A Widow and a Questionable Autoethnographer

Introduction

Can we share our experiences and write something that is more than narcissistic or cathartic? This question has been triggered by my experience writing a journal paper which was rejected and not published. In the paper, I considered my experiences of being widowed with two young children using my memory of key incidents. I had never written about becoming a widow and had resisted this label. However, a subsequent experience with a new census form, which gave me no choice but to describe myself as a widow, triggered my desire to explore this status. Some two decades separated the census form and the death of my husband. The incidents used to reflect on my forced adoption of this imposed label occurred in the five years after his death. Reflecting on my memory of key incidents was an attempt to share the representational shifts that occur when you evolve into something else in the eyes of others. As a widow you become either someone to avoid or someone to pity. I framed the paper through a feminist lens and argued that sharing the personal and considering it in relation to theory was a political act. Butler’s (2020) notion of the precarious subject was used to understand how spousal loss can redefine women in unforeseen and negative ways.

One of the reviewers states;

This autoethnographic exploration of the author’s own widowhood discusses a much-neglected topic that is of great importance to feminist theory and gender studies more widely. It is structurally sound, addresses a very relevant set of themes through a methodology that serves to reveal the intricacies of the author’s experiences.

Overall, I would love to see this piece published as it makes an important and original contribution to feminist theory, gender studies, and to our contemporary understanding of western widowhood. But the author will need to situate each part of the article much more clearly in existing research that goes beyond autoethnography and single parenting.

The second reviewer states;

My main concern is that the self-experience analyzed refers to an experience experienced about twenty years ago. . ..As such the thesis presented is perhaps relevant to the social atmosphere of several decades ago. This social atmosphere might or might not be relevant for today. The autoethnography findings presented here cannot determine its relevance for today. However, this could be resolved by interviewing young widows recently widowed using a qualitative methodology and comparing their recent experiences with the author’s experience.

These comments led me to conclude that these reviewers found my understanding of autoethnography problematic. Hence my question at the beginning of this paper. How do we conduct autoethnography and how do various scholars understand the process? For the first reviewer, personal experience needs to be embedded in literature related to the topic, regardless of whether this literature sits within the author’s frame of reference. I was directed to read in the fields of grief counseling and memoir writing. The second reviewer suggested more research with similar others as a way of ascertaining whether my experiences were contemporaneous. It is acknowledged, including by one of the reviewers that there is scant academic literature on young widows, especially those with children (Anderson et al. 2023; Jones et al. 2019). Feminist analysis of widowhood is even more limited. Thus, my first question is how do we expand a neglected area of research without taking some methodological risks? This is a particularly pertinent question when the topic is difficult to explore because of its emotional nature. My second question is about the memory of personal experience. I am reluctant to accept that we cannot learn anything from experiences that happened a long time ago unless these are discussed in relation to corresponding contemporary experiences. Ellis (1999) refers to “heartful autoethnography” and suggests that memories are like “making retrospective fieldnotes on your life” (675). Why can’t my “heartful memories” speak to our present or our future?

Others have considered their experiences nudging the boundaries of what is deemed to be acceptable autoethnography with reference to rejected journal papers (Sparkes 2000). The review process is by its nature a form of gatekeeping and as such tells us of expected standards. There is a tension between gatekeeping and exploring new or different ways of researching that is evident in debates about autoethnography. These debates will be discussed elsewhere in the paper. I wish to revisit my original writing about the incidents that triggered in me clearer understandings about what it means to be labeled a widow. I do this with two aims. Firstly, I wish to bring my experience to light as a type of feminist intervention, a way of redirecting attention away from common understandings, into deeper considerations of the impact of being labeled a widow. Secondly, I wish to engage with a methodological debate about autoethnography. These aims are interwoven because I would like to explore whether some topics may prompt methodological risks, for example, those not commonly researched or those which are deeply emotional. Do such topics warrant different definitions of “acceptable” research?

Situating Myself

My husband died unexpectedly over twenty years ago when my two children were seven and five years old respectively. I worked full-time at a university where I taught subjects related to gender, cultural difference, and methodology. My husband and I both worked and had been sharing child-rearing responsibilities. After his sudden death, I continued to work full-time as my family relied solely on my income. My work context did not alter but attitudes toward me did. Similarly, within my friendship circle and neighborhood, people I had known for years changed the terms of our engagement. This was a difficult time and I found managing my children’s grief through my own, deeply challenging. There was a new financial burden which meant paying for childcare was very limited.

I have a Greek background and in Australia (and perhaps elsewhere) what it means to be Greek in the diaspora is often stereotyped. Melbourne, where I live has a significant Greek population, most of whom migrated in the 1960s. Commonly people in my age-group, were either born in Australia or migrated as young children. Greek migrants fled post-war trauma and poverty, enticed by work and an opportunity for a better life, especially for their children. Australia had traditionally welcomed British migrants and those from southern Europe encountered suspicion and racism due to the perception that they were incompatible with the Australian way of life. This perceived incompatibility was attributed variously to appearance, language, religion, lack of facility with modern urban lifestyles, and adherence to traditions unfamiliar within mainstream Australia. The residual effects of this racism have lingered (Hage 2000).

Representations of the Widow

In western society the widow has been historically surrounded by certain expectations of dress and behavior. This was particularly pronounced in Britain during the Victorian era when the queen’s mourning became emblematic of more general expectations of widows. Rites such as the wearing of black and refraining from socializing for long periods were a means of disciplining and protecting the woman in the absence of a husband. She was characterized as simultaneously vulnerable and impetuous. By contrast, widowers simply reverted to being bachelors. Subsequently, the role of women has changed and the strict moral and social codes surrounding widows have dissipated. Nonetheless, the widow continues to be viewed differently to the widower.

Gilbert (2007) traces the etymology of “widow” and its link to emptiness and lacking. She has “dissolved into a void, a state of lack or non-being that is akin to, if not part of, the state into which the dead person has journeyed, fallen, or been drawn” (25). The widow rather than the widower enters an empty state on the death of the spouse because it is women who are traditionally and legally bound to their husband—marriage as “civil death” (27). Gilbert argues that unlike widowers whose grief is expressed through public eulogies or ceremonial elegies, women’s grief is personal and linked to the deceased in very direct ways. Perhaps also, women are closer to death because they are closer to life through birthing. There is an ambiguity that surrounds the figure of the widow, one that acknowledges her vulnerability but also a form of power that can destabilize taken-for-granted social mores. Mitchell (2013) describes how Victorian widows were expected to adhere to strict codes of behavior and dress. Yet they were sexually experienced, and many middle-class widows were economically independent and in control of their destiny, which was unusual at the time for women. Mitchell attributes these qualities, linked as they were with the wearing of black, to the modern status of the “little black dress” as an alluring item of clothing.

The place of the widow needs to be considered in the context of unequal gender relations and how these have shaped women’s role in the family. Barnaby (1997) argues that widows, widowers, and orphans are the only statuses defined by death. However, it is the widow who has historically garnered most symbolic attention, illustrated through expressions such as the black widow spider. She states, “that the widow represents not only the death of the husband through the institution of marriage, but the termination of that most potent symbol, the regeneration of the male ‘seed’, the most fundamental transcendence of mortality by biology” (131). Thus, the loss of a husband has more symbolic worth relative to the loss of a wife.

Widows are commonly older women who no longer have responsibility for young children. Young women rearing children on their own are usually single mothers (Anderson et al. 2023; Sands et al. 1989). Single mothers can be those who choose to have children on their own. They can be women whose partners or husbands have abandoned the family. They can be divorcees whose husbands provide varying amounts of support. And they can also be young widows. Single mothers often remain undifferentiated and surrounded by opprobrium, regardless of the reason they rear children on their own. They can be seen as having loose morals or as prompting a man to leave through their mismanagement of the relationship. Women who bring up children on their own are surrounded by discourses that intimate they are welfare cheats and that their children are considered prone to illness and failure (Lipman et al. 2002). Their children are assumed to be worse off. Most single parent families are headed by mothers whose earning capacities are unlikely to match those of men. Female-headed families are some of the most financially deprived (Sebastian and Ziv 2019; Stack and Meredith 2018). This may also be the case for widows, not all of whom are provided with financial support through the estate of their deceased spouse. It may not follow, however that the children are deprived in every way. Because of the value attached to the nuclear family, there is more scrutiny of families that are outside what is assumed to be an ideal type. This, despite the evidence that women and children suffer abuse and die at the hands of intimate partners and fathers (Phillips and Vandenbroek 2014). Even those who may be expected to support sole mothers, can be paternalistic and punitive. In Australia, for example, the only female prime minister, and the only one who identified with feminism publicly, instigated cuts to the single parent pension. The cuts were argued as a means of getting single mothers back to study or work (Chan 2013). The Prime Minister described the changes as “tough love,” a description that invoked a sense that single mothers were “naughty children” in need of discipline.

Young widows with children face many challenges. These include new financial burdens (Liu et al. 2020; Stack and Meredith 2018); shifts in relationships with family and friends (Megan 2019). Widows can become socially isolated because previous friendship circles find them threatening or remind them of potential loss (Adena et al. 2023; Jones et al. 2019). Sole parenting is more difficult and is exacerbated by the simultaneous management of children’s grief as well as the widow’s own grief (Anderson et al. 2023). Young widows can also feel isolated because few share their lived experiences. Being widowed early can create dramatic shifts in the way others see you and consequently, the way you see yourself (Chentsova Dutton and Zisook 2005). It is a personal upheaval that redirects you from the life you planned to a new life you are forced to deal with.

Below I describe several key incidents that illustrate what triggered in me, the most awareness of how my husband’s death had reshaped me in people’s eyes, and what this said about the way I had been seen prior to his death. Feminist autoethnography uses personal experience as a means of challenging inequality. Here I wish to explore how widowhood makes more evident women’s status as “lesser than” despite their situation requiring of them more resilience, independence, and determination. Ettorre (2016) explores what characterizes feminist autoethnography. She argues that while autobiography and autoethnography have in common the central place of “I,” the latter situates the “I” in a cultural context and by doing so remains intrinsically political, unlike autobiography, which may or may not be political. She concludes that feminist autoethnography creates transitional or “in between” spaces of embodied emotions; it restates the personal as political; it commits to women’s future lives and “helps to raise oppositional consciousness by exposing precarity” (4). I use the notion of precarity to contextualize my methodology and to understand my experiences. Ettlinger (2004) contends that precarity is as significant at a micro-level as it is at a macro-level where it has become more obvious through acts such as those surrounding the events of 11 September 2001 in the United States. She argues that recognizing emotions as these occur within spaces such as the home or workplace is an important way of challenging the more common Cartesian logic that divides feelings and rationality. Instead, she argues that thoughts and feelings are interactive. They are responsive to time and space but are continuous because people carry them with them as they move through the various contexts of their lives. Not recognizing the importance of thoughts and feelings is missing an opportunity for change. How work makes us feel, for example, is likely to affect a range of economic issues (Ettlinger 2004). Ettlinger (2007) contends that precarity “inhabits the microspaces of daily life” (324). By exposing the thinking and feeling that inhabits these microspaces autoethnography exposes the everydayness of precarity and allows us to recognize how our experiences may be intersecting with those of others. I am particularly interested to explore precarity and its link to oppositional consciousness through the microspaces of my life. It is most apt here where the focus is on the impact of a sudden death and its reminder that life is indeed fragile and precarious. The loss of a husband can “rebrand” a woman in ways she does not control. I wish to examine my own experience of this rebranding as a means of triggering broader insights into what it means to become a widow and how this can be reshaped through the act of telling and retelling. In Ettlinger’s sense, I am carrying my thoughts and feelings into the present by reflecting on a range of experiences that have occurred in different settings over a period of time.

Don’t Expect Me to Look After Your Children

We had lived in a street with a tight community of neighbors. One of our neighbors had been my husband’s close friend for a long time. She worked from home and on social occasions, my children were welcomed into her house where they experienced her as a surrogate grandparent. I paid for childcare as it was required; however, on one occasion I had an emergency which precipitated in me asking this neighbor if she could look after my children for an hour or so. Her “yes” was heavy with an undertone. When I dropped them off, she quickly snapped “Don’t expect me to look after your children whenever you’re in a mess.” I was taken aback. This was the first time I had asked her for any assistance in the many months since my husband’s death. She commented later that she wanted to draw a clear line in the sand. This was a pre-emptive comment, safeguarding against the possibility that she could become a hostage to my needs, given she was home most of the time.

I wondered if this would have been the response had it been a father rather than a mother seeking help. I’ve seen women rally around men who are taking responsibility for their children. Perhaps it’s because men feel more comfortable asking women for help. Perhaps women feel the need to support the “experiment” of paternal responsibility. It might just be about friendships and loyalties. When the primary friend in a couple dies, people may not feel any obligation to their partner and children. On the other hand, some feel a sense of duty and resultant guilt when they believe they have not lived up to this duty. Three men who had been my husband’s close friends, on separate occasions, apologized to me for not doing anything to help me in the years after his death. I had never asked for nor expected help from them. Each described their guilt for not helping their friend’s wife, which they felt they were honor bound to do. By mentioning their sense of guilt, it was left to me to take responsibility for it and exonerate them in some way.

Just Employ a Nanny

Working full-time, looking after two young children, and a home leaves little time and few financial resources for travel. I shifted my work responsibilities so that I could centre my children as much as possible. I drew back from research conference attendance because it was difficult to leave my children for long periods of time. A colleague queried whether I would be attending a conference held in another city, which I had attended regularly in the past. A married mother of two adult children, she seemed oblivious to how “unfree” I was to travel. When I explained this, she responded with, “Just employ a nanny.” It was said as though I had simply overlooked this as a possibility. She then suggested websites that advertised services. I was forced to state that financially, this was beyond my reach. The conversation was intrusive and forced me to reveal aspects of my life that made me uncomfortable.

In my experience of bringing up children on my own, most people assumed I was divorced. Divorce can mean financial assistance and shared parenting. Widowhood more commonly comes to mind with reference to older women whose children no longer need their support. Once my status became known, most people assumed I was living off an income left to me through insurance or its equivalent. You then transform into a type of “merry widow,” someone with the financial capacity that enables independence. You can employ a nanny and continue to live the life that had been possible previously. An assumed financial independence can also turn employment into a choice rather than a necessity. In some people’s minds, choosing to work is poor parenting. “Shouldn’t you be spending more time with your children,” a female colleague commented. In her eyes, I was putting my career ahead of my children’s welfare. When we think of “bread winners,” women do not immediately come to mind. A woman who has the financial backing of a man, even if he is deceased, works by choice rather than necessity. There are tropes that centre the nuclear family and within it, the primacy of the father and the supplementary role women are supposed to play adjacent to him. Working women take jobs away from men, they are dilettantes, they are childless and aggressive careerists, or negligent mothers. The widowed mother can be particularly negligent because her children’s needs are seen as more pressing.

Fatherless Daughters

“For God’s sake, did they think my daughter was fatherless.” My friend was relaying a story about her daughter. She had used the phrase to convey that her daughter had been mistakenly considered unprotected or neglected in some way. She realized the implications of this for me and was deeply embarrassed and apologized. The fact that my friend felt embarrassed at what she considered her faux pas reinforced the sense of lack that surrounded my daughter in her eyes. There is a particular mythology surrounding fathers and daughters, one that rests on the need for women and girls to have the protection of a man, either a father or a husband. This is not to deny the significance of losing a parent. But these comments made me engage with the loss of a father relative to a mother and how this might shape the figure of the mother, particularly for daughters. My daughter was seen as having lost her protector, a role I could not fulfill. In the meantime, my son was being told by older men that he was now “the man of the house.” He was under ten years old at the time.

She’ll Be OK

Though hushed, I nonetheless heard an older relative of my husband’s comment to a friend; “Oh, she’ll be OK. She’s young enough to find someone else.” This occurred days after my husband’s death. In later years the fact that I had not yet entered another relationship was read as my inability to “get on with my life.” I was regularly quizzed about why I was still single and pushed to account for my choice. “Having a life” was linked to being in a relationship. I was being told “to get a life,” yet simultaneously I found previous forms of my social life disappearing. Dinner party invitations with couples dried up, for example. Instead, the women would suggest morning walks and coffee. During this period, one of my husband’s friends stated that had I died instead, my husband would not have been so “loyal” and would have re-partnered as soon as possible. Being single was never seen as my preference. It was illustrative of loyalty to a man, of not dealing with grief successfully and of not getting on with my life. By comparison, a man would have simply re-partnered and got things back to normal as soon as possible, saving people a great deal of discomfort in the process.

Uniform of a Widow

I have always worn a lot of black. In Melbourne where I live, this is not unusual, and jokes are often made about our penchant for black relative to the more colorful attire of those who live in Sydney or Brisbane. After my husband’s death, a colleague commented that he was surprised that I had succumbed to what he described as “the uniform of the Greek widow.” He suggested I should stop wearing mourning black. I have never consciously represented myself as Greek through my dress, and if my dress appeared Greek to others, this was never noted openly. My colleague had taken the liberty of commenting on my dress and attributing cultural meaning to my choices, which he disparaged. My clothing had not altered, but after my husband’s death it was interpreted differently. I became the embodiment of the Greek widow, with all that this image entails in people’s imagination in countries such as Australia.

Feelings

Ellis (1999) advocates “emotional recall.” This is a process whereby emotions are captured retrospectively. The distance of time, she argues, allows us to get outside an emotional scene and analyze it from a cultural perspective. During each of the experiences I describe above, I felt various levels of anger, confusion, and discomfort. At the time, I had little energy or emotional stamina to stop and analyze what was said and what meaning was intended. Ettorre (2023) argues that “personal truths” have a political dimension. She states that embodied experiences and emotions “are emblematic of wider political meanings and social trends” (2).

My anger, confusion, and discomfort had a cultural and political context. Ethnicity and gender intersect to color experience through various representations of what it means to be a woman, and in my case, a member of an ethnic minority. Many assumptions are made about the Greek diaspora and the likelihood that its members will live their lives according to different, commonly perceived as outdated, practices. The perception of diasporic communities as somehow ossified and thus relatively “backward,” particularly with reference to gender practices is not an uncommon view. In this context, the family is pitted against mainstream society and rather than seen as a source of support in an unfamiliar society, which can be hostile, it is seen as the source of repression. This view of the minority family can become a rationale for assimilationism, including through the schooling of young women. Instead, diasporic spaces are integral to shifting and evolving ways of being Greek and Australian (Tsolidis 1995, 2001, 2003, 2009).

With reference to Greek mourning practices specifically, those who migrated to Australia from Greece in the 1960s, are more likely to persist with customs as these were lived prior to migration. For this generation, women were more likely to be responsible for maintaining rituals associated with mourning, including the wearing of black (Avgoulas and Fanany 2018; Panagiotopoulos et al 2013; Papadelos 2019). For subsequent generations, the individual is more likely to determine how they mourn, and this will be responsive to levels of religiosity and their relationship with specific micro communities, for example. My experience of widowhood brought into view how gender and ethnicity intersect and how both feed off each other and affect our lives in ways I had forgotten about at a personal level.

Living Patriarchy Anew

Being on your own as a woman reads differently to being on your own as a man. This was illustrated most poignantly when on several occasions I heard men tell my son, he was now “the man of the house.” Apart from the burden of responsibility this phrase puts on a young boy, it implies that all households need a man. Such statements emphasize the lack of a man rather than celebrate the competency of a woman. A widow’s agency remains obscured even when a man is absent and there is no possibility of her capacities and efforts being misattributed. I remained referenced to men, either through their death or because I had not formed a new relationship with one. Why did this surprise me, given my long-term interest in feminism?

We become inured to living patriarchy. We fail to notice the underlying assumptions about who we are and how we live our lives on an everyday basis. This may be a form of self-preservation, a way of sustaining some level of equilibrium. Perhaps we cannot function if we are always alert to the minutiae of oppression. An extraordinary event can realign one’s focus and allow forms of inequality that have receded into the background of our everyday to come to the fore with alarming clarity. In my case, the death of my husband, allowed me to understand more clearly the status attached to being married, to having a “man in the house” and the burden this expectation placed on my young son, for example. It allowed me to understand the perception that “fatherless daughters” were surrounded by a particular kind of loss. It forced me to recognize how a widowed woman can be seen as a burden, someone who challenges you to assist her. It amplified the view that children brought up by sole mothers are unlikely to succeed. It brought to the fore how I was susceptible to characterizations of who I am based on gender and cultural stereotypes. It made me recognize that society is most comfortable with couples and nuclear families, and that single women create social unease. Perhaps most significantly, it made me aware of how unrealistic I had been assuming I’d escaped these cliches. I had been overly optimistic of the place we had reached in challenging the types of thinking that my husband’s death precipitated. The shift in thinking made me realize that the way I had thought I was being viewed was overly optimistic. People had not understood me to be independent, competent, and someone who had worked hard to create a relationship and a family predicated on gender equality. Instead, I caught glimpses of myself in their comments and reactions, that reflected their view of someone who was half of a whole and significantly, the less competent half of that whole.

Mourning Ties to Others

Berman speaks of “mourning sickness” to describe the feelings of those who have lost a partner. I believe it is an equally apt way of describing the reactions of people to those who are grieving. People get sick of those who are mourning the loss of their loved one. The bereaved make us uncomfortable. None of the reactions and comments described above were made with malice. In various ways these people were concerned for me and my children. Herein lies one of the major prompts for the silence surrounding loss. Speaking ill of people’s concern for you is burdensome. It makes you seem rude and unappreciative. Speaking about your discomfort brings you face-to-face with your inability to think the best of people and their relationship with you. Being a widow makes you responsible for people’s discomfort with death because it is your presence that brings it to the fore and demands a response.

The Precarious Subject

In her book, Precarious Life (2004) Butler discusses key questions related to violence, death, and mourning. She asks “What makes for a grievable life?” (21). Through this question she emphasizes that our vulnerability is socially constituted, as is the level of grief at our demise. Butler argues that wars mark out a hierarchy of mourning premised on the representation of various groups of people as more or less visible and valuable. Differentiated levels of mourning become a descriptor for the worth of those who have died. She asks us to consider our possible complicity in designating, through our public grief, some people as less important than others. Her discussion, whilst aimed at elaborating the ethics surrounding global violence and reactions to it, also speaks to death and grief at a personal level.

When we grieve, we assume that this is a private experience and yet, by mourning we are revealing another aspect of ourselves, “something that delineates the ties we have to others, that shows us that these ties constitute what we are, ties or bonds that compose us” (Butler 2020, 22). Rather than private, the loss of a person is the loss of the ties we have with that person and thus a diminishment of self. Grief illustrates “. . .the thrall in which our relations with others hold us, in ways we cannot always recount or explain. . .” (23). While we may struggle for autonomy our bodies are never quite our own. Instead, there is a public dimension to their constitution. “Despite my affinity for the term relationality, we may need other language to approach the issue that concerns us, a way of thinking about how we are not only constituted by our relations but also disposed by them as well” (24). Instead of autonomy, there is a sense of vulnerability that reminds us that death is a form of dispossession that is out of our control. We are reminded that our lives are tied up with those of others, the ones we grieve for but also those whose lives constitute our broader community, who may recognize us differently after someone has died. According to Butler the body has a very public dimension, it is constituted as a social phenomenon that bears the imprint of others from its beginning. Our struggle for bodily autonomy needs to recognize this dimension of its formation. Our sense of ourselves is premised on how we are seen and the communication this dynamic establishes between individuals and groups of people. By seeking to understand how others see us, we are beginning a conversation that acknowledges that our constitution is reliant on the perceptions of others. Because of this, we are tied to others and our mortality creates a shared vulnerability, our own vulnerability, the vulnerability of those we love and the vulnerability of others who help to define who we are. Thus, we are tied to the grief that follows the real or potential loss of the people with whom we have relationships and who help us develop our sense of ourselves.

Butler argues that the “. . .body implies mortality, vulnerability, agency” (26). She outlines how many political movements are based on the notion of the autonomous self, including feminism with its calls for bodily self-determination. While such political movements have a role, she argues that like women who share experiences that can lead to a common political will, our shared mortality should lead us to a broader sense of community and political will. Grief challenges what Butler identifies as a sense of our autonomy. The loss of someone with whom one is linked is out of our control. “Perhaps we can say that grief contains the possibility of apprehending a mode of dispossession that is fundamental to who I am” (28). This doesn’t negate our autonomy, but it illustrates how our bodies are implicated in the lives of others.

In this context, the figure of the widow becomes socially significant. Through her relationship with her deceased husband, she becomes a symbol of loss and grief and reminds us of our own mortality and that of those we love. Defined by his presence as a wife, as a widow, she is defined by his absence. The widow comes to symbolize how women’s sense of self is constituted through and takes meaning from her relationship to a man. A woman is read differently by those around her when she becomes a widow. The loss she has experienced has the potential to destabilize and rewrite her relationships with others and possibly the relationships these others have with each other. In turn, these shifting relationships that surround her, reorientate how she sees herself. While loss of a spouse is perhaps the most significant life event (Berman 2015), women experience spousal loss differently.

The Precarity of Feminist Autoethnography

Autoethnography is a contested field. There are strongly felt differences about what makes research autoethnographic. Anderson (2006) aims to draw a connection between autoethnography and realist ethnography. He uses the term analytic ethnography to distinguish it from evocative autoethnography, which he argues has come to dominate understandings of what is autoethnography. In order to define analytic autoethnography as a subgenre of realist ethnography, he lists its five constituent elements. These are the need for the researcher and the researched to have a shared status. Analytic reflexivity needs to be carried out and the researcher needs to be visible in the text. Dialogue with informants is required, as is theoretical analysis.

In their response to Anderson, Ellis and Bochner (2006) elaborate how their version of autoethnography differs. They argue that Anderson privileges traditional forms of theory and analysis. Instead they defend autoethnography as “a mode of inquiry designed to be unruly, dangerous, vulnerable, rebellious, and creative” (433) rather than under the control of reason, logic, and analysis. Their paper illustrates their preference for storytelling as a means of reflecting and evoking feelings. It is an account of their dialogue, the context and process they use to craft their response to Anderson’s argument. They agree with Anderson that the autoethnographer should be a full member of the group being researched and be visible within the text. They also agree that there is a need for dialogue with others within the text. However, they differ substantially with Anderson on the need to extrapolate so that theoretical analysis is linked to a broader social phenomenon, which they argue is a form of generalization. This abstraction maintains the empiricist agenda. They prefer to move beyond empiricism, an act which is seen by some, they argue, as a threat to the discipline of sociology.

Atkinson (2006) argues that the personal has always been a part of the sociological imagination. Researchers frame and undertake their research through their own perspectives, priorities, and stances. He considers that while reflexivity on the part of the researcher has been valued, the focus has shifted to the researcher, beyond the act of situating themselves. Thus, the researcher has become the priority, replacing those being researched. He argues that “. . .the methodological has been transposed onto the plane of personal experience” (403). Justifying such research as political does not excuse its “essentially self-absorbed nature: the personal is political, but the personal does not exhaust or subsume all aspects of the political (Atkinson 2006, 403). Given my original paper was linked to the personal being political, I am interested to pursue this line of thinking through an exploration of feminist autoethnography.

Feminist Autoethnography—Is It More Than Self-Absorbed?

Feminists have championed the personal as political, which has led to the adoption of autoethnography as a means of bringing experience to light. Making the personal political has been a cornerstone of second-wave feminism through its brand of consciousness raising (Firth and Robinson 2016). This movement involved working with others to understand how personal experiences were often shared and how voicing experience to each other, allowed women to organize politically to challenge taken-for-granted assumptions about women’s lives. The essentialism implicit in a practice that presupposes a coherent “woman” has been questioned (Zack 2005). However, there are those who still see the merits of using the personal as a political stepping off point and its compatibility with non-essentialist views of what it means to be a woman. Ettorre (2016) for example, argues that there is a political potential to personal narrative because it challenges the distinction drawn between academic and creative writing. It places an emphasis on language as an active agent and demonstrates “how to write situated knowledges of myself and the other into text” (8). She argues that feminist autoethnography requires this personal writing to be theorized to move it away from autobiography and realize its potential to provide the “I” with a cultural context and thus a political potential.

Feminists have taken the personal into academic work and used the personal as a means of knowing. Feminist epistemologies have developed around collaborative memory work and biographical and the autobiographical narratives as a means of understanding the social. What Abrams describes as women becoming heroes in their own life stories (Abrams 2019). The meaning we give to narratives about self is caught up with memory, the private and how we choose to make it public and the identity we create through processes that unite the past and the present (Kehily 1995). These processes are likely to be more graphic and more complicated as we delve into issues, such as death, which are mired in pain. Making the personal public, at once makes us strong and vulnerable. It makes us generous with our experiences and feelings, but it also means that we are burdening others with the acceptance (or otherwise) of our discomfort. Haug (2000) writes with reference to memory work that we “know much more about ourselves than we normally assume. Many things have been censored out of our self-image because we deem them not essential, too painful, or too chaotic” (4). She argues that the construction of perception, including of ourselves, proceeds under dominant discourses and this needs to be recognized before it can be challenged. She cautions that we can relay memories in ways that conform to dominant discourses and that, memories themselves should become contested. Instead of linking memories to a truth, Haug (2008) contends that working with memories is about “. . .restless people with new questions, who are in a process with the intention of moving themselves out of a position of subalternity” (538).

It would over-simplify these debates to draw a clear line between analytic and evocative autoethnography, between those who make emotions explicit through forms of creative writing and those who use theory to analyze. Putting feminist autoethnography in one of these categories would also be over-simplifying complex debates about how we construct knowledge and to what end, including under the rubric of feminism. Burnier (2006) makes an argument for the use of both the personal and the scholarly. She argues that separating analysis from the evocative risks reinscribing the emotional in contradistinction to the rational. She provides an example of how she used gender theory to shed light on her own gendered experiences. The personal, she hoped, would resonate with others while her analysis through theory would provide a means of further developing the field. She also argues that to accept a division between the evocative and the analytical is returning to the gendered heart/mind dualism whereby the rational is deemed masculine and the emotional feminine.

Is There a Need for Methodological Risk-Taking?

At the beginning of this paper, I posed two questions arising from comments provided by reviewers on my original and rejected paper. I aim to explore whether methodological risks are warranted under some circumstances. I understand the reviewers’ comments to signal problems with my execution of autoethnography. My paper did not meet the criteria commonly expected, most particularly around the need to fulfill the “ethno” element (Adams and Herman 2023) of autoethnography. It was too self-referential instead of providing necessary context through further literature analysis or research with others. It dwelt solely on experiences that happened too long ago. Interviews with contemporary young widows would establish whether what I had experienced remains relevant. I have reflected on these comments, a process which I hope has stimulated a better version of the original paper. The rejection of my paper has led me to argue the need for methodological risk-taking especially when the topic under examination is underexposed in the literature and requires personal resilience to bring into public light. Some personal experiences require more time to settle in people’s hearts and minds. These are also likely to be the type of experiences with similar impacts regardless of when they occurred. Indeed, those writing about young widows in the 1970s and 1980s (Barnaby 1997; Lopata 1979; Mallan 1975) capture very similar experiences to those I had in the 1990s and 2000s. Young widows still comment through social media that similar issues affect them (Frangou 2023; Hines 2023; Jennings-Edquist 2021).

The review process tells us what research is considered worthy of publication. Each journal has a set of criteria that establishes for its readership what is worth reading. The process remains opaque because those who read the journal don’t get to read the reviews, nor the unpublished papers. Debate about what constitutes good research does occur in and of itself, for example, that between various schools of autoethnography (Short et al. 2013). However, within each new way of researching, new criteria are developed for what is deemed worthy of publication. Sparkes (2000) comments on this process and concludes that;

Of course, what counts (original emphasis) brings us back full circle to what criteria are used to judge what counts in the first place. Work like autoethnography and narratives of self, that operate on the borderlines of disciplines, that cross or blur boundaries, seem to cause problems for those concerned with criteriology (original emphasis). This involves the search for permanent or universal criteria for judging research (36).

Instead of criteriology, Sparkes (2000) argues for a flexible and dialogical approach to establish what is good research. He contends that instead of checklists we need criteria that identify a school of thought that continues to change because such criteria are responsive to purpose and context. He argues that without this flexibility we risk new forms of dogma.

I would argue the need for responsive criteria that prompts methodological risk-taking. If the topic is “under researched” it may require the methodological checklist to be adapted accordingly. If the experiences happened a long time ago this may add a deeper dimension to the reflection rather than constitute a shortcoming. Widowhood remains underexplored and underexposed. It requires personal resilience to step out of silence and bring related experiences into light. While there are common themes in widowhood experiences there are also differences in how it is lived. There are also differences between various ways it is written about and analyzed that may need to be encouraged. In this paper I have considered my experiences as a young widow with children with hindsight. The length of time between my experiences and their retelling is of itself, noteworthy. It is not easy to write as a widow, especially when there is a reluctance to own this label. Many people avoid widows so there is little appetite to come forward as one, especially as a feminist who resists being labeled in relation to a man, more so one who is deceased. Methodological risk-taking mitigates dogma. Within categories that sit outside the mainstream there can be a tendency to “defend the barricades” by establishing difficult-to-cross barriers. Against criticisms that autoethnography isn’t “proper” ethnography, we may be trying too hard to prove our academic credentials through new forms of dogma by avoiding the risk of the unfamiliar.

Conclusion

This paper explores my experiences of being a young widow. The original paper was rejected by a journal because the reviewers were critical of how I had constituted my experiences as autoethnography. The reviewers argued that I did not adequately contextualize my experiences in the literature. Nor did I consider my experiences, which occurred a long time ago, in a contemporary context through interviews with widows of today, for example. I have chosen to revisit my original paper for two reasons. Firstly, available writing on what it means to be a young widow is relatively limited, particularly that which uses a feminist analytical framework. My aim is to reflect on how a woman becomes a precarious subject when she is widowed and how this changes how she is seen and potentially how she sees herself. Her status remains linked to that of her male partner despite him being absent and the situation bringing forth her independence and resilience. Secondly, I wish to contribute to a debate about methodological risk-taking. Within autoethnography there is a vibrant debate about the establishment of criteria and whether this type of gatekeeping protects forms of excellence. Rather than criteria being understood in this way, I would support the alternative argument that criteria can delineate a community and that for autoethnographers this community needs to be marked by responsiveness to context and purpose. This is a call for some methodological risk-taking as a way of staving off new forms of dogma.