CONCLUSION A Grasinski Granddaughter
Appendix: Description of Research Methods
Illustrations
FIGURES
1. Caroline in front of her home, 1979
3. Nadine in front of her home, 1977
4. Angel in front of her home, 1967
5. Mary, Angel, and Gene at their home, 1952
6. The Grasinski Girls’ family tree
7. Gravestone in St. Stanislaus Cemetery, Hilliards, Michigan
8. Frances and Ladislaus, c. 1938
9. Helen and Joe on their wedding day, 1922
11. Mary, Angel, Fran, Gene, and Caroline, 1951
12. Fran and Albert Hrouda on their fiftieth wedding anniversary, 1998
14. Nadine, Joe, and Gene, 1949
15. Gene and Fran (holding Annette, Caroline’s daughter), 1947
16. Sister Nadine in her room at the convent, 1970
17. Nadine on her wedding day, 1975
18. Nadine and Marie Chantal, c. 1982
19. Nadine, Bob, and Marie Chantal at the opening of their winery, 1990
20. Final profession of vows for Sister Nadine, 1958
21. Angel, Jim, and daughter Mary in front of their home, 1967
22. The girls from Buzz’s Bar and Grill, 1954
23. Angel and Jim on their wedding day, 1956
24. Angel, Jim, and their six children, 1968
25. Mari during her college years, 1978
26. Mari and Raphael at the Chateau Chantal Winery, 1993
27. Nadine and Marie Chantal, 1980
28. Caroline in Florida, 1980
29. Caroline and Edmund in Macon, Georgia, 1943
30. Caroline, Edmund, and their three children, 1955
31. Angel and Nadine with their mother Helen, c. 1985
32. Nadine and Angel at Nadine’s home, 2001
MAPS
1. Development of the Polish corridor in Hilliards, Michigan, 1873–1935 34
2. Valley Avenue in the Sercowo neighborhood of Grand Rapids, Michigan, 1932 41
TABLE
1. Polish-American sisterhoods in the United States, 1957–1958 93
Series Editor’s Preface
HISTORIANS AND SOCIAL SCIENTISTS HAVE studied the male-dominated public side of Polish immigrant and ethnic life that took place in the churches and organizations, in the shops and the factories, on the picket line, and at the ballot box. But few studies have peered into the homes to examine the hidden, inner social world of white ethnic families and communities like those of Polish America and, more specifically, the private lives of the white ethnic women of modest, working-class backgrounds who lived therein.
Through extensive interviews and interactions with five Polish-American sisters—the author’s own aunts and mother—sociologist Mary Patrice Erdmans enters this secret yet signally important world to tell the story of a generation of women who, for the most part, have remained voiceless in both the ethnic and women’s history narratives. In The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made, Erdmans describes this world as seen through the women’s own eyes, a world of small victories, silent hurts, ordinary pleasures, and, above all, the triumph of survival. Their world, to be sure, was bounded by the structures and strictures of patriarchal relations with their father, their husbands, and their employers, but men remain mostly offstage in this volume. This is, instead, the story of five women and the personal engagement of one Polish-American daughter and sociologist with the lives of these women, who, perhaps without their knowing it, nurtured her own professional ambitions and feminist consciousness.
Professor Erdmans, associate professor of sociology at Central Connecticut State University, also is the author of Opposite Poles: Immigrants and Ethnics in Polish Chicago, 1976–1990. In The Grasinski Girls, Erdmans has written a unique and pathbreaking study of gender, ethnicity, and class that will enlighten scholars, students, and general readers interested in women’s studies, ethnic studies, and the Polish-American experience.
The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made is the fifth volume in the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series. The series revisits the historical and contemporary experience of one of America’s largest European ethnic groups and the history of a European homeland that has played a disproportionately important role in twentieth-century and contemporary world affairs. The series aims to publish innovative monographs and more general works that investigate under- or unexplored topics or themes that offer new, critical, revisionist, or comparative perspectives in the area of Polish and Polish-American Studies. Interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary in profile, the series seeks manuscripts on Polish immigration and ethnic communities, the country of origin, and its various peoples in history, anthropology, cultural studies, political economy, current politics, and related fields.
Publication of the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series