One of the most interesting autobiographies I've read is Carolyn K. Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman (Rutgers University Press, 1987). Steedman notes that notions about what is gender-appropriate behavior in parents obscure the dominant stories of "ordinary" childhoods, rendering them invisible and unspeakable. She tells the stories of her mother's childhood and the stories that made such a mark on her mother that they deeply influenced her own childhood:
[S]he shaped my childhood by the stories she carried from her own, and from an earlier family history. They were stories designed to show me the terrible unfairness of things, the subterranean culture of longing for that which one can never have. These stories can be used now to show my mother's dogged search, using what politics came to hand, for a public form to embody such longing.
Steedman characterizes her book as being "about how people use the past to tell stories of their life." Interestingly, she emphasizes the importance of certain stories in enflaming her mother's "longing" and "envy" for "the things of this world."
My mother's longing shaped my own childhood. From a Lancashire mill town and a working-class twenties childhood she came away wanting: fine clothes, glamour, money; to be what she wasn't. However that longing was produced in her distant childhood, what she actually wanted were real things, real entities, things she materially lacked, things that a culture and a social system withheld from her. The story she told was about this wanting, and it remained a resolutely social story. When the world didn't deliver the goods, she held the world to blame. In this way, the story she told was a form of political analysis, that allows a political interpretation to made of her life.
One of the stories Steedman describes as important to working class girls dreaming of escape are the fairy tales that "tell you that goose-girls may marry kings." Such stories fueled her mother's wanting, "a sad and secret story, but it isn't just hers alone." The stories her mother tells her, however, are the stories of "getting by," of having to work and scrape for everything one does get, of desire thwarted. "But out of that tradition," Steedman observes, "I can make the dislocation that the irony actually permits, and say: `If no one will write my story, then I shall have to go out and write it myself.' " Steedman makes it easy to see why the two stories that advertisements endlessly and repeatedly tell are the most important propaganda tool maintaining capitalism's domination of the world economy. What is not so easy is to understand why these stories are considered to be too banal to be taken seriously in accounts of our social and political reality.

back to essay