Introduction to the Series
When my mother died suddenly and unexpectedly, the task of sorting
through her possessions fell to me, her only child. In the top drawer
of her dresser was a tin box with a lid adorned by a gaily colored
portrait of Salmagundi. This box was familiar. It had once contained
two pounds of Whitman’s chocolates that my father had given her the day
he proposed. As a child I had often looked inside, and I knew my mother
used the box to safekeep her nursing pin and a particular kind of pearl
button she wore on her uniforms. That is what I expected to find when I
raised the lid after her death. The pin and the buttons were there,
just as I remembered, but I also found something else—an old letter,
dated 1928, written in a large, elegant hand, in a language I could
neither speak nor read. The signature was a name no one on either side
of the family recognized.
I had the mysterious letter from the past
translated. What follows below was my introduction to the woman who was
my great-grandmother.
Dear Daughter
Much time has passed and I know nothing about you, how you live and what you do. My dear daughter, why have you forgotten me completely, why don’t you write me anything about yourself? My dear daughter, remember me once again in my old age. You know very well that I am alone and abandoned. They have all left me in my old age. I’m exhausted from illness and cannot walk or work anymore, and I do need to eat like everyone else, but I don’t have the means for it. I’m being hated in my old age and nobody wants to feed me, so I have to suffer half-starvation. My dear daughter, you know very well what kind of life I have, please remember at least one last time. My dear, you have been the best one, the one I always helped as much as I could. I had you, my dear daughter, and now my life is ending. Please do me this favor in my final days and help me, because you can well understand that nobody has any sympathy for me. You alone will have feelings for me. My dear one, I ask you and my son-in-law Anthony to help me as much as you can. Send me at least a few dollars and I will be eternally grateful, even after my death. I ask you in humility to help me as much as you can, and god will reward you for that. And don’t forget to write me a letter about yourself. Please write to me what news you have and how your children are doing. Write me something for me as a mother who is very near the end. My dear children, don’t forget my plea and please do what I ask you. I wait day and night for your reply. I have nothing more to add because at my end it is misery and poverty and I know nothing else. I wish you lots and lots of health and happiness and joy. I’m sending you kisses,
Your mother,
Petronele Gurzliene
Without this legacy, I would most likely
not even know my great-grandmother’s name. Having the letter translated
did not prove satisfying, however; the plea for news from a beloved,
distant child and for financial assistance only whetted my curiosity
and raised more questions. The date, 1928, was eleven years after the
Communist revolution in Russia and four years after the end of World
War I, a period of great economic and social turmoil in Eastern Europe.
Was my great-grandmother’s desperate situation a result of the war and
social upheaval? Was the crisis political (had some family member been
involved in anti-Communist or anti-Russian activities) or personal
(bankruptcy, misadventure)? Why was my great-grandmother “hated” and
“abandoned,” and why would her daughter “well understand” that “nobody
has any sympathy” for her? Had she done something horrid or courageous
that somehow made her a pariah in the community?
Stories about ancestors that were passed
down orally in my family revolved around my father’s side. This letter
awakened in me the realization that I knew nothing about previous
generations on my mother’s side. In fact, I knew practically nothing
about the life of my grandmother, who had lived with us for a number of
years, and not very much about my own mother’s life. In truth, I had no
idea who these women were. What had their lives been like? Was there
any thread running between their destinies and mine? Over the next few
years I was able to piece together my mother’s story, and a small bit
about my grandmother. To this day, my great-grandmother remains an
enigma, a shadowy, unknowable figure.
Aside from a few hard facts (date of
birth, marriage, death), my attempt to find my great-grandmother and
know her as a flesh and blood person was an exercise in frustration.
The recognition of my loss, combined with books I was reading about
women’s autobiography and biography, led to the founding of 20th Century Women,
a project to collect the life stories of elderly women who had lived
through most of this turbulent century of change and transformation.
The stories that will appear in this journal are selections from this
on-going project.
Shadowy, unknowable figures—that describes most women who have walked on this earth.
Until the last quarter of this century,
the memoir and the biography were the province of the celebrated, the
great achievers, the rich and powerful, and principally men. The lives
of a handful of women were documented—queens or notorious rebels, the
mothers of great men, patronesses who helped talented, ambitious men
rise to prominence. The occasional woman who was included was someone
who fascinated men or who held great power, or to whom a man felt
uncommon gratitude or love, or who was so troublesome that she was
written about in a way that would make her an example or warning to
other women unhappy with their lot in life. This last group, the
unconventional women, usually were called jezebels or the adjective
notorious and dangerous was applied to them, making them seem abnormal
or monstrous.
The so-called “ordinary” woman might, if
fate decreed that she gave birth to a gifted writer, have her story
told in fiction, although one wonders what Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s
grandmother would say about the way he used her tales in One Hundred Years of Solitude, and I would lay money that the real-life models for Emma Bovary and Anna Karenina would wish to argue with the portraits and conclusions drawn by Flaubert and Tolstoy.
This is not to say that men have not
tried to be fair, loving, honest in their fiction and biographies of
women over the centuries. Many have. Suffice it to say here that from
birth forward men’s lives are, or have been, different from their
mothers and sisters. They view the world through a lens constructed of
their experiences, and it is not the same lens as the one that women
see through.
Until this century there was one place
where mothers, aunts and spinsters could tell their stories in their
own way and that was within the family. “I remember when I was a girl
and on Saturday nights the old folks would sit around and tell us about
how they did back then,” one ninety-six year old cousin told me. Men
wrote about their experiences and their reflections and by doing so
preserved not only their lives, but their wisdom. From their stories,
new generations learn how best to live in an unpredictable world.
Women, kept uneducated for so many centuries, had only the oral
tradition, a medium that is unreliable and ephemeral. Children and
possibly grandchildren might retell a woman’s story, but with
repetition the tale will suffer significant alteration from what she
said or intended, and with the passage of time her story becomes
reduced to a sentence (“On my mother side, I think, somebody back there
was burned as a witch.”) that, while perhaps memorable, hardly does the
woman justice. The truth is that before the 20th century, the best most
women could hope for was to have their name scrawled in the family
Bible or carved on a tombstone.
A woman born into the twentieth century
will rarely have even the personal pleasure of telling her story within
the family. In the 20th century, this informal oral tradition was
overwhelmed by the invention of mass media. Today’s young women learn
how a woman ought to live from advertising, rock lyrics, sit-coms and
movies, rather than from the mouths of real women who know the
difference between dreams and reality, and who have struggled with the
sudden reversals that life and fortune bring, and who have failed and
triumphed.
The social changes that took place in the
20th century dramatically altered women’s lives, the possibilities they
can imagine, their expectations for what they can become. Women in the
21st century will have difficulty imagining life with the limitations
that confronted their great-grandmothers when a woman’s career choices
were marriage, teaching and nursing. The gap between generations will
only become greater with the passage of time, and women might easily
forget what revolutionary rights and freedoms were won for them in the
20th century. More importantly, they might forget why these battles
were fought and the price women paid for victory.
20th century
women have lived through devastating world wars, economic catastrophes,
great movements for civil and women’s rights, the sexual revolution,
and vast technological changes which continue to alter our families,
our communities, the fabric of society and men’s and women’s roles.
Many women in their seventies, eighties and nineties are still
struggling to deal honestly with their past lives. They have difficulty
writing their memoirs. They come from traditions where women were
secondary, and are intimidated at the idea of “going public.” They
doubt that their experiences are “interesting” or “important.” Trying
to forge their experiences into a story frequently releases conflicting
and troubling emotions connected with behavior that breaks from the
norm, and creates blocks of memory. They are most familiar with
narrative forms that were developed by men to tell men’s stories, and
to reflect the ways men perceive the world, and do not always
accurately render women’s perceptions. A woman who attempts to tell her
story but who can find no adequate model often falls silent, wondering
if there isn’t something wrong with her. Or she may try to make her
story “fit” into familiar models, in the process distorting her actual
vision of reality. This last problem stymies elderly women in
particular, especially those who have not had the benefit of recent
feminist theory in the area of women’s biography and autobiography and
linguistics.
Most of the stories that will appear at
this website will be excerpted from longer works that deal with the
woman’s entire life. Because all stories are based on memory, and as is
the case with any narrative that has not been fact-checked, readers
would do well to bear in mind the possibility of an unreliable
narrator. It should be noted, however, that while some individuals may
have rewritten their lives into something close to fiction, most
elderly people, at least in my experience, are concerned nearly to the
point of obsession with recording the truth or “getting it right,”
which to them means an accurate account of their actions, perceptions
and motivations.
This project is a quest for the heroism
beneath the surface of everyday life. The word unconventional (like
strident) is generally applied by society to any behavior employed by a
woman who acts to obtain for herself the freedom, equality and dignity
that every person seeks, covertly or openly. In these lives, most acts
that would be called unconventional are in reality a woman’s heroic
response, sometimes carefully reasoned and sometimes intuitive, to a
situation or existence that is threatening to her sanity or her life.
If more women speak the truth about their lives, perhaps we may begin
to redefine how a woman can and ought to live, what it means to be a
womanly woman. We can learn not to fear the unconventional, the
ambitious and the bold, and how to include such traits within in our
definition of what is normal, womanly and even feminine.
It is my hope that the narratives that appear here
will inspire sons and daughters to look twice at their mothers,
grandmothers and aunts. Ask them about their lives. Listen without
judgment. They may tell you stories that will stop your heart.
