But the two genres diverge around viewpoint. Memoir is expressed in the first person, showing a particular life in a particular context. History is told in the third person, generalizing from many particular stories in an attempt to create a larger narrative about change over time. Emotion plays different roles in the writing of memoir and history. Memoir is generally understood as a highly personal rendering of the past, refracted through private experience, feelings, and relationships. History is usually grounded in public life, considered somehow objective and detached from emotion. But is memoir really entirely private and subjective and history completely public and detached? People live public and private lives, often intertwined. The distinction between the two realms is often overstated or artificial. Memoirists and historians till the same soil. So why would a historian steal the personal stories of others? It does not seem necessary. Not every historian does.
But I do.
I will try to explain what drove me to such a questionable activity by writing a brief memoir of myself as a historian—a task that is quite foreign to those of us trained in the methods and language of historical scholarship. First of all there is that troubling pronoun “I.” Most historians learn to bury the first person pronoun. I (yes, I) do not allow my students to use it. “Assert your argument,” I tell them, “history is not about your opinion.” It is not as though there is no author, or some vague royal “we” (I don’t allow that one, either). It is rather the presumed voice of authority, the distanced and objective expert whose words and interpretations need not be owned other than on the title page. The invisible “I” is something of a fiction—or rather a convention of writing historical scholarship. Of course, what historians do with the bits and pieces of the past they select and arrange is uniquely their own. If their work was not based on original ideas and analyses, it would not be considered scholarship. Their writings would simply be narratives of the past, which is not the same as history, just as a narrative of a life is not a memoir.
It began simply enough. I dove into history in the 1960s and 1970s, when historians were turning away from the study of leaders and other elites, of wars and battles, and discovering ordinary people as agents of history. This new social history, as we called it, reflected the turmoil in society as well as in my soul. Those who had been buried in earlier renditions of history suddenly surfaced. Women’s history, African American history, labor and immigration history, gay and lesbian history, Chicano and American Indian history, Asian American history—all began to develop as legitimate fields of historical inquiry. At the same time, areas of life and institutions that had previously been considered timeless, eternal, or outside of history opened up to historical investigation. Family, sexuality, gender, race—aspects of life once seen as unchanging or rooted in biological processes—came to be understood as historically constructed. The institution of the family had a history. Sex had a history. Historians began to discover new ways of understanding the past in which the distinction between the public and the private became blurred or even evaporated. Historians began to discover emotion.
The study of history came to embrace the lives and feelings of those previously ignored by historians: ordinary people, not those who have already made their mark. We would write “history from the bottom up.” The civil rights movement quickly generated a rich historical literature on African Americans. The feminist movement sparked an explosion in women’s history. It was an exciting, heady time to be entering the field.
There were, however, some major challenges, mostly having to do with sources. In truth, historians have often drawn on memoirs in their work. There is nothing new or nefarious about that. People write memoirs for the public record. Or they deposit their personal papers in archives, in order for those documents to be viewed and used—by historians or whoever might be interested. These are memoirs freely given. They do not need to be stolen. The problem is that the people who thus give their memoirs are usually members of the elite. These types of memoirs and papers generally do not help social historians write history from the bottom up, since these folks tend to be at the top, not the bottom. Finding memoirs of people who have not given them to the public requires some stealth.
I first learned the art of sleuthing for memoirs when I was in graduate school at UCLA. In a seminar taught by one of the social history pioneers, we were assigned to write a paper based on records of ordinary people. Our challenge was to bypass published works and the manuscript collections and libraries where papers of notable people were housed. Los Angeles was our archive. Each of us went out exploring the various nooks and crannies where records of ordinary people were collected.
I hit the streets. I took the freeway to downtown Los Angeles, struggled to find a cheap place to park, hiked several blocks to the Los Angeles County Archives. I spent a long and weary day looking at public records. Birth records contained quite a bit of information: mothers’ and fathers’ names, occupations, places of birth, nationality, race, age, and so forth. Death records also contained useful information about ordinary individuals. There were also documents that recorded property acquisition, business records, and all sorts of transactions. But these records had no stories, no real people, no emotion. Just numbers and bits of data. I imagined myself making charts with categories and checking off little boxes for hours on end. I would die of boredom before I could write one word of history—and what could I write without stories?
Then I discovered court records. To be precise, I discovered divorce records. There I found real stories, full of flesh and blood, full of drama. Feminism had drawn me to history. I knew that the personal was political. The issues that sparked my passion for history were grounded in feminist issues: women’s experiences and changing roles, the personal world of marriage and family, changing sexual norms and behaviors, changing leisure activities and consumer culture, the impact of the women’s rights movement—all of those issues were at the center of the struggles of dissolving marriages, and there they were in the public record. I had found my gold mine: a treasure trove of brief but exquisitely distilled memoirs.
Divorce court records, of course, are not memoirs in the strict sense of the word. They are mediated by lawyers and written for a particular purpose, different from that of the memoirist. But testimonies in divorce court have quite a bit in common with memoir. They are drawn from personal memory and filled with emotion. They are constructed from selected bits of past experience, connected to particular events in the couple’s married life, and put together to make a point: my spouse is guilty. In the years before no-fault divorce, there had to be a guilty party. Fortunately for me, California considered marital crimes such as “mental cruelty” as grounds for divorce. The records were thus often very detailed and open-ended. Stories of betrayal, disappointment, and anguish may well have been written for the public record, but they were not meant for the historian’s probing eyes. Parties to divorce cases hoped for a decision in their favor, and they expected that their depositions would be safely hidden away on some obscure shelf and never looked at again.
My research was focused on the Progressive Era, the years between 1880 and 1920, when the women’s rights movement gained momentum and women finally achieved the right to vote, when the “new woman” appeared on the urban scene to challenge the middle-class mores of the past, when sexual behavior was changing so rapidly that activities previously considered scandalous had become the norm. All of those issues came to life in these accounts of the trials and tribulations of divorcing couples, and the line between the private and the public crumbled. One minute I felt like a kid with my fingers in a cookie jar; the next minute I fancied myself a spy whose magnifying glass had just come across the hidden clue that would solve the mystery. I was filled with sheepish delight. Take the travails of the Linganfields, for example:
In the Superior Court of Los Angeles in 1920, Lorimer Linganfield, a respectable barber, filed for divorce. Although his w
ife, Marsha, held him in “high regard and esteem as her husband,” there were “evidences of indiscretion” in her conduct. She wore a new bathing suit, “designed especially for the purpose of exhibiting to the public the shape and form of her body.” To his further humiliation, she was “beset with a desire to sing and dance at cafes and restaurants for the entertainment of the public.” When Lorimer complained about her “appetite for beer and whisky” and extravagant tastes for luxury, she replied that he was “not the only pebble on the beach, she had a millionaire ‘guy’ who would buy her all the clothes, automobiles, diamonds and booze that she wanted.” The ultimate insult was her refusal to have sexual intercourse, claiming that she did not want any “dirty little brats around her.” The judge was sympathetic. Lorimer Linganfield won his suit—and Marsha won her freedom.1
Here was everything I wanted to uncover: changing gender roles, public and private morals, sexual behavior, reproductive patterns, and expectations for marriage. Poor Lorimer divorced Marsha for the same reasons he married her: she was a sexy flapper full of fun and excitement. To a fault, it turned out.
So I became a memoir thief and a historian at the same time. Although it seemed slightly underhanded to take the personal miseries of people of my grandparents’ generation and use them for the lofty goals of writing feminist history, I felt justified because I was writing history from the bottom up. The best I could do to assuage my guilt (was I now the guilty party?) was to treat these documents with sensitivity and respect—to use the substance without abusing it. I did not need to expose people’s real names, even though these were public records and doing so would break no law. To protect my subjects’ privacy, I used pseudonyms (and case record numbers for the purpose of citation), a practice I have held to ever since. I also needed to take these individuals on their own terms. This is an important aspect of writing history. Although we all write from the present, we must avoid the temptation to read the past through the present. Memoir writers face the same challenge. Memories, like historical documents, need to be situated and interpreted in their proper moment. We cannot escape the hindsight that comes with writing about the past—in fact, hindsight is essential. But we need to do our best to move our imaginations into the time frame of our subjects.
My sleuthing gave me what I needed for both the dissertation and the degree. As often happens with such adventures, it became somewhat habit forming. The Los Angeles divorce cases satisfied my curiosity about my hometown, but could I make a claim for a larger national story? After all, as skeptical questioners at job interviews insisted, Los Angeles is its own thing. Especially when it comes to matters of sex, love, marriage, consumer culture, and the like. Under the hot lights of interrogation at a job interview at Princeton University, when asked how I could claim much of anything on the basis of records of a bunch of deviant turn-of-the-century California misfits, I blurted out my confession: you are right. I promised that before my work landed between two hard covers, I would do some research in a more “normal” place. Reassured, they hired me, and I explored the divorce records of New Jersey. The stories were not so different, even on the farm:
Maude and Andrew Grossman married in 1917 and lived on Andrew’s parents’ farm until 1920 when Maude walked out. According to the state interviewer, Maude was “tired of living on the farm.” Andrew explained, “My wife frequently complained that she was dissatisfied to live [on] our farm. She was fond of moving pictures and wanted to go [to her hometown] most of her time, where things were more active.” Andrew’s father supported his son: “Andrew has lived on our farm since his wife deserted him. Andrew is a boy of good habits. He never uses liquor or tobacco. He is a church member and a good boy. He has always been industrious and works every day. He has always been a good worker. My farm is plentifully stocked and it could not be possible for anyone to live on my farm and not have plenty to eat.”
Plenty to eat was not enough to satisfy Maude’s cravings, so she took off for the bright lights of the city. This case and others demonstrated how changes in women’s roles, sexual mores, consumer tastes, job opportunities, and urban life ratcheted up the expectations for marriage, leading to higher levels of disappointment when those expectations were not met.
Having gathered a bundle of memoir-vignettes from New Jersey as well as Los Angeles, I wrote them up and sent them to my editor at the University of Chicago Press, who figured that if you averaged the East Coast and the West Coast you got the heartland and published my book.
But that was not the end of it. My habit was formed, and divorce records were no longer enough. I moved on to a bigger story, from my grandparents’ generation to that of my parents, and I did something even more brazen: I stole from another memoir thief.
It was one thing to figure out why the American divorce rate went from almost nothing in 1880 to the highest in the world by 1920. It was quite another to untangle the story of the baby boom after World War II. I found lots of great material in the usual public records and evidence from popular culture and the prescriptive literature. But I couldn’t find any real people behind the glittery celebration of family life in Cold War America. No emotion. So I began sleuthing again and found another unexpected cache of booty. Tucked away in the Henry Murray Center at Radcliffe College, next to the famed Schlesinger Library women’s history archives, was a glorious collection, the equivalent of a historian’s vintage store: gently used data from an earlier era. A social psychologist had made a longitudinal study of middle-class married couples who filled out lengthy, open-ended questionnaires from the late 1930s to the mid-1950s, revealing the intimate details of their lives. After publishing a few brief articles on psychological development in marriage, the initial collector had dropped his lovely material into the recycle bin. Score!
Some pieces of the data set were perfect, including questions on gender roles, household tasks, work experiences, consumer patterns, preferences for numbers of children and how those preferences changed over time, and consumer spending patterns. But the original investigator, true to his era, was not interested in the same questions that interested me. I was baffled that a detailed survey that included dozens of questions on sexual behavior did not ask one question about politics, not even what political party the informants joined, or even if they voted. Welcome to the 1950s. Nevertheless, the surveys revealed in richly textured detail how these couples interacted, lived, loved, and built their families in the years of the baby boom. They were not meant for my eyes. They were not even meant for each other’s eyes. Husbands and wives filled out the questionnaires alone and sent them to the investigator. Putting these surveys side by side, it was clear that some of these folks, although married to each other, were in different marriages.
In any case, I had my set of memoirs, history from the bottom up, filled with my substance of choice: emotion. If any group of Americans had access to the American dream after World War II, it was these affluent, white New England suburbanites. They taught me how much distance there was between the dream and the reality. Take the case of Maria and Norman Kimball, who married after breaking the rules of midcentury sexual propriety:
“I have concluded that my husband has deep emotional conventionality such that the attitudes our ‘free love’ experience fostered undermined his respect and admiration for me....I have been faithful, but doubt if he believes this.” Nevertheless, Maria claimed that her marriage gave her “the purely female pleasure of having a husband whose behavior is never an embarrassment, who never lets one down in public, never vents malicious humor, and whose ideas and attitudes rarely jar one’s own beliefs. In outside contacts, we work like a well-oiled team. It may be wryly amusing at times, but there’s some satisfaction in having acquaintances envy one’s apparent compatibility.” Using explicit cold-war terminology, she continued, “Each retreats from any sphere of influence in which the other develops an interest....I don’t suppose either of us is too satisfied with this noncooperative impa
sse, but it works. In fact, it works very well. So long as we maintain a state of breakdown in communication, we get along fine. Crazy, isn’t it? Yet these last few years I’ve come to believe that however irrational a human relationship may be, if it works, it’s valid.”2
The Kimballs’ marriage worked until the 1970s, when the feminist movement and changing attitudes toward divorce made it possible for them to give up the charade.
I swiped the Kimballs’ story, and hundreds more like it, and published my second book. I then turned to our nation’s obsession with reproduction (particularly Americans’ preoccupation with the procreative proclivities of other people). I began a book about reproductive outsiders: the childless. But much as I searched, I could not find any records anywhere that gave me insight into the experiences and feelings of the childless. Many pundits, professionals, and activists wrote about childlessness: infertility specialists, social workers, eugenicists, “childfree” advocates, environmentalists. But I was unable to find the stories of ordinary people who were childless by choice, chance, or even coercion. No stories, no emotion. Finally, hooked as I was, I had no choice but to persuade people to write memoirs for me. I didn’t really go about this under false pretenses; I used the typical author query placed in newspapers around the country. Tell me your stories of childlessness, I begged; I am writing a book, and I need the stories of real people. I promised I would not use real names. People responded. They got nothing in return except the satisfaction of expressing their feelings and experiences. Hundreds of rich, wonderful letters arrived in my mailbox. Nearly everyone who wrote to me assumed I was childless. The infertile expressed sadness for my pain. The “childfree” congratulated me on my good sense to be among them, the ones who resisted social pressure and lived happy, unencumbered lives. None suspected that I had three children. No matter—they volunteered what I needed for my story: the emotional as well as physical costs of being outside the normative pronatalist culture. Patricia Painter, for example, wrote of her struggle with infertility:
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