DEBORAH L. TIDWELL WITH PAMELA T. SCHWARTZ & JANET T. DUNN

FAMILIAL REALITY ENGENDERING FEMINISM: THE IMPACT OF A MATRIARCHAL UPBRINGING ON THINKING ABOUT TEACHING AND LEARNING

Much of the literature on feminist pedagogy confronts the hierarchical values within a patriarchal society and subsequent institutional settings (Bardsley, 2006; Bauer, 2009). Within this argument and through this lens of thinking about teaching and learning, the focus is often on providing females access and opportunity for the same experiences and engagement within the learning environment that their male counterparts are provided (Buchman, Diprete, & McDaniel, 2007; Lynch & Feeley, 2009). Research has examined the ways in which educators approach males and females and the dichotomy found within cultures and across institutional systems (Dee, 2007). In addition, the roles of females in the home and the work place have been a focus of research, both in terms of traditional frames and in changes that have occurred over time in response to cultural change (Buchman, Diprete, & McDaniel, 2007; US Department of Labor, 2011). Yet matriarchal systems embedded within the overarching patriarchal culture have functioned in concert and in contrast to the pervading cultural structures. In this chapter, we address this often overlooked and under-researched area through a self-study that uses our own lived experiences within our family’s matriarchal structure to examine the impact of matriarchy on ways of knowing and engaging. Matriarchy by definition is a complex term, as it reflects different meanings within research on matriarchal systems and of matriarchy as a cultural structure (Gatson, 2007). Earlier research on the dynamics of a matriarchy connect the phenomenon to motherhood and how motherhood is defined through the manner in which social systems are arranged for distribution of resources (Hoskins, 2005). Some define matriarchy as matrilineal in nature, connecting one’s heritage to female roots within the family/social community (Gough, 1961), or matrilocal where locations of families are determined by female location (Ember, 1974). Yet these two maternal connections are dismissed in some of the literature as not truly matriarchal as they do not represent political or economic power relations (Schneider, 1961). Engels ([1884] 1972) suggests that the materialistic nature of motherhood stems from the group marriage dynamic within early human societies where there was a lack of certainty of the paternal connection to the child. Thus lineage is more reliably connected to females and the matrilineal connections from generation to

M. Taylor and L. Coia (Eds.), Gender, Feminism, and Queer Theory in the Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices, 93–110. © 2014 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. D. L. TIDWELL, P. T. SCHWARTZ & J. T. DUNN generation. Engels finds that such matriarchal structures give power to women both politically and in economic terms, and sees matriarchy as an earlier cultural structure (mother right) which progresses toward patriarchy (father right) over time. Laquer (1992) takes a different view from Engels, arguing that matriarchy represents the material (child bearing), equating motherhood to a natural phenomenon whereas fatherhood/patriarchy reflects idea (factual) over matter (the body). In the mid- 1900s, matriarchal structures are described by some as a dysfunctional dynamic due to socio-economic hardship and disruption of the family (Frazier, 1968; Moynihan, 1965). This deficit view of matriarchy grew out of research on African American families in the United States where the growth in the number of single mother families of lower socio-economic status was declared both dysfunctional and destructive to the overall culture. These varying views on matriarchy are not mutually exclusive, in that a matriarchy may include several dynamics that support a matriarchal structure. Additionally, a social structure may not be solely a matriarchy or a patriarchy, but may fluctuate depending upon the context or may reflect neither. More recent research on matriarchy (Goettner-Abendroth, 2004, 2005) argues that matriarchy is not only an historical structure, but can also be found today in some cultures. While my sisters and I grew up in a macro culture in the United States during the mid-1950s through the 1970s that reflected an over-arching patriarchal system, our family culture was matriarchal in its structure. In defining our family as a matriarchy, we borrowed from different aspects of the diverse range of characterizations in the literature for matriarchy to describe how our family culture functioned. In our home the senior female held a position of high regard and deference, where economic and political (family) decisions were strongly influenced by her input. Using both personal history and family mythology as realized through story telling, this chapter examines the norms, values and experiences within a matriarchal upbringing that may have influenced our understanding of the world around us and, more specifically, my thinking and actions as an educator. The use of personal history and narratives is not new as a method for self-study of practice (Bullough, 1994; Kitchen, 2009). What makes this self-study unique, however, are the processes in which my critical friends (my sisters) and I engaged in collaboratively creating scenarios through storytelling, and in examining those scenarios through the lens of our family matriarchy. Our focus was on understanding how our family matriarchy impacted our life experiences and our understandings about the world around us. As explained in the following section, the initial examination of my key personal history scenarios expanded into collaborative storytelling that resulted in multiple scenarios. Our use of collaborative personal history narratives closely resembled the process of collaborative autobiography (Lapadat, Black, Clark, Gremm, Karanja, Mieke, & Quinlan, 2010). Our collective understandings helped me as an educator in connecting my personal history to my professional work. The organization of this chapter represents that process of unfolding scenarios inherent in our methodology. The context of the self-study

94