Steedman, C. (1986). Landscape for a good woman: A story of two lives. London: Virago, 1986.
Scott, J.W. (1992). The evidence of experience. In J. Butler & J.W. Scott (Eds.), Feminists theorize the political (pp.22-40). New York: Routledge.
Although Scott (1992) supports the use of experience in recording history, and as a means of studying “the other”, she contests the historical approach of using experience as fact or as the creation of knowledge. Scott describes historical explanations of experience as “foundationalist”; that is, historians do not question the pre-existing categories (gender, race, class etc.), to which they classify their subjects. In turn, existing ideologies are reaffirmed and there is no exploration of how these categories are produced. In order to understand the process of how identities are produced, it is necessary to look not only at the experience of an individual, but at how experience shapes that individual. The context, within which the subject is situated, including the dominant discourse and politics, must also be considered (Scott, 1992). Steedman’s mother’s rejection of dominant ideology exemplifies the importance of looking at process. Rather than aligning herself with the working class, her mother supports conservative politics with her motive being envy for what she does not have.
Landscape for a Good Woman is an autoethnographical account of Steedman’s childhood growing up in a 1950’s working class, single parent family in England. Steedman draws on her past to rethink and reconstruct dominant ideas of class, feminism, patriarchy, and gender. Her personal narratives not only challenge the typical image of the perfect bourgeois family, but also the romantic sense of family and work solidarity that is assumed of the working class. In doing so, Steedman illustrates the importance and the possibility of autoethnographic work that gives, “a sense of people’s complexity of relationship to the historical situations they inherit” (p.19). These complex relationships are elucidated through Steedman’s multiple references to herself as her mother despite her disregard for her mother; “that whilst hating her, I was her” (p.55). The metaphor of her being her mother reinforces Scott’s (1992) notion that individuals are “subject to definite conditions of existence” (p.793) and these conditions are especially strong during childhood, which Steedman describes as always being someone else’s story. Steedman does not claim that the history she refers to is entirely accurate, but rather states that her stories trace a part of her history so that others can (but not necessarily will) relate and in doing so make sense of their own history.
Steedman posits that one derives meaning from their memories and personal histories through both psychoanalytic as well as structural analysis. Using Steedman’s story in the bluebell wood where her father is reprimanded for picking flowers, she finds symbolism in the uprooted plants and the illegality of the situation (being an illegitimate child). She is also able to put this story into a context that considers her father’s social position as a working class male that subjects him to this scrutiny. Both social context and psychoanalysis are important to lend meaning to an experience but Steedman cautions that such psychoanalytic myths – that describe an experience and its outcomes- should not be generalized and essentialized. As is evidenced by E.P. Thompson’s work as mentioned by Scott, his attempt to capture the stories of the working class were problematic despite his inclusion of agency, because he failed to capture the variance of individual experience (whether it be gender, ethnicity or other variance), and consequently his work resulted in essentializing class. While Steedman uses such myths throughout her work, she urges the reader to refuse to consider her narratives as part of a larger cultural psychology. Why should her story be considered over someone else’s? We understand it is not her intention to make her experiences seem more important than someone else’s but does her position as an academic equipped with the analytical tools and resources to be critical of her upbringing privilege her reflections over others’? Are there negative implications of having alternate voices that come from such privileged positions?
We have seen the use of metaphors in description both in last week and in this week’s articles. In addition to the symbol of the flowers, the theme of food is presented throughout the book: not only did Steedman describe her mother’s ‘food reform’ as a means of control over their life, but she also described the emotional impact of the school meal program as a form of recognition of the importance of children. What other symbols or metaphors are used throughout her book? Looking at both last week and this week, do these metaphors add or detract from the message conveyed? How, as researchers, can we ensure to get the deeper meaning of symbols and metaphors presented?
Two ideas have emerged and followed us from blog to blog. Those are vision and of course objectivity. Last week, Haraway claimed that vision should be an objective understanding of our situated knowledge. It should, “attach the objective to our theoretical and political scanners in order to name where we are and are not, in dimensions of mental and physical space we hardly know how to name”(p.582). Scott’s position is quite similar as she argues that vision that precedes critical examination of social categories (such as class and gender) fails to recognize how an experience operates within society. Given the notion that such categories are so multiple and varied within themselves, who should have the authority, or in other words, who should be able to claim objectivity over one’s experience? How could a critical examination of one’s own past experience change over time? Does that memoried experience become any more or less objective with age?
Steedman claims that, “children do not posses a social analysis of what is happening to them, or around them, so the landscape and the pictures it presents have to remain a background, taking on meaning later from different circumstances” (28). She also goes on to claim that the idea of a childhood was created based on the notion that there is a “landscape of feeling” within every adult that needs to “be continually reworked and reinterpreted” (128). Both of this week’s bloggers found the notion of childhood as an uncharted or unexplored terrain to be problematic. It seems as if Steedman is arguing that children are unable to make meaning of their experiences until they are equipped with adult insight. What do these references suggest about young people’s place or value in society? How might their positions, or even childhood histories, be exploited in the process of being reworked and reinterpreted by the adult vision? If Steedman is in fact correct, is it even possible to engage children in reflective and critical discourse?
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Mel and Jess, I really like how you have put the two works in conversation with one another. I was particularly compelled by your question of the possibility of including children in social analyses of their situation. I am not sure how generalized Steedman’s comment was regarding the inability of children to understand what is happening to them. While Steedman herself needed greater experience and time to reflect on her childhood, she also concedes that nine-year old Carla (one of the authors of The Tidy House) possessed a “sharp social vision” (p.81). Furthermore, the story of the young watercress girl is uncomfortable for the older (and thus, more experienced) male researcher BECAUSE the child had such social insight accompanied by “the blank absence of childhood from her face” (p.134). I believe Scott’s article would explain this disparity in comprehension/reflection in terms of experience. The experiences of Carla and the watercress girl constituted them as subjects with greater insight to their social situation, while Steedman did not acquire this experience until later.
ReplyDeleteSteedman’s “experience” also disrupts notions of the importance of a man’s presence to enforce (albeit competing concepts of) patriarchal ideologies. She wants to “suggest that the notion of patriarchal law has to be seen within the framework of ownership and possession, that its status as an interpretative device is altered when women are seen as owning something, even if it is only their labour, and the babies they reproduce” (p.69). Child-bearing, in her experience, can be understood as an attempted transaction between a woman and man, and/or a “bargain” between working-class women and the state. I find these ideas resonate quite well with Scott’s notion of “agency”. Scott explains that subjects do indeed have agency, although not as “autonomous individuals exercising free will” (p. 793). Instead, subjects exercise the choices enabled them by their conditions of existence. In Steedman’s mother’s case, her working class background, her own mother’s treatment of her, and her wish for a more secure future with a husband allowed her to exercise her agency of having children. This notion of agency helps us reconcile agency vs. structure debates inherent in many sociological/cultural studies.
While I significantly enjoyed Steedman’s book, I found her discussion of the refusal of reproduction to be somewhat problematic. She argues that, “refusal to reproduce oneself is a refusal to perpetrate what one is, that is, the way one understands oneself to be in the social world” (p. 84). While Steedman concedes that this line of thinking is based on necessarily fragmentary evidence, she continues with a seemingly deterministic argument about refusing reproduction. She states that in order for a person to want to reproduce, she must have experienced approval of her body at some time in her life and have a consequent self-love. This seems slightly at odds with her argument that having children can be a means of economic agency for a woman. While the two motivations are obviously not mutually exclusive, I wonder how they can be reconciled. Does every woman who wants children experience approval at some point in her life? Can the wish for children simply be an economic or transactional experience? At a more abstract level, at what point can or do we generalize experience? While Steedman seems to be cautioning against generalization, it appears she does this to some extent with this issue. This takes me back to the question raised by Mel and Jess about children’s ability to analyze their social situation. It does seem that Steedman contradicts herself in that discussion as well. Is contradiction ok? Does it ask us to analyze further? How may it help or hinder us in understanding the complexity of meaning and experience? Or is Steedman in fact not generalizing, but speaking specifically to her experience (which should be assumed by the reader) although her language suggests the former?
*by the older researcher's experience I allude to in the first paragraph, I mean common sense notions of experience that correlate it with age.
ReplyDeleteBoth Steedman’s (1986) and Scott’s (1986) work mark a shift in methodological approaches to socio-cultural studies from situating the positionality and objectivity of the researcher to using personal experience of scholarly evidence. Steedman’s ability to draw-out, analyze, and re-analyze events and symbols of her childhood and her relationship to patriarchy, gender and class dynamics shows how personal experiences are situated within broader contexts. In the opening section of Landscape for a Good Woman Steedman speaks to the usefulness of interpreting personal experience to rework real events to give meaning to the context in which they occur and what the represented, and continue to signify. Steedman writes; “we need to search backwards from the vantage point of the present in order to appraise things in the past and attribute meaning to them” (p. 21). It is in giving meaning to these events, she elaborates, that we can trace forward the past and make a history.
ReplyDeleteWhat I found particularly interesting in Steedman’s work was her discussion of the creation of class-consciousness. In many ways, the narrative and analysis she presents runs counter to conventional understandings of the English working class in the early and mid 20th centuries--the patriarchal bourgeois perspective--to that of working class girl and her mother. Steedman challenges the notion of class-consciousness through her articulations with class, gender, and the structures of society that are learned in childhood. She argues that class consciousness cannot be conceived as a psychological consciousness, and takes issue with the “old story” of working class consciousness (that of Marx) built around exploiter and exploited, capital and proletariat, and its failure to describe the “precise how and why of the development of class-consciousness”. The attribution of psychological sameness to the figures in the working class landscape are made by men and fail to account for the experiences and consciousness of working class women and children. Through her experiences and the tensions within her household--the absence of her father, the restrictions he places on her mother and their social status, the coldness and dissatisfaction of her mother, her relationship to labour and material goods--Steedman places the specificity of place and politics of her household within the broader context of working class life, that is not universal, but a story that “presents itself momentarily as complete”.
Through her personal experience, Steedman also elucidates the relationship of women, and her experience as a child, to labour and capital. She argues that across time and culture, “women are written off as objects of exchange among men” (p.68). Her story challenges these histories that provide insight into the minds of “those who do the exchanging” but does not present an understanding of those who “are the objects of exchange”. In this sense, Steedman repositions her experiences as central facets of a working class consciousness that is particular to how “children...must learn about men making circumstances and women remaking them, about men earning more money than women...in fact; about how a social world is set up” (p.81).
[Sometimes as a child I was told not to worry when adults were being exclusive and secretive in their chatters. Oftentimes feeling confused, and wanting to ask, “What were you guys ...” – interrupted I usually was, by more aged members of my kin. They would turnaround (with a sincere looks on their faces) and reassuringly tell me: “you’ll get to know one day.” Frustrated and naturally curious more often than not I would be when I was left alone, that is ... in . trying . to . connect . the . dots – as was the case in the events before (around the age of eight) and the memroies after (right up until this day) my parent’s divorce. I am, in other words, in agreement with Carolyn's post. In my words, though, as a society, we are neither enabling children to take possession of knowledge nor giving them enough space to make mistakes.]
ReplyDeleteIn "Landscape for a Good Woman" (1986), Steedman knew something was up with this “new” look thing, that is, what it was that the New Look (woman [in her dreams’]) coat represented. In her 20s then, having had the time to reflect on her working-class childhood and adolescence and after sharpening her critical thinking skills, the meaning of the New Look (woman [in her dreams’]) came to symbolize something more.
ReplyDeleteThe New Look was first and foremost a catalyst for class consciousness, nevertheless, if one had to be working-class, then it was good to be a seamstress, which Steedman’s mother was (22-24), which leads into the second point. On her mother, the author writes, “She looked so much better than the fat, spreading, South London mothers around us, that I thought we had to be middle class” (37). The New Look not only involved looking like the bourgeois, however, it also meant adopting their hegemonic cultural values.
In striving to become a more traditional 1950s Englishwoman, then, that is a devout Christian with Victorian morals, Steedman’s mother sought to become a stereotypical working-class woman, part of a nuclear family, and someone who “kept a clean house” (35). As an “illegitimate” child, though, Steedman gathered “the sense ... that people knew something about [her], something that was wrong with [her], that [she] didn’t know [her]self” (40).
Moreover, lacking a patriarchal father, Steedman came to accept a metaphorical comparison of herself to the Little Mermaid, which was first rehearsed by her mother: “She turns me into the Little Mermaid a few years later, swimming round and round the ship, wondering why I was not wanted ... ‘How could he do it,’ she said, ‘leave two nice little girls like you?” (55) This quote clearly exemplifies how parents can unnecessarily overly-demonize each other metaphorically to children.
Thirdly and finally, the New Look woman symbolized her father’s other woman, yeah, “that woman” (39), the mystery woman (who had enough money for New Look coat). Given the context, nevertheless, I ask: do you think Steedman’s father was overly-demonized by her mother?
Jess and Melanie, you ask why Steedman’s story should be considered over someone else’s. I first think that it depends on who you ask. On the one hand, readers from one-parent, split, or separated households, as examples, may think her account to be more authentic, more entertaining, and hence give someone’s life more purpose (perhaps more than say E. P. Thompson’s would have?). For a more traditional 1950s Englishwoman, on the other hand, E.P Thompson’s account, comparatively speaking, may in fact have proved to be more relevant. The point I am hereby trying to make is that there is undoubtedly space for both views and I am sure Steedman’s narrative too will be critiqued (as E. P. Thompson’s was by both Scott [1992] & Steedman) or ripped apart one day; it’s inevitable, so long as it remains influential in academia, which I think it will.
Personal experience has always been made problematic as a site of ‘Truth,’ as mentioned by Scott this is most likely due to the fact that, “Experience is at once always already an interpretation and is in need of interpretation” (1992:37). In the sense that ‘experience’ is interrelated with our recurrent themes (aptly articulated by our lovely bloggers as ‘objectivity’ and ‘vision’), this highlights the important intersection of truth knowledge and power. Because of the historical role of narrative as subordinate to empirical (positivist/scientific) “Truths,” ‘experience,’ has rightly been as source of hot debate in terms of legitimacy. As further articulated by Scott identity (as influenced by experience) is not a fixed category, and furthermore identities such as ‘black,’ ‘gay,’ ‘homosexual,’ or ‘negro,’ have social, historical and political roots (1992:35). Therefore, for example, experience of one female cannot be necessarily translated to the experiences of another.
ReplyDeleteI think the important question is the origins and legitimacy of these knowledge’s, as the bloggers asked:
Why should her story be considered over someone else’s? We understand it is not her intention to make her experiences seem more important than someone else’s but does her position as an academic equipped with the analytical tools and resources to be critical of her upbringing privilege her reflections over others’? Are there negative implications of having alternate voices that come from such privileged positions?
In the case of disability, for example, the concept of universality of impairment denies the privileged position of experiences with disability. If everyone is to be considered ‘disabled’ then the lived-experiences of a non-normative body are ignored, and their minority status denied. Though a deaf individual my not have much in common with a woman with Spinal Cord Injury they each have specific ‘experience’ to contribute, not to say that one is more privileged than the other, but that they can contribute to a body of knowledge – if they choose to speak/write on it.
There seems to be a necessity to turn an ear, at one point or another, to some voice that is articulate about ‘experience.’ Because Steedman is writing, because she is self-reflexive and, as rightly stated by Robbie, expressing the non-masculine (atypical in academia) experiences of the working class – there is a necessity to see her knowledge as privileged. Like the disabled body as privileged over impairment. Though it would be ideal to have all voices acknowledged, Steedman’s lived-experience clearly brings something important to the table, even if it does not necessarily reflect all voices.
Sorry for the perpetually late post, all. I always think that I’ll somehow be able to formulate my thoughts better given more time. Ha!
ReplyDeleteScott exposes the humanist assumptions in various definitions and understandings of “experience,” since all variations assume the prior existence of the individual. She shows how these definitions actually function in a metaleptic manner, confusing effect with cause, and thus “establish[ing] the prior existence of individuals” (p. 782). Her hope for historians, then, is a change of focus whereby “the emergence of concepts and identities as historical events in need of explanation” become the objects of inquiry (p. 792). Importantly, “[t]his does not mean that one dismisses the effects of such concepts and identities” (p. 792); this does, however, mean that one recognizes them as effects rather than a priori foundations. The reason I felt the need to write that all out (things, I realize, that have already been handled wonderfully in this week’s blogs) is because I am grappling with how this method meshes with what Steedman is up to in her book, particularly as it materializes in a specific passage. When I first read Landscape, this section jumped out at me as deserving of a close reading: it begins at the very bottom of p. 121 and continues for the majority of the following page. It is the passage in which Steedman describes the role that the ration book played in her development, something that has required temporal distance to recognize. The child, asked directly about the trips to the store to redeem food vouchers, would not have seen the activity as identity-constituting. That’s not to say that she wouldn’t have had anything useful to say about herself; rather, it is to say that had a researcher collected her story of the time spent traveling to and fro the baby clinic to collect the OJ and Virol, and privileged the child’s story as The Truth and (to use courtroom jargon) submitted the experience into evidence, then the usefulness of the story is truncated. The concept of philanthropy that came into prominence in the 1950s remains about the government and how it helped its struggling citizens (with Steedman cast as a struggling citizen who perhaps achieves class consciousness through these acts), rather than about how such a concept actually functions. In the later interpretation, the experience is metaphor: the milk and school dinners are not a means to discovering class consciousness; they are her self-worth. The creation of subjectivity is then in line with rejecting the class politics that constituted (or made possible, or necessary) her conception in the first place. There’s much more to say on this, so I promise to think more about it before we meet this afternoon. Apologies again.