Bibliographical Interview

Bibliographical Interview

Introduction

“Courage is the Price that Life Extracts for Granting Peace with Yourself”, these are the words of Amelia Earhart, one of the world's most celebrated aviators, and American woman who broke records and charted new waters. In my life one such woman is my grandmother Angeline Jackson. She is the most courageous and successful ladies I have ever come across in my life. I conducted a bibliographical interview of my great grandmother and this paper will highlight the major aspects of her life.

Discussion

She is the most influential and precious person in my life, Angeline Jackson was born on 8th March, 1947, in Arlington, Virginia, to housewife Stella Jackson and news editor and public marketing executive John Jackson. While her mother was Jewish, she was raised Presbyterian. She was the only daughter of her parents and therefore got lots of attention from them. She was a brilliant student right from the start of her schooling; she was a product of Virginia public schools and graduated in 1969 with a bachelor's in Sociology from the University of Virginia. She won a gold medal in her masters in Sociology from the University of Virginia. Afterward, Angeline pursued a career in sociology with an entry-level position as an assistant sociologist. Later she moved to Washington where she started her career in a full-fledged mode.

Angeline Jackson turned out to be one of the most renowned and successful sociologist in the United States whose research focused on gender relations, motherhood, economic rationalism, welfare reform, individualism, and young collegiate women's sexuality. Since her first major academic work, The Contradictions of Culture in Motherhood, she demonstrated an interest in the conflicting ideologies of femininity and individualism; specifically, the opposition between self-sacrifice and self-interest. This contradiction is brought into sharp relief in the contemporary culture of motherhood, with its emphasis on loving devotion at the expense of women's individual gain.

Angeline was interested in the problems she identified as the unfinished business of feminism, including the unintended consequences of feminism's achievements. She examined how the new freedoms ushered in by second wave feminism have generated conflict and contestation at both the cultural and individual level, with women typically moving between contradictory spheres (home and work) and contradictory modes of self (worker and mother, sexualized glamour girl and student).

Angeline's first book, The Contradictions of Culture in Motherhood, set out to explore the peculiarities of contemporary mothering. Her research encompassed three main sites: historical and cross-cultural accounts of motherhood; dominant child-rearing manuals and semi-structured interviews with 40 mothers in Unites States of America of mixed class and race backgrounds. Analyzing these different texts, Angeline traced the emergence of the ideology termed intensive mothering. This ideology stipulates that mothers invest large amounts of time, money, energy, and effort into child rearing at the expense of themselves. She found intensive mothering to be dominant across all race and class groups in her study. Moreover, she generalized that intensive mothering is a characteristic feature of contemporary Western societies.

Methodologically, Angeline adopted a disinterested, outsider perspective ...