Aunting: Cultural Practices That Sustain Family and Community Life

5 Mentoring and Modeling

125 5 Mentoring and Modeling [My aunt] has been one of my greatest role models. Her work has taken her to many exciting places, and she is now the CEO of a non profit [sic] charity that offers services to families and children. She has accomplished so much in her life . . . and she has set a great example for women. She has succeeded in business without conforming to any of the gendered workplace stereotypes. (22-year-old, European American niece) Mentors and role models are figures of guidance and wisdom who speak of and for the implicit expectations, responsibilities, and opportunities that a novice needs to know in choosing and following a particular path. Our participants offered many stories of aunts who provided critical models, life lessons, and mentorship for them throughout their lives. These stories point to the aunt as a significant resource in family life and often an important influence in the lives of their nieces and nephews. The prevalence of the aunt as a role model or mentor in participants ’ stories suggests that aunts may implicitly or explicitly teach lessons beyond those learned from parents, friends, or teachers. However, the portraits our participants shared of aunts as role models or mentors were complicated. As we shall see, nieces and nephews both applauded and criticized their aunts for following 126 AUNTING traditional expectations about women’s roles and place; they both celebrated their aunts for being independent or defiant and denigrated them for being deviant or willful in pursuing alternative life paths. We argue in this chapter that the life variations that aunts model can either reinforce or expand on a niece’s or nephew’s perceptions of what women can do and be. Further, the differences among aunts and other female family figures—particularly mothers and grandmothers —offer lived lessons in variations on femininity within a family and in the culture at large. Whether or not the aunt’s choices are approved of, she still offers a model of what else is possible. In this sense, we contend that aunts model variations in femininity and multiple possibilities for women’s life choices. Significantly, our participants’ stories about their aunts as role models or mentors often turned out to be stories about their own life journeys and choices. Clearly, telling us stories about their aunts provided our participants with opportunities to tell us about themselves.1 Because the aunt is a family relationship, her story is part of a niece’s or nephew’s family story already. But when the story is about the aunt as a model or mentor, the story becomes focused on the niece or nephew against the background of the family story that encompasses both of them. We have already observed that young adult nieces and nephews seem to know their aunts largely in terms of their own interests and experiences. This is even more the case when the stories characterize the aunt as a role model or mentor. The focus is on the niece’s or nephew’s life and the way the aunt shaped particular understandings or choices, whether intentionally or not. We argue that the stories that nieces and nephews tell about life lessons they have learned from their aunts are stories about their own lives.2 Role Modeling Many stories of aunts as role models portrayed aunts as either positive or negative models, usually based on whether or not the aunt had taken or resisted traditional feminine life paths. The stories ranged from accolades to cautionary tales and often featured stereotypically feminine characterizations of aunt figures, from the beneficent nurturer to the oppressed victim. We begin with those stories that feature MENTORING AND MODELING 127 aunts who are lauded for modeling traditional or proper behavior for wives and mothers. Participants reported that they looked to their aunts as models of proper social behavior, religious devotion, motherhood, or career success. Next, we discuss stories about aunts who did not conform to traditional expectations of femininity or female behavior; these aunts provided models of eccentricities and lessons—positive and negative—about deviating from expected feminine identities. Other aunts were cast in stories as victims—as subjects of oppressive gender roles. Finally, aunts were sometimes models of the disastrous consequences of poor life choices; their stories were told by nieces and nephews as cautionary tales of what not to do. We conclude this section by considering stories that compare and contrast...