“It might be hard to understand why I’m fascinated by my first, and only, rage if you don’t know me. Basically, I’m a nice yes girl and I want you to like me. Yes, I’d be happy to chair that committee; yes, I’d be happy to watch your kids this weekend; yes, I’d be happy to read and edit the young adult fantasy novel your friend wants to self-publish. I’m considerate and polite. I write prompt and personal thank-you notes, bring you dinner when you’re sick or grieving or stressed or have a new baby, and ask after every living relative you’ve ever mentioned. At Christmas, I make 150 dozen cookies – twelve or fifteen different types – for my annual cookie party and to give away to family, friends, and everyone from clerical support staff to my dental hygienist.

     I also avoid conflict, try to mediate confrontation, and wince when people start shouting (or even raising their voices). That’s not to say that I don’t get angry. I get plenty angry, but I keep quiet about it. I stew and then come home and vent, letting fly all the nasty things I wish I’d said. Or, if I’m already at home when I get angry, I’ll go out to do all that. Either way, the person who inspired my anger rarely, if ever, knows. But, I don’t just tamp down my own anger. I also go out of my way to try to prevent other people from getting angry (and, yes, I’m sure there’s some sort of classic psychological explanation involving my childhood, but that’s not relevant here).

     Now, perhaps, you can imagine the shock of my first rage.” (57)

“This is an origin story, a feminist story, a family story, my story, my compass. It is a story of stories told to me, around me, about me. Family stories about family members—mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, me. I don’t know whether these stories are true in the conventional sense, but I do know that they are part of the truth that has scripted me, the truth by which I write myself, the truth that somehow inspires the work I do now.

     Family lines, storylines, tenure lines. All of them borderlines of sorts, demarcations of the self even if the lines that might distinguish family from story from work and research cross and cross again. They are lines that point to a question—What inspires a girl to feminist scholarship?—and then bend around to suggest an answer, an answer caught in the interstices of family stories about girls and women, an answer worked out in the inner musings of a little girl and later a young woman, an adult woman, a daughter, a granddaughter, a sister, a niece as she tries to understand, interpret, make sense of all these stories of herself, of other girls, other women, family stories that will surely tell her how to be and what to be if only she can reconcile all of them.

     In the end, I think both the question (why feminist scholarship) and the answer (this set of family stories) are about my relationship to feminism, not folklore. How folklore became my academic identification, why it became my disciplinary training needs little explanation: It’s the stories. Always the stories. Folklorists, myself included, range far beyond narrative, but I know for certain it’s the stories that led me to folklore. Fairy tales, folk tales, fables. Personal narratives, historical legends, memorates. Beyond my research, they are my mode of communication, my way of remembering, of knowing, you, me, others, everyone.” (19-20)