WOMENS FOLKLORE, WOMENS CULTURE
Publications of the American Folklore Society
New Series
General Editor, Marta Weigle
Volume 8
WOMENS
FOLKLORE,
WOMENS
CULTURE
Edited by
ROSAN A. JORDAN SUSAN J. KALIK
from the poem by Anne Sexton entitled Cinderella is from Transformations by Anne Sexton. Copyright1971 by Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
The photographs in by Karen Baldwin.
Copyright 1985 by the University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Main entry under title:
Womens folklore, womens culture.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. WomenFolkloreAddresses, essays, lectures. 2. WomenUnited StatesFolkloreAddresses, essays, lectures. I. Jordan, R. A. (Rosan A.) II. Kalik, Susan J.
GR470.W661985398.08804284-12019
ISBN 0-8122-1206-1
Printed in the United States of America
6th paperback printing 1996
To Linda Dgh, Bess Hawes, and Ellen Stekert
CONTENTS
1. Dial a Story, Dial an Audience:
Two Rural Women Narrators in an Urban Setting
LINDA DGH
2. The Vaginal Serpent and Other Themes
from Mexican-American Womens Lore
ROSAN A. JORDAN
MARGARET R. YOCOM
4. The Kinship Quilt: An Ethnographic Semiotic
Analysis of a Quilting Bee
SUSAN ROACH
5. Its a Sin to Waste a Rag: Rug-Weaving
in Western Maryland
GERALDINE NIVA JOHNSON
6. Womens Handles and the Performance
of Identity in the CB Community
SUSAN J. KALIK
7. Belle Gunness, the Lady Bluebeard:
Narrative Use of a Deviant Woman
JANET L. LANGLOIS
8. The Misuses of Enchantment:
Controversies on the Significance of Fairy Tales
KAY F. STONE
KAREN BALDWIN
CAROL MITCHELL
11. Sex Role Reversals, Sex Changes, and Transvestite Disguise
in the Oral Tradition of a Conservative Muslim
Community in Afghanistan
MARGARET MILLS
ELAINE JAHNER
UNTIL RECENTLY, folklorists have concentrated their efforts on performances that are characteristically male-oriented in that they are highly individualistic or competitive and take place in public or formalized arenasthe pub, the street cornerwhile ignoring folklore that is more collaborative and enacted in the privacy of the domestic sphere or as part of ordinary conversation. Consequently, such genres as personal experience narratives, popular beliefs, and various kinds of humor have often been dismissed as minor genres or, less formally, old wives tales or just gossip. In other words, genres and performance contexts that are especially characteristic of men have most interested folklorists as worthy of study, while folklore that flourishes within the private domain of women has been underrated and ignored. One term for this sort of bias is sexism, defined by Bernard (1971:37) as the unquestioned, unexamined, and unchallenged acceptance of the belief that the world as it looked to men was the only world, that the way of dealing with it that men had created was the only way, that the values men had evolved were the only ones....
This volume has been assembled in an attempt to help change this lopsided orientation in folklore scholarship by giving attention to women performers and womens genres, which need to be examined along with the more frequently studied, often more public, forms of folklore used extensively by men. In looking at womens folklore, however, we are finding that our studies also yield new insights into the realm of mens folklore and into the ways in which the two domains affect each otherwhether the relationship be one of contrast or one of complementarity.
Rosaldo and Lamphere argue that anthropologists in writing about human culture have followed our own cultures ideological bias in treating women as relatively invisible and describing what are largely the activities and interests of men, and they point to the resultant dearth of ethnographies taking the womens perspective (1974:12). Murphy and Murphy point out that the bias of the anthropologist fits the bias of the male informant, who also sees the world in male terms (1974:209). And Ardener argues that until recently anthropologists have felt quite comfortable in writing an ethnography based mainly or entirely on what male informants have told them, because
those trained in ethnography evidently have a bias towards the kinds of models that men are ready to provide (or to concur in) rather than towards any that women might provide. If the men appear articulate compared with the women, it is a case of like speaking to like. To pursue the logic where it leads us: if ethnographers (male and female) want only what the men can give, I suggest it is because the men consistently tend, when pressed, to give a bounded model of society such as ethnographers are attracted to. But the awareness that women appear as lay figures in the mens drama... is always dimly present in the ethnographers mind. (1972:136137)
Farrer (1975a, 1975b) and Weigle (1978), in their introductions to collections of essays about womens lore, have already pointed to the same bias in the discipline of folklore. The gender of the folklore fieldworker influences what he or she looks for; it affects his or her relationship with informants, and what he or she is ready and able to see and hear and understand as important. Ethnocentric or sexist preconceptions about appropriate gender roles have limited the lines of inquiry pursued by folklore fieldworkers studying groups with gender assignments different from those the investigator has learned to consider usual. For example, Abrahams (1976) has related how his own culturally determined expectations about gender and cooking caused him to overlook for a while an important aspect of West Indian culture having to do with both male and female involvement with foodways, an area of inquiry which eventually proved extremely useful to him. This kind of bias, and the fact that until recently most fieldworkers were male and did not have free access to womens culture, have naturally affected folklore research and fieldwork, in its conceptualization, in its application, and in the interpretation of data. In general, this male orientation has meant that womens expressive culture is ignored or viewed as insignificant and limited. Farrer (1975a) points out that womens folklore genres have been accorded attention only if they fit the prevailing image of women, that data has been collected from female informants on a very limited range of subjects, and that folklore theories and models are based on half (the male half) of the relevant data.
Usually in Western societies it is the male genres that have been used to define the recognized universe of artistic expression within a group. These recognized, usually male, genres assume the status of legitimate folklore genres. Female expressive forms either fit the male mold or they are relegated to a non-legitimate, less-than-expressive category. (Farrer 1975a:xvxvi)
