ABSTRACT

Conducting the interviews for this book was, in different ways, terrifying, frustrating, challenging, and joyous (not necessarily in that order, either temporally or quantitatively!). The terror came in large part from the fact that interviewing required of me a confrontation with my own personality and cultural training. For interviewing requires one to go out and ask personal questions of strangers and, even before that, to approach unknown people, either in person or by telephone, and ask them for an enormous favor-to give time, and to share personal history, for the most part taking entirely on trust that their time and, more importantly, their words will be treated with respect. The frustration and the challenge came from the special difficulties involved in interviewing white women on what for many of them was, in ways I will explore later, a “taboo” topic that generated areas of memory lapse, silence, shame, and evasion. The joy came from listening, talking, and reveling in the singularity of the women’s stories, accents, turns of phrase. It would be patently untrue to suggest that I “agreed” or identified equally with each woman’s perspective on society, or with how each articulated the issues of race, culture, and whiteness with which I was preoccupied. Nonetheless, in the context of the interviews themselves, I worked to comprehend the logic of their lives and the words with which they described them.