White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness

Appendix: The Women Who Were Interviewed

Appendix The Women Who Were Interviewed The interviews took place between October 1984 and February 1987. The names used here are pseudonyms. Where appropriate to preserving confidentiality, names of towns have been omitted and personal details have been changed. The names of large cities, however, have been retained. In addition to background infor­ mation, I note how I met each woman and what I knew about her at the start of the interview. As I stated in chapter 2, I adopted a "purposive" rather than a random strategy for gathering interviews. The diversity of the whole group in terms of age, class, and region was monitored consciously through the two­year period of the research. Further, I divided the interviews into three subgroups: white women who, I imagined, might be more than usually conscious of gender as a system of domination; white women whom I knew to be more than usually connected to communities of color (and thus possibly more conscious of racial domination); and white women about whom I had no preconceptions other than their gender and race. (Clearly, groups one and two overlapped at times. Moreover, some of the women in the third group turned out to be either gender conscious or race conscious. Interviewees' names, year of birth, and date of first interview, in order of age: Lisbeth Poirer (1967) 5/1/86 Lucy Fredricks (1967) 7/14/86 Cathy Thomas (I960) 2/10/85 Marty Douglass (1959) 5/12/86 Patricia Bowen (1958) 10/20/84 Tamara Green (1958) 10/18/84 Louise Glebocki (1958) 3/21/86 Beth Ellison (1955) 4/11/85 Chris Patterson (1954) 10/30/85 245 246 APPENDIX Sharon Ellison (1954) 10/12/85 Clare Traverse (1954) 6/15/85 Jeanine Cohen (1953) 10/4/84 Suzie Roberts (1953) 10/31/86 Helen Standish (1950) 2/22/86 Sandy Alvarez (1949) 7/25/85 Debby Rothman (1949) 9/25/85 Donna Gonzaga (1946) 5/12/86 Frieda Kazen (1945) 8/8/85 Eve Schraeger (1944) 11/13/85 Dot Humphrey (1942) 11/18/85 Margaret Phillips (1940) 10/16/85 Alison Honan (1936) 7/22/86 Joan Van Buren (1931) 6/5/86 Ginny Rodd (1930) 4/14/86 Evelyn Steinman (1930) 7/1/86 Irene Esterley (1926?)* 5/13/86 Joan Bracknell (1912) 7/10/86 Marjorie Hoffman (1905) 9/24/85 Hilda Perlman (1903) 2/14/86 Dora Hauser (1900) 2/21/86 *Declined to give age Lisbeth Poirer (1967) 5/1/86 Lisbeth Poirer (Lisbeth told me she had changed her name after leaving home) grew up on the East Coast: Philadelphia, New York, Long Island, and Maine. She began life in upper middle class neighborhoods. After her parents' divorce, when Lisbeth was seven, she, her mother, and her brother moved frequently within working­class neighborhoods. At about fourteen, Lisbeth ran away from her mother and moved in with her father, which meant that, once again, her environment was upper middle class. Her anger and pain about her childhood were palpable: the last hour of the interview tape was barely audible, as Lisbeth's depres­ sion overwhelmed her and her voice was reduced to a murmur. After high school, Lisbeth had traveled for several months in Europe and had returned to the United States and settled in San Francisco less than four months before the interview. She was working as a telephone fund­raiser for an ecology action group APPENDIX 247 and living with a group of white men and women in a rundown apartment in a poor, racially mixed section of San Francisco. I met Lisbeth in San Francisco when we both volunteered to take part in a door­to­door fund­raiser for children in Central America. As her designated canvasing partner, I was shocked by the apparent contradiction between her volunteer activity and her casually neg­ ative remarks about Latino men. As a result, I requested to inter­ view her. Lucy Fredricks (1967) 7/14/86 Lucy grew up in the Pacific northwest in a Seattle suburb—an island joined to the city by a causeway. Her parents, while middle­class in origin, were poor, having chosen to "drop out" of the career structure. Lucy and her siblings helped their father sup­ port the family by painting houses, and Lucy learned many art and craft skills at a young age. While she was growing up, Lucy's social environment was white except for...