the mother is to initiate her daughter into the patriarchal family romance— heterosexual pursuit of a mate, marriage, motherhood, and the confident passing of this legacy to the next generation. In this myth, woman’s identity is established in relationship to the masculine and the familial, and she is empowered by her alliance with patriarchal power.2 For Hirsch, the heroine in this story is the feminist daughter who establishes herself—her singularity—by refusing to enact the plot. She eschews the cultural conventions of femininity and identifies herself in opposition to the mother; she is empowered by striving to get free of patriarchy (Kahn, 1992). Hirsch finds feminist revisions of the romance plot in the literature 1

I use this term with both hesitation and hope. Hesitation because there is no ‘‘feminist gerontology,’’ at least as an identifiable body of knowledge or methodology, in the same way that there is a feminist literary criticism, a feminist psychoanalysis, or a feminist philosophy. I am hopeful, however, that feminists and gerontologists are moving in the direction of a feminist gerontology. I see evidence in the work of Browne (1998), Gardner (1999), and Reinharz (1986). See also, Ray (1996). 2 Hirsch and other feminists (Collins, 1987) acknowledge that this plot is most prominent among white, middle-class, Western women. In analyzing the writings of Toni Morrison and Alice Walker, Hirsch reveals the problematics of feminist psychoanalytic theory when used to interpret the generational relations between black women, whose cultural concepts of mothering and motherhood have been profoundly influenced by slavery and its aftermath.

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of women writers where female characters employ ‘‘emancipatory strategies’’—different beginnings, endings, and patterns of development. The most relevant aspect of Hirsch’s literary criticism, however, is her insight that all of psychoanalytic theory, including feminist revisions of it, has so far been written from the position of the child in response to the parent. Feminist psychoanalytic theory is ‘‘daughterly’’ and, therefore, blinded by generational identity and ‘‘matrophobia.’’ Even feminists who are mothers themselves adopt and articulate the oppositional stance of the daughter when theorizing and conducting research. To identify with the mother, in the discourse and practice of late 20th century feminism, is to identify with the patriarchal system that limits and negates you. Hirsch writes to initiate critical awareness of the romance plot and other family metaphors and to inform us of their pervasiveness in American feminism. She asks us to generate new relational metaphors and to revise the current mother/daughter plot, envisioning instead a ‘‘feminist family romance of mothers and daughters, both subjects, speaking to each other and living in familial and communal contexts which enable the subjectivity of each member’’ (p. 163). Toward this end, she suggests that feminists ‘‘might begin by listening to the stories that mothers have to tell, and by creating the space in which mothers might articulate those stories’’ (p. 167). Building on the work of Hirsch and other feminists, literary scholar Kathleen Woodward (1999) suggests that we add another character to the family plot—the grandmother—in our efforts to move beyond the Freudian binary. The grandmother takes the focus off mother/ daughter dynamics and introduces the figure of the older woman (the woman that both mother and daughter are becoming) as vital and wise. The grandmother represents change through the passage of biological and historical time, but she is also a figure of attachment and continuity across the generations. Woodward introduces us to her own grandmother, with whom she felt deeply connected as a child, despite the 50-year difference in their ages. She now looks to feminist literature for inspiration in revising the family romance around the grandmother figure. She finds in Margaret Drabble’s A Natural Curiosity a world populated by middle-aged women in positive relationships with each other and a much older woman. The meeting of generations in the novel is full of possibilities, rather than the usual pessimism: ‘‘The assumption is that there are not just two generations, but many. In the world of the novel, we come to see this is altogether the natural course of things. At the same time the future is represented as open-ended, with generations of women loosely linked not through the trope of familial identification but rather through a curiosity akin to affection.’’ Here, the present and future ‘‘are bound together by anticipation’’ (Woodward, 1999, p. 161), by the promise of relating in new ways made possible through imagination and experimentation. Woodward suggests that, in women’s literature, age researchers will find the creative energy needed to reimagine age relations and reshape the future for old women. Woodward provides a compelling revision of the mother/daughter plot, encouraging us to embrace generational ‘‘others’’—the mother and grandmother—as always already a part of ourselves. As a literary critic dealing with ‘‘discursive formations,’’ however, she glosses over the ways that difference—not an abstraction or a metaphor but a physical presence—

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materializes in the stuff of everyday life and causes conflicts between women. Gerontological research by social scientists provides a less metaphorical explanation for intergenerational conflict: it has its basis in cultural change, it significantly shapes our pasts and futures, and it is very difficult to overcome, collectively and individually. Anthropologist Katherine Newman (1996) argues that ‘‘generational culture’’ may be central to the development of individual identity by drawing members ‘‘into a cocoon of shared assumptions and moral vocabularies’’ and by providing ‘‘a feeling of separation from other generations’’ (p. 374). Some generations are more influential than others in their overall identity and cohesiveness, and members vary in the degree to which they rely on generational culture to establish individual identity. It appears, however, that the children of the Great Depression have an especially strong generational identity, as does the baby boom generation—a situation that leads to conflicts between them that may threaten core identity issues. Generational identities are largely unconscious in early life but become more salient as we age. While acknowledging diversity within age groups, Newman and other social scientists find that specific patterns in behaviors, beliefs, social orientations, and personality traits characterize cohorts or generations across the life course. Glen Elder (1974) argues, for example, that working-class and middle-class whites whose families were deprived during the Great Depression in America tend to assign priority to finances and material possessions, valuing economic gain and security in adulthood. They are prudent and self-sacrificing and place considerable emphasis on the family, defined first in terms of the value of children and secondarily in terms of the interpersonal relationship between spouses. These values have been forged through shared experience. Girls during the Depression were expected to take responsibility for all domestic duties, while boys worked outside the home, often from an early age. As a result, the girls became women who led contingent lives, largely dependent on others (husband and children) for success and happiness. If they had career goals, women sacrificed them completely or delayed pursuit of them until after marriage and the primary child-rearing years. Elder reminds us that ‘‘an occupational life for women, apart from the family and its economic needs, was contrary to public opinion throughout the Depression decade; a woman’s place was in the home, not in competition with men for scarce jobs’’ (p. 202). These Depression era children became the mothers of baby boom children and modeled a particular kind of mothering and familial care. In contrast to children of the Depression, the women (and feminists) of the baby boom generation (born between 1946 and 1964) have been shaped by very different sociohistorical circumstances. Compared to our mothers’ and grandmothers’ generations, we have married later, had fewer children, and had them later in life. Although more women are working for pay outside the home, we are not as financially secure as our parents were in their middle age; we have saved less and borrowed more; and we have not planned as prudently for our retirement, despite government trends to shift from collective to individual responsibility for handling the contingencies of old age (Kutza, 1998). Our social world is very different at midlife from that of our mothers at midlife: we have experienced rapid technological change, the shift to a service economy, downsizing and restructuring of the work environment, disappearing organizational ladders, and a deemphasis on longevity and seniority in the workplace, as well as the dramatic influx of women in the workplace (Moen, 1998). Given

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our experiences, the collective values of American middle-class boomers conflict with those of our parents: we place greater importance on independence (over family connection), emphasize new experiences and personal empowerment (over tradition and familial obligation), are more distrustful of all forms of authority, show less company and brand loyalty, value leisure over work, and are far more relativistic in our concept of ethics (Longino, 1998; Russell, 1993). Most of us, mothers and daughters alike, take these generational identities for granted and consider ourselves superior to other generations. Social historian Tamara Hareven (1995) argues that these differences between generations are not just psychodramas, but complex social and economic processes that must be defined historically. Many social policies (such as mandatory retirement laws) formalize, institutionalize, and reify generational differences, separating us ideologically and culturally, as well as economically, into agesegregated groups. Generational differences, from this perspective, are socially inevitable.

3. The force of generational categories How might such generational differences be relevant to academic research? How do they help explain relations between older and younger women? How might they inform our research, teaching, and practice? Recently, feminists across the disciplines have begun to explore these questions, starting with the generational differences among feminists themselves. One reason why the generation gap has become of interest to women in academe is because second-wave feminists have become middle aged. The angry daughter now occupies the position of the mother. As literary critic Madelon Sprengnether (1992) sees it, differences between younger (third-wave) and older (second-wave) feminists ‘‘evoke troubled memories of mother–daughter conflict’’ (p. 201), largely because feminists, like everyone else, identify more closely with their own generational culture. Third-wave feminists—those academically trained in the late 1980s and 1990s—have been characterized by second-wave feminists as theoretically obsessed careerists who avoid grassroots activism. Second-wave feminists— those academically trained in the late 1960s through the early 1980s—are often characterized by third wavers as ‘‘old social activists’’ who are out of touch with the latest theories. In the public sector, the debate between feminist generations centers on a number of issues: the meaning of ‘‘feminism,’’ the definition of ‘‘activism,’’ feminism’s role in supporting alternative sexualities, the challenges of combining professionalism and feminism, and the status of privileged older feminists who, having ‘‘made it’’ themselves, fail to mentor the younger generation (Bondoc & Daly, 1999). A second-wave feminist herself, Sprengnether (1992) finds that her students and junior colleagues project onto her ‘‘an image of mothers who had disappointed them: through their failure to confront or to wield authority, through their repression of their daughters’ spirit and energy, or through their inability to grow old in challenging and dynamic ways’’ (p. 205). These alleged differences have significant material consequences: lack of communication and networking among feminists, self-promotion without regard for other women’s career advancement, failed job searches and tenure cases due to lack of collegial support, and inability to mobilize for collective action and institutional change. Sprengnether calls for an

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‘‘ethics of relationship,’’ including relationships beyond the family, to offset these problems. This will require, at the very minimum, ‘‘a willingness, or openness, to possibility on both sides’’ (p. 206). In her introduction to Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue, coeditor Devoney Looser agrees that generational differences must be identified and addressed directly, despite many feminist theorists’ reluctance to generalize about cohort identities: ‘‘Denying the force of a generational category may in fact serve to prevent the questioning of its hold over us’’ (Looser & Kaplan, 1997, p. 33). Other feminist critics, influenced by postmodern theories of the self, attempt to deconstruct generational identities and reconceptualize the life course in more fluid, historically contingent terms. They blur chronological boundaries and foreground all the forms of diversity (besides age) that both separate and unite feminists, including race, class, ethnicity, geographic location, sexual orientation, and able-bodiedness.3 As one example, cultural studies scholar Anca Cristofovici offers a postmodern concept of the aging self, which stands in direct contrast to the youth/age, mother/daughter binaries. In her conceptualization, following psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas (1992), each of us has many ‘‘sequential self states,’’ which meet, conflict, and interact. Over time, ‘‘incorporating previous states, we become the sum of what we have been’’ (Cristofovici, 1999, p. 269). Cristofovici (1999) suggests that: there is no ‘‘true old self’’ or state but a permanently fluctuating relationship between a younger and an older self, perceived now as bracketing (hence the sense of closure, even of claustrophobia or estrangement from one’s chronological age), or as suspension (hence the sense of insecurity). These ‘‘different forms of being,’’ also associated with different ages, are at times perceptible in a posture, a tone of the voice. In a short conversation with a friend my mother’s age, for instance, I can see through her to others, as in sequences of different photographs projected rapidly on an imaginary screen. In her gestures and words I read visitations of my mother; in the impatient zigzagging of her hands, I see her daughter; in the undertones of her voice, her own mother. In such ways we are able to grasp our lives as a continuum, ways so different from the sense of hierarchy presupposed of old age. . . (pp. 286–287). From this perspective, to isolate mother/daughter relations from the intricate matrix of social relations is to place too much significance on a single aspect of human development (Kaplan, 1997). Beyond that, to speak of cohorts or generations of women is to speak from an identity politics that overlooks diversity within generations. The postmodern critique of the generational divide is appealing; it directs us toward the subtleties and complexities of age and age relations. But what effect does it have on the ways younger and older women interact in the world? At least one literary critic—Coppelia Kahn—admits that her postmodern analysis of age in Shakespeare’s plays has not transferred very well to her real-life relationships. Kahn, a second-wave feminist, writes, still, as an angry daughter, even though her mother has been dead for 10 years. Clearly, she is bound by the old mother/daughter binary, in spite of herself: ‘‘This essay is about how my mother shaped me, and without ever knowing it, my feminism. . . While I lived under her thumb, in terror of her 3

See Featherstone and Hepworth (1991) and Katz (1990, 1996) for more on the postmodern life course.

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rages, and desperately trying to fulfill her expectations while deviously flexing my own will, I shrank from trying to understand her. It might have brought me closer to her, and the last thing I sought was the sympathy that understanding might bring. I sought, instead, opposition; resistance unto death. She was enemy and oppressor; I her victim’’ (Kahn, 1992, p. 157). In the practice of daily life, it is difficult to resist the pull of the old Freudian psychodrama of mother/daughter conflict. Yet, we must try. As a modest gesture toward rapprochement, women of all ages could begin by sharing and analyzing their personal and collective histories. In the process, they might learn to recognize and even appreciate one another without comparing or competing, resisting or denying. The dynamics that occur during women’s storytelling are something I have begun to explore through ethnographic research. In the remainder of this essay, I tell a story which suggests, at the very least, that feminist gerontologists must rethink the mother/ daughter binary from both sides, bracketing our ‘‘daughterly’’ selves in order to embrace ‘‘the other within’’ (Pearsall, 1997). We must consider not only how we position ourselves in terms of older generations, but also how they position themselves in terms of us.

4. A story of generational conflict It is a Thursday afternoon in early fall, and the Geriatric Center Writing Group is holding its weekly meeting. Members present include Phyllis, a volunteer and homemaker; Rose, a retired social worker; Georgia, a homemaker; and Mary, a retired elementary school teacher. All are white, middle class, and in their 60s and 70s. All have high school degrees, and most have some college education. The group is sponsored by the Geriatric Center’s learning-inretirement program. Members are well read, articulate, and eager to write. Their facilitator, Lee, is a middle-aged white woman who is completing her master’s degree in geriatric social work. Lee has developed the group to assist older adults with autobiographical writing—for pleasure, personal awareness, and growth. I have been both participant (at the group’s urging) and observer of this group for 4 weeks. I am in the first weeks of a 2-year study of older women’s self-representations through writing. I am new to gerontology research, although I am well acquainted with writing groups. Tentative and nervous, I am still negotiating my position as researcher. I want the group members to like me and my writing. Yet, I am learning that strong differences exist between us. Their writings, especially those about childhood and youth, have a warm, hazy glow about them, like sepia tints. The message is always the same: life is full of challenges, but one rises above adversity and learns from the mistakes of the past. Indeed, a version of this motto has been inscribed by a shaky hand today on the classroom bulletin board: ‘‘Living, by one definition, is exposing yourself to a variety of trials and tribulations and then learning to overcome them.’’ This is followed by a definition of ‘‘overcome’’: ‘‘To turn into something useful.’’ My writing, on the other hand, starts benignly enough and then veers off into messy emotional territory. It is full of anger, frustration, confusion, ambivalence, and thinly veiled judgments of myself and others—particularly my mother. So far, the group has responded politely.

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On this day, however, our relationship changes. We begin as usual, with members sharing information and good-natured banter. All four of us have brought something to read: Mary has written about dangerous activities and close calls during her childhood and adolescence; Phyllis has written about the time she got her tonsils out; Rose has described her reaction to a mispronouncing newscaster on National Public Radio; and I have written about my father’s death 9 months earlier. Lee, not knowing the subject of my story, asks me to read first. At the time of writing, I was facing another loss. My boyfriend David’s elderly father, Joe, was declining rapidly and had been moved to a nursing home. We had spent the summer cleaning out Joe’s home in an old Polish neighborhood of Detroit, where Joe had lived most of his adult life. We had sold a majority of his things, as well as the house. The story I present to the group is a cathartic jumble in which I describe Joe’s physical decline and the deterioration of the family home, intermixed with flashbacks to my own father’s last days in the hospital. My description of Joe’s final weeks prior to placement in a nursing home is graphic: David had found him wandering the streets at 11 o’clock at night. He wore filthy blue polyester trousers and a thin summer shirt. He smelled of shit and urine. David drove him to the emergency room. While waiting for admission, his father went to the bathroom, lost control of his bowels, and left his dirty underwear on the floor. It was the beginning of the end—late-stage liver disease accompanied by toxic dementia. Seeing him like that was a terrible blow. David and his father had shared many things, among the more positive being a partiality for good clothes and good grooming. I also reveal that, during this time, David learned that Joe had been held up at gun point a few months earlier. A man had forced his way into the house, hit Joe on the head, tied him up, and stolen most of what he had of any value. The friend who informed David said she thought the violent intrusion might have had something to do with Joe’s rapid decline and dementia. I also described the scene at my father’s deathbed, where David was present: He looked very small and very old in the hospital bed, his arms deeply bruised from the IV’s. ‘‘Touch his arm, he’s still warm,’’ my mother said, still holding on. The family left us alone with him. I tried to pray but could think of nothing to say except, ‘‘I didn’t even get a chance to say good-bye.’’ ‘‘He was a good man,’’ David said. ‘‘He’ll be with us at the lake next spring.’’ David and I held hands and cried together—for both our fathers. Intermingled with these descriptions were small glimpses into my relationship with David, which was intimate. The story ends 2 days after my father’s death. David and I are sitting on my mother’s living room couch after everyone has gone to bed, reading the newspaper, eating out of a casserole someone has left, and laughing at some absurd comic routine on television. The last line of the story is ‘‘Somewhere in the midst of it all, I felt a surge of joy at the possibility of such everyday intimacy during a time of chaos, crisis, and an uncertain future.’’ At one point during the reading, Mary took off her glasses, looked away, and began to cry. When I finished, the women were silent at first, then began to discuss the emotions the story had raised. Mary talked about her own father’s death and her impatience at the time with her mother’s weak and confused response. She expressed feelings of guilt about that now. The

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others supported Mary and confirmed that no one knows how they will respond to death until it happens. Lee mentioned that to mourn the death of a parent is to mourn the loss of your own role as a child. And then we moved on to the other readings. Rose read last that day. She had written about a radio announcer who did the morning news and commentary and who repeatedly mispronounced names and words: ‘‘Fort’’ Motor Company, ‘‘Bop Etwards,’’ and the ‘‘UassA.’’ Rose found the announcer grating and expressed concern that the standards of the radio station were being eroded. The group’s response to this story was positive and encouraging. Comments centered around whether the announcer’s continued presence on the air might have been a case of affirmative action. I listened and remained silent for several minutes. Then Rose and I had the following conversation: Ruth: Rose:

Ruth: Mary: Ruth: Rose: Mary: Rose: Mary: Ruth: Mary:

That’s really into what I was going to ask. Why was this story so important to you? I mean, there’s a lot of energy involved in hearing you. Because I really don’t like to have to decipher information. . . And I found myself having such a barrier of trying to figure out what the word was, or the word was grating on my ear. Part of it has to do with the fact that my mother was a stickler on speech. Speech was the very backbone of the information of things. She didn’t even like us to use slang. I mean, and she wanted the words to be pronounced correctly, not sloppily. . . So I think what I was doing was I guess I had been imbued with this standard of how you speak, that you speak correctly, and your pronunciation is right, etc., etc. Now, it’s interesting that I—of course, everybody has exceptions to the rule of knowing how to pronounce things. And I never realized that I have my own way of pronouncing certain words until people began kidding me about it. Because I always call the thing up above the top of the building a roof [pronounced with a ‘‘u’’ sound], and everybody else seemed to be calling it a roof [pronounced with an ‘‘oo’’ sound]. That’s a regionalism. I say roof [pronounced with an ‘‘oo’’ sound]. It’s both. It’s both. Well, I never learned it as roof [pronounced with an ‘‘oo’’ sound]. I always said roof [pronounced with a ‘‘u’’ sound]. I had a coworker correct me on pronunciation of route [pronounced with an ‘‘oo’’ sound] and route [pronounced with an ‘‘ou’’ sound]. Well, I think they’re both correct, aren’t they? Well, she didn’t think so. She let me know in no uncertain terms. Which did she prefer? I don’t know now.

We went on to talk more about regional pronunciations, and the session ended with a brief discussion of the time and place of the next week’s meeting. Although not immediately apparent in the words from the transcript, my questioning of Rose reflected my own discomfort: I was angry at her description of the announcer and the group’s references to affirmative action, which seemed racist and classist to me. I kept wondering, ‘‘Would they be talking this way if someone from a different racial or ethnic

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group were present? Would Rose have even shared the story?’’ Trained in the liberal traditions of feminism, as well as contemporary sociolinguistics, I value diversity in all things, including speech patterns, and consider variations in language use natural and desirable. In fact, I have taught many classes based on these very principles. Yet, the group’s concept of language appropriateness was quite different from mine, following a more prescriptive ideology which values correctness and standard usage. Members were operating on the common assumption that ‘‘proper English’’ is objective and value-neutral. My response to this conflict was to move into my English teacher mode: I asked a probing question to get Rose thinking about why she had written what she had, and I provided information which suggested the inevitability of linguistic difference (‘‘It’s a regionalism.’’) I also upset the delicate balance between participant and observer that provides the foundation for ethnographic research. Feminist ethnographers tell us that these roles can be profitably challenged and extended (Behar & Gordon, 1995). But they also caution us that negative consequences might ensure (Wolf, 1992). In this case, I separated myself from the group by adopting at least three identities that were perceived as challenging: I wrote and spoke in ways that displayed my generational identity and my feminist identity, and I drew on my professional identity, evoking a discourse of authority, if not superiority, and putting Rose in the position of defending herself. This is one explanation of what was going on. Another is my long-standing passive resistance to my own mother’s propriety in matters of behavior and language usage. A bright farm girl who aspired to the middle class, my mother, a child of the Great Depression, always wanted to be an English teacher. However, circumstances called upon her to drop out of school at 16 to care for her father, who had had a stroke, and to help her mother run a boarding house to support the family. She never became an English teacher, but she has recited lines of poetry all her life and corrected people’s grammar. Although in my adolescence and youth I resisted my mother’s values and beliefs and later wrote my own version of the family romance, I did become an English professor. Rose’s pronouncements against the radio announcer evoked my mother’s judgments of me, and my judgments of her. I was not aware of this at the time; I only knew that I found Rose irritating. The following week, Lee called to say that the group needed to discuss at the next meeting whether to continue with the research. Some members had expressed ambivalence about further participation. Rose had mentioned she felt ‘‘put on the spot’’ by my response to her life story. Someone else had brought up the language issue, expressing discomfort at my use of ‘‘shit’’ and asking Lee if I was writing in this way ‘‘just to get a reaction’’ out of them. Lee thought these were generational differences: ‘‘They’re not used to the stark realism of your writing,’’ she suggested. ‘‘They tend to pretty things up.’’ For my part, I began to question my motives: was I writing about painful subjects to shock them? Unconsciously, was I making some effort to provoke? Could I perhaps be playing out some old drama, maybe with my own mother? Otherwise, why had I gotten so offended by Rose’s critique of an anonymous radio announcer’s nonstandard pronunciation? Lee interpreted the dissension in terms of group dynamics and power struggles. She noted that Rose considered herself a founding member of the group and had made it an important part of her life; by questioning her, I had, in effect, threatened her identity and status among her peers.

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I attended the next meeting without notebook or tape recorder. We talked about whether I should continue with the observations, how the group had changed since I had become a member, and what the others wanted from the writing group. Mary asked me what I was looking for; did I have expectations about what I would find? I told her, honestly, that my perspective was evolving. Catherine, who had not been present for any of the previous meetings in which I had read, said she was not sure she wanted me to be a contributing member—she might not want to know what I thought and felt. The life story she read that day was about ageism and how mad it makes her when people like her daughter (who is my age) tell older people who are perfectly capable of making their own decisions what they should do. She spoke of the writing group as a place where elders could speak and be heard; where their ideas, memories, and feelings would be shared, honored, respected, and not judged. We talked about whether I was old enough to be part of this group, and Lee raised the question, ‘‘Is it only age differences that the group is feeling?’’ Phyllis said she had learned a lot from me, but she did not feel comfortable with all aspects of my writing. ‘‘Last week—and this is just my personality, but I tend to back away from things—I was intimidated by your writing. What you wrote, once I got beyond the language, touched me to the core.’’ Rose, the member whom I had most directly offended, spoke of the group as an intimate circle of friends who had spent months getting comfortable with each other. She then read a piece she had written especially for this meeting: a parable about a small, primitive tribe on a remote island, which got together to share its stories. Then an anthropologist came and asked to hear the stories. Then the anthropologist taped the stories, and some members began to feel uncomfortable. Then the anthropologist began to share her own stories, which made members feel even more uncomfortable. Everything changed. The group’s focus began to shift to the anthropologist. The ending of the story was yet to be determined. Lee called a few days later to say that the group had decided to withdraw from the study. Anthropologists have explored the complications of the participant–observer role in some depth. But even feminist ethnographers have not fully acknowledged the age relations that develop in and around these roles. In their collection, Women Writing Culture, for example, ethnographers Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon (1995) invite us to rethink our research and writing in order to engage the complexities of multicultural, feminist, and multinational scholarship, especially in terms of articulating race, ethnicity, and gender. They consider the moral dilemmas that arise in writing about cultural ‘‘others’’ who do not share our lived experiences. This effort requires that we study how language and narrative are used to gain power and dominance. Within this interrogation of authorship, however, Behar and Gordon do not consider the social and psychological dimensions of age. If we look to psychological research for an understanding of this conflict, we might consider it natural and even desirable in terms of both individual and group development. Research suggests that women’s development occurs in a web of relationships (Jordan, 1997), including that with the mother figure. Many 20th century women’s life writings reflect the deep connection between mother and daughter; they often include a mother’s biography embedded in the autobiography of the daughter, suggesting that the daughter’s life is continually constructed in dialogic interaction with the mother’s life (Malin, 2000). Of course, the mother’s ‘‘voice’’ in these autobiographies, as in most feminist research in

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general, is filtered through the daughter’s, and in this sense, the mother does not ‘‘speak’’ for herself. For this reason, mothers and daughters—indeed, women of many generations—need to learn how to listen to one another and speak up for themselves before they can establish more equal footing. Feminist researchers, too, must work through the projections that occur between us and the women we study. We must engage in a nuanced theorizing that acknowledges the vast diversity among women and the potential for change over time in female relationships. We must acknowledge, too, that mother/daughter dynamics are different among women of various races, ethnicities, and spiritual backgrounds. Our feminist theorizing must be the kind that admits alternatives to the mother/daughter plot. My conflict with the Thursday afternoon writing group illustrates very concretely how differences in language use, writing style, and narrative scripting reflect generational differences in values, beliefs, and practices of self-representation and age hierarchies. It also illustrates my insensitivity, at the time, to these differences and to mother/daughter projections between younger and older women. In responding critically to the language of Rose’s story—and, indirectly, to her presentation of self—I violated the norms for encouragement and support so important to successful functioning of a women’s writing group. Rose’s perception that the group focus had shifted to my issues was a disturbing revelation. If we look to anthropology for an explanation of this conflict, we can gain an appreciation of its social, as well as psychological, significance. Victor Turner (1974) would describe the episode of my dismissal as a ‘‘sociocultural drama,’’ rather than a Freudian psychodrama. In Number Our Days, a study of a Jewish Senior Center in California, anthropologist Barbara Myerhoff (1980) documents many such events that she both observed and participated in. Following Turner, she defines the sociocultural drama as a public event in which a crisis emerges, goes through identifiable stages, and is resolved. The group perceives a ‘‘threat to collective life’’ usually when someone violates a rule or custom; the conflict simmers and spreads; some action is called for that redresses the imbalance and restores order; and the group realigns its social relationships. These dramas are significant because they throw into relief the core issues of the group: ‘‘In these dramas, [groups] develop their collective identity, their interpretation of their world, themselves, and their values. As well as being social dramas, the events are definitional ceremonies, performances of identity’’ (Myerhoff, 1980, p. 32). In the drama of the Geriatric Center Writing Group, the collective identity that surfaced on that particular Thursday was a generational one in which the mother/daughter plot surfaced. In this case, group members supported the mother/peer and displaced the daughter/outsider. Their words and actions reinforced that this group was for them and was to be conducted in accordance with their values, beliefs, and goals. From this perspective, there is power in maintaining a generational identity—power that some groups and individuals may not want to give up in order to create more reciprocal relationships with generational others.

5. Some conclusions It is 5 years later, and this small drama remains a defining moment in my training as a feminist gerontologist, my introduction to the challenges of conducting qualitative, interpret-

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ive research across the generational divide. I have read other people’s theories and told this story many times, trying on different interpretations, feminist and otherwise.4 Mostly, I am left with more unanswerable questions and ideas for further study. There are insights to be gained from my story, however, and from the scripted ending to The Winter Guest. The two scenes from the Thursday writing group reflect moments of conflict—times when my assumptions, values, beliefs, expectations, response patterns, ways of thinking were called into question. They were, therefore, moments that initiated change and growth in me as a person and scholar. They catapulted me into thinking differently—and far more complexly—about the meanings of age and the possibilities for intergenerational relationships among women. The ending of The Winter Guest shows us how one mother and one daughter move in the direction of mutual change. On their way home from a long walk across the frozen landscape, the mother grows weary and stumbles on the rocks. Afraid to show her weakness, she continues on without her cane. The daughter, alarmed, assumes the caregiving role: Frances: Take my hand, mother Mother: I don’t need it. I’m fine by myself. Frances (angry): Take my bloody hand, mother! Mother (standing up straight): My name’s Elspeth. Frances pauses, visibly moved. She offers her assistance again, more gently, this time without recrimination. ‘‘Take my arm, Elspeth. Please.’’ With this simple act of renaming, the ground of their relationship has shifted. In calling her mother by her given name, Frances recognizes another self outside the family plot. For the mother’s part, to stand and deliver her name is to relinquish the mother role and open herself to other ways of relating. The two invite us to imagine new relationships among women, to alter the mother/daughter plot. How might we reimagine the ending to my story of generational conflict? I offer three possible scenarios that draw on the potentials in renaming, role shifting, and self-positioning. They are, of course, still ‘‘daughter-centric’’ (Daly & Reddy, 1991) in their orientation because I am, after all, a daughter who has never been a mother. Readers may well imagine other endings. My purpose here is to shift the emphasis from older women’s writings, told among peers, to intergenerational storytelling, following Hirsch’s (1989) suggestion that ‘‘feminism might begin by listening to the stories that mothers have to tell and by creating spaces in which mothers might articulate those stories’’ (p. 167). I do not mean to diminish the role that age-segregated groups play in affirming individual and generational identities— only to suggest that other kinds of groups are needed to explore and extend women’s identities beyond the roles that are culturally constructed for them. Scene 1: The group decides to continue with me as participant–observer and work through our differences. We discuss our varying responses to each other’s stories and talk about how these responses reflect differences in values, beliefs and role expectations, as well as social conventions, which make us feel uncomfortable with open disagreement. We remind ourselves continually that ‘‘difference’’ need not mean ‘‘deficiency’’ and that conflict can 4

For another reference to this story, see Ray, 2000.

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be positive and growth-enhancing. In time, the older women invite their daughters to join and share their life stories. Scene 2: The group decides to become a second-half-of-life group open to middle-aged women and older. For a few weeks, we focus our writing exclusively on the mother/daughter relationships. Group members include women who have or had long-term relationships with their mothers, women who lost their mothers in early life, women who have never been mothers themselves, women who related to their mothers differently because one or both were feminists, lesbian mothers, women whose mother-in-laws have extended their concept of ‘‘mother,’’ and others who have, in various ways, lived unconventional mother/daughter plots. Scene 3: The group evolves into a multigenerational group for women of all ages. We experiment in writing from different age positions: young women write from the imagined positions of midlife and old age; old women write from the remembered and recreated positions of youth and middle age. We talk about what is gained and lost in assuming these positions and the extent to which we find ourselves drawing on myth, stereotype, and media images, including films, to make our narratives sound ‘‘realistic.’’ In all these scenes, we decide, along with literary critic Cora Kaplan, that our very texts, although they may create discomfort, also provide a kind of ‘‘mothering’’—a nurturing, educating, and prompting—that moves us always in the direction of change and growth. References Behar, R., & Gordon, D. (Eds.) (1995). Women writing culture. Berkeley, CA: University of California. Bollas, C. (1992). Being a character: psychoanalysis and self experience. New York: McGraw-Hill. Bondoc, A., & Daly, M. (Eds.) (1999). Letters of intent: women cross the generations to talk about family, work, sex, love and the future of feminism. New York: Free Press. Browne, C. (1998). Women, feminism, and aging. New York: Springer. Carter, M. W. (1996). Female grotesques in academia: ageism, antifeminism, and feminists on the faculty. In V. Clark, S. N. Garner, M. Higonnet, & K. H. Katrak (Eds.), Antifeminism in the academy ( pp. 141 – 165). New York: Routledge. Collins, P. H. (1987). The meaning of motherhood in black culture and black mother – daughter relationships. Sage, 4, 3 – 10. Cristofovici, A. (1999). Touching surfaces: photography, aging, and an aesthetics of change. In K. Woodward (Ed.), Figuring age: women, bodies, generations ( pp. 268 – 293). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. Daly, B., & Reddy, M. T. (1991). Introduction. In B. O. Daly, & M. T. Reddy (Eds.), Narrating mothers; theorizing maternal subjectivities ( pp. 1 – 18). Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press. Elder, G. H. (1974). Children of the great depression: social change in life experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ermarth, E. (1992). On having a personal voice. In G. Greene, & C. Kahn (Eds.), Changing subjects: the making of feminist literary criticism ( pp. 226 – 239). London: Routledge. Featherstone, M., & Hepworth, M. (1991). The mask of ageing and the postmodern life course. In M. Featherstone, M. Hepworth, & B. S. Turner (Eds.), The body: social process and cultural theory ( pp. 371 – 389). London: Sage Publications. Gardner, D. (Ed.) (1999). Fundamentals of feminist gerontology. New York: Haworth Press. Gullette, M.M. (1997). Declining to decline: Cultural combat and the politics of the midlife. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.

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Hareven, T. (1995). Changing images of aging and the social construction of the life course. In M. Featherstone, & A. Wernick (Eds.), Images of aging: cultural representations of later life ( pp. 119 – 134). London: Routledge. Hirsch, M. (1989). The mother/daughter plot: narrative, psychoanalysis, feminism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University. Jordan, J.V. (Ed.) (1997). Women’s growth in diversity. New York: Guilford. Kahn, C. (1992). Mother. In G. Greene, & C. Kahn (Eds.), Changing subjects: the making of feminist literary criticism ( pp. 156 – 167). London: Routledge. Kaplan, E. A. (1997). Feminism, aging, and changing paradigms. In D. Looser, & E. A. Kaplan (Eds.), Generations: academic feminists in dialogue ( pp. 13 – 29). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Katz, R. S. (1990). Using our emotional reactions to older clients: a working theory. In B. Genevay, & R. S. Katz (Eds.), Countertransference and older clients ( pp. 17 – 26). Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. Katz, S. (1996). Disciplining old age: the formation of gerontological knowledge. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia. Kutza, E. (1998). A look at national policy and the baby boom generation. Generations, 22, 16 – 21. Longino, C. F. (1998). Geographic mobility and the baby boom. Generations, 22, 60 – 64. Looser, D., & Kaplan, E. A. (Eds.) (1997). Generations: academic feminists in dialogue. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota. Malin, J. (2000). The voice of the mother. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Moen, P. (1998). Recasting careers: changing reference groups, risks, and realities. Generations, 22, 40 – 45. Myerhoff, B. (1980). Number our days. New York: Simon & Schuster. Newman, K. (1996). Ethnography, biography, and cultural history. In R. Jessor, A. Colby, & R. Sweder (Eds.), Ethnography and human development: context and meaning in social inquiry ( pp. 371 – 394). Chicago: University of Chicago. Pearsall, M. (Ed.) (1997). The other within us: feminist explorations of women and aging. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Ray, R. (1996). A postmodern perspective on feminist gerontology. Gerontologist, 36, 674 – 680. Ray, R. (2000). Beyond nostalgia: aging and life-story writing. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Reinharz, S. (1986). Friends or foes: gerontological and feminist theory. Women’s Studies International Forum, 9, 503 – 514. Russell, C. (1993). The master trend: how the baby boom generation is remaking America. New York: Plenum. Sprengnether, M. (1992). Generational differences: reliving mother – daughter conflicts. In G. Greene, & C. Kahn (Eds.), Changing subjects: the making of feminist literary criticism ( pp. 201 – 208). London: Routledge. Turner, V.W. (1974). Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University. Wolf, M. (1992). A thrice told tale: feminism, postmodernism and ethnographic responsibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Woodward, K. (1999). Inventing generational models: psychoanalysis, feminism, literature. In K. Woodward (Ed.), Figuring age: women, bodies, generations ( pp. 149 – 168). Bloomington, IN: Indiana University.

Ruth Ray is Professor of English and faculty associate in gerontology at Wayne State University in Detroit. Her areas of interest include feminist theory and praxis, intergenerational learning, women’s writing groups, and latelife autobiography. She is currently at work on a book of stories about love, sex, and friendship in late life, based on her ethnographic research in nursing homes.