Autobiographies of a generation? Carolyn Steedman,Luisa Passerini and the memory of 1968

Introduction: 1968, memory studies and auto/biographical studies

On the surface, the study of 1968 seems suited to auto/biographical studies, a field concerned with constructing or deconstructing the socio-cultural meaning of individual life-stories. ¹ Among the models of auto/biographical narrative employed in life-writing, such as ‘conversion’ narratives of blessing and salvation (Marcus, 1994: 168) and ‘gallows’ narratives of sin and punishment (Gagnier, 1991: 154), the one that has been most often applied to the radicalism of the 1960s is the Bildungsroman or ‘formation’ narrative of opportunity and fulfilment. The familiar collective narrative of a ‘post-war generation’ with expanding ‘possibilities’ and ‘experience’ (Fraser, 1988: 2–3) is found for instance in Promise of a Dream: Remembering the Sixties (2000) by Sheila Rowbotham (born in 1943). As a member of the ‘sixties generation’ looking back on its formative years, Rowbotham asserts: ‘The extraordinary sequence of events during 1968 led my generation to believe we were moving in the same direction as history. We considered that, unlike our elders, we had no apologies to make; we hadn’t justified labour camps, we hadn’t compromised. In contrast to the fifties, when both Stalinism and the Labour Party had loomed large, we were convinced that we could make everything anew’ (Rowbotham, 2000: 191). ²

However, the discipline of memory studies has proposed other approaches to 1968. Admittedly, as Stuart Hilwig (2010) has observed in the recent collection Memories of 1968: International Perspectives, ‘[t]he study of memory is an elusive undertaking that has yet to yield any major consensus in the field’ (p. 222); and certainly, as was shown in the first volume of this journal, memory studies has developed in a ‘centerless’ (Olick, 2008: 26) and ‘diverse’ (Roediger and Wertsch, 2008: 18) way. Nonetheless, one of the important aspects of the memory studies field is that it considers not only how personal narratives create a story out of the past, but also how they make narrators feel in the present; how they operate ‘not so much to represent the past to us as [ … ] to make the past a presence in our moral and emotional life’ (Poole, 2008: 155).

This broader interest in narrative takes us back to self-reflexive feminist work in auto/biographical studies in the 1990s. This work explored how women’s autobiographies could embrace ‘“a life” as it is lived in its length, complexities, contradictions, shifts and changes’ instead of normative masculine models of self-knowledge (Stanley, 1992: 26). It also considered how marginalised female subjects could transcend ‘coercive calls to a “universal humanity”’ that reflects dominant male-centred views of self-formation (Smith and Watson, 1992: xix), and how the ‘standpoint or subject position’ of researchers could alter as their research becomes ‘a part of their “private” lives’ (Cosslett et al., 2000: 14).

In the 2000s, those insights became a formative part of memory studies; a field which examined not only how personal narrative could create ‘transformative’ changes in the way that people view the world (Brown, 2008: 265) but also how – through psychoanalysis – personal narrative could elicit ‘the foreign body, the buried city, the underworld’ of a person’s selfhood (Antze, 2003: 102). What this idea of the upper and lower self cannot accommodate, however, is the feminist concept of personal multiplicity. If ‘we encounter a greater fluidity in the enactment of the feminine’ (Swanson, 2000: 123), then the vertical, two-tier model of conscious/unconscious may make less sense than a de-centred model of selfhood, which is dispersed into multiple, overlapping and mobile parts, shaping identifications with events such as ‘1968’ in complex ways.

In brief, auto/biographical studies have focused on self-knowledge and memory studies on self-reflexivity. One link between these approaches is the work of feminism within auto/biographical studies; work that problematised the concept of the auto/biographical ‘I’ as a fixed, unified self and perceived its self-knowledge not as pre-given (already formed by the lifetime process of self-formation retold in the auto/biographical narrative) but as negotiated in the difficult process of writing auto/biographically.

This reconceptualisation of self-knowledge has implications for the established concept of generational auto/biography: that is, the idea that an auto/biographical subject will automatically align their individual process of self-formation with the collective process of generational formation, so that the personal narrative and social master narrative of an event such as ‘1968’ are symbiotic. My contribution to this critique of generational auto/biography echoes recent articles in Memory Studies. It highlights ‘the pitfalls of generational thinking’ (Kansteiner, 2012: 112), and considers the question of how individuals ‘escape the gravitational pull of powerful social master narratives’ (Kansteiner, 2010: 4) in relation to generational master narratives.

In order to explore this, we must consider the variability of the pull that generational master narratives exert on people who might be considered to be part of a generation. As Anna Von der Goltz (2011) has recently noted in relation to 1968, there are different levels of generational membership: ‘The 68ers alternately denote all people of a particular age cohort (born roughly during or just after the Second World War), all students of this age cohort, the core of 1960s activists, the wider circle of those who sympathized with the protesters, or all those who described themselves as 68ers retrospectively including those who had not actually participated at the time’ (p. 474). What Von der Goltz alludes to is the subjective process of generational self-designation described elsewhere by Holger Nehring (2007): ‘Talking about “generation” is a device that enables historical actors to make sense of their biographies and connect their lives with history’ (p. 57). Often, the audience is a younger generation: elders transferring their thoughts with an eye to family history (Alexander, 2009: 161). Yet what Nehring leaves out is that there is not only a dynamic of personal appropriation by those who might not fit all the categories of generational membership but who wish to achieve greater connection; there is also one of ambivalence from the inside, by those who identify with their generation in part but feel less membership than that which is socially ascribed to them. These people may use auto/biographical narrative to escape from, or to add nuance to, the social master narratives about ‘their’ generation. Perhaps it is this process of negotiation between personal and social narratives of generational belonging that is most worthy of study.

Personal and social narratives

This dynamic between personal and social narratives shapes two texts by female writers who relate to 1968 in different ways. Luisa Passerini and Carolyn Steedman were both born in the 1940s, and in the 1980s, both wrote experimental auto/biographical texts about their personal life-history: Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation: Italy, 1968 ³ and Steedman’s Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives. In comparing these texts, my interest lies in the conflicts and tensions between their personal narratives and the social master narrative of the 68ers as a generation. After a brief exploration of contrasts and comparisons between the two thinkers, the section ‘Steedman and Passerini: methodologies’ introduces their different approaches to narrative writing, especially with regard to concepts of experience and language; the section ‘Passerini and Steedman’ discusses how the women deal with the relationship between their autobiographical selves and the ‘we’ of generational belonging; the section ‘Steedman, Passerini and “1968”’, finally, considers the interface between the authors’ identities and the historical, generational event of ‘1968’. The aim of this article is, then, to look at Steedman and Passerini not simply in terms of their contribution to ‘rethinking history’, or as casually-designated ‘feminist historians’, but in relation to the personal and social pasts that they depict in their life-writing. The personal narratives of Steedman and Passerini help to demonstrate the de-centred model of selfhood by showing their fragmented identification with the social master narrative of the 68ers as a generation.

Steedman and Passerini: contrasts and comparisons

Steedman and Passerini have already been mentioned in the same breath, notably by post-modernist critics of historical writing who link them to autobiography rather than memory. Alun Munslow (2003) lists them together among the ‘biographer-historians who deploy history as a representational cultural activity’ and who use history ‘as an increasingly self-reflexive form of biography, perhaps even as a hybrid of the autobiographical and the historical’ (p. 2). Jeremy Popkin (1999) notes how they each ‘challenge the notion of the isolated, autonomous self’ and ‘fracture chronology, jumping forward and backward through their subjects’ lives and thus rejecting the standard autobiographical portrayal of a coherent personality developing over time’ (p. 736). This established way of looking at Steedman and Passerini fits them within the post-modernist paradigm of ‘rethinking history’, and sees their autobiographical approach primarily as a ‘critique of the traditional […] historian’s role’ (Popkin, 2005: 75).

In a basic sense, Steedman and Passerini are comparable in several respects. Both women are professional academic historians (Steedman at the University of Warwick and Passerini at the University of Turin), both were born in the 1940s (Passerini in 1941 and Steedman in 1947), and Landscape for a Good Woman and Autobiography of a Generation were published at a similar time, 1986 and 1988, respectively, by which time both had decided not to have children. In intellectual terms, both authors are known for their critical awareness of historical methodology. Steedman’s Dust (2001) considers the relationship between the historian and the archive, and Passerini’s ‘History and Subjectivity: The Oral Sources and Memory’ (1988) analyses the connection between history, memory and the oral tradition. Finally, both have expertise in the historical uses of psychoanalysis, demonstrated in the texts under consideration. In a conference paper delivered in 1986, for example, Steedman explained how Landscape for a Good Woman combines the chronological framework of history with a psychoanalytic ‘mode of storytelling’ that ‘allows the dream, the wish, the fantasy, to be presented as evidence’ (Steedman, 1992: 49).

Yet there are clear differences between Steedman and Passerini. First, Steedman is English and Passerini is Italian, and they have written primarily in their respective languages about the history of their respective nations. ⁴ Aside from their methodological writings, each has largely dealt with a body of historical materials which is discrete from that of the other. Second, Steedman and Passerini are associated differently with memory studies and auto/biographical studies, with Passerini affiliated largely to the former and Steedman to the latter, even if one of the chapters in Dust is titled ‘The space of memory’ (Steedman, 2001: 66–88). Steedman previously wrote two biographies, published her critical writings as Past Tenses: Essays on Writing, Autobiography and History (1992) and reviewed several books in the field in an article called ‘Difficult stories: Feminist auto/biography’ (1995). By contrast, Passerini’s article ‘Work ideology and consensus under Italian fascism’ (1979) was discussed by the University of Birmingham’s Popular Memory Group (1982: 216), and in 1987, her book was published in English as Fascism in Popular Memory. Later projects have appeared in English as Memory and Totalitarianism (1992b), Memory and Gender (Leydesdorff et al., 1996), and Memory and Utopia: The Primacy of Intersubjectivity (2007).

Third, Passerini unlike Steedman is an oral historian, and like her Italian colleague Alessandro Portelli, she has used oral history to explore the ways that individuals compliment or contradict the social master narratives of their communities. Oral history, as the sub-discipline of history in which the historian records the personal narratives of those who have lived through historical events, has the potential to contribute both to memory studies and to auto/biographical studies. However, in the hands of Passerini and Portelli, it has moved broadly into alignment with ‘memory’ and not, in general, with ‘auto/biography’ (cf. Bornat, 1994: 18–19). Although Portelli (1997) champions Passerini’s awareness of the relationship between historical events (p. 190), historical writing and autobiographical memories, they share a view that the auto/biographical stories of individuals are made ‘important’ by the ‘tales, symbols, legends, and imaginary reconstructions’ woven around them by ‘collective memory and imagination’ (p. 1). Meanwhile, in their emphasis on the emotionally difficult circumstances of ‘contradictions and conflicts’ (p. 2), they are sympathetic to the side of memory studies that deals with what can and cannot be said by a storyteller. As Joan Scott (1996) notes in her introduction to Autobiography of a Generation, Passerini ‘probes the selections [made by her interviewees as they decide what to say and what not to say], teasing out repressed elements and silences by reading symbols and metaphors, looking for contradictions and ruptures in narratives, listening for denials and displacements, asking questions about feeling’ (p. xii). The physical and sensory nature of these verbs is no accident. Passerini’s work uses real life-stories to get an emotional feel of the tension between personal and social narratives that memory studies has often explored from a theoretical or psychoanalytical standpoint.

Steedman and Passerini: methodologies

In her 1986 conference paper on Landscape for a Good Woman, Steedman (1992) noted that an autobiography is ‘the embodiment of the something [sic] completed’ (p. 47), but Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation is less about completion than construction, the processes by which the narrative of a person, and of a ‘group’, is produced. The text is organised in a ‘jump-cut’ style, with chapters alternating between self-analysis and interview-analysis and passages ‘jumping from one to the other of many stimuli I found on my way of exploring this field’ (Passerini, 2009: 21). This scattered structure adds nuance to what Passerini says with Selma Leydesdorff and Paul Thompson in their introduction to Gender and Memory, that ‘[t]he categories of experience and language are formulated within the frames of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity: [ … ] reconstructed by the protagonist, and transmitted to others willing to listen’ (Leydesdorff et al., 1996: 14). What Passerini points out is that the whole basis of understanding underlying a personal narrative is the product of interpersonal, social negotiation, as well as of silence and listening. ⁵ In Autobiography of a Generation, her relationship with her psychologist is seen as the beginning, not the end, of transforming her past into narrative. Early in the book, she recounts the opening stages of this relationship: ‘Memorable session with Dr. G./“I can no longer go either forward or backward.”/Silence./I resume narrating old dreams, I talk nonsense, I stop. I don’t know what to say, other than that I am sick at heart’ (Passerini, 1996: 14). In these initial stages, a personal narrative fails to emerge. As Derek Duncan (1998) says: ‘Passerini’s submission to psychoanalysis [ … ] seeks to give expression to a suffering she is as yet unable to understand’ (p. 376). Her verbalisations take the form of a dream-like ramble.

In this sense, the book equates with the spatial theorising of Michel De Certeau (1984) as a journey that ‘offers a series of turns’ rather than a straight line (p. 100). Thus, it also chimes with the ‘new cultural history’ of the 1980s (Hunt, 1989), which, in books such as Peter Novick’s That Noble Dream (1988), critiqued the modern, objectivist view of historical knowledge in order ‘to stimulate alternative ways of thinking about works of history’ (p. 629). However, from a feminist perspective, Passerini reflects on her unease as a woman pursuing what De Certeau (1984) calls ‘the art of composing a path’ (p. 100): an art of subjectivity which, in Italy, had traditionally been a male destiny that left women as the objective figures who stood still: ‘Women stayed put, survived, hardened under the burden of responsibility’ (Passerini, 1996: 5). As Graziella Parati (1996) has argued, Passerini sees her life as that of a woman wandering into the public sphere but restricted by that cultural legacy (p. 130). What she tries to do, with her commitment to subjectivity, is to perceive her personal narrative from other perspectives, just as she tries to see her interviewees from a perspective outside traditional historical objectivity. As she said in 2011: ‘[I]t was the experience of listening to the memory of others that allowed me [ … ] to listen to my own memory’ (p. 246).

As such, Autobiography of a Generation has a different approach to personal narrative than that of Landscape for a Good Woman. There is no analyst in Steedman’s text: Whereas Passerini emphasises how the most basic frames of the narrative are constructed with difficulty, Steedman locates herself firmly in the ‘south London fifties childhood’ of ‘a post-War child’ (Steedman, 1986: 5). Perhaps this is partly a question of their respective relationships with their mothers. Whereas the mother and the landscape of London are the anchors for Steedman’s personal narrative, Passerini is severed from the places of her past by the pain of her mother’s death ‘when I was six’ in 1947 (Passerini, 2011: 241). In Autobiography of a Generation, Passerini tells her analyst: ‘I have no roots, I have no memory of any origins that resemble me. My mother is an absence’ (Passerini, 1996: 4). Her text is partly an attempt to recover this terrain, which symbolises the womb-like heart of her early life: ‘Slowly I acquire the sense of an inner space. Frequently I dream about the main piazza of my native city [Asti, near Turin], the city of my childhood and adolescence’.

Steedman’s aim in Landscape for a Good Woman is to perceive her personal narrative by means of her particular, intimate relationship with her mother. The ‘good woman’ in Landscape for a Good Woman is Steedman’s mother, ‘who was, as she told us, a good woman’ (Steedman, 1986: 106–07); and the second life in this ‘story of two lives’ is that of Steedman herself. As Steedman implies in Past Tenses, the landscape for the good woman ultimately belongs to Steedman herself. As the storyteller, she is the ‘body in time and space, telling the story that brings you (wherever the teller actually ends the story) to this place, here and now [ … ] (which is why you have to see that the good woman is me)’ (Steedman, 1992: 47). Her sense of finding a personal narrative through the story of another person is elaborated in Dust, where she explores the idea that, at heart, writing history is an inter-personal process of interaction with the ‘spirits’ or ‘ghostly presences’ of historical subjects from the past (Steedman, 2001: 71).

Steedman differs from Passerini in her pronounced sense of discomfort with comradeship or solidarity, whether with fellow radicals or fellow women. Whereas Passerini describes the essence of 1968 as ‘the transition from the few to the many, [ … ] from the individual to the collective, from private to public’ (Passerini, 1996: 60), Steedman confesses in a biographical note in Liz Heron’s Truth, Dare or Promise: Girls Growing Up in the 50s that ‘I spend a lot of time removing my troublesome presence from events and situations’ (Steedman, 1985: 125). Heron’s text, published by the feminist publishing house Virago, prints a collation of passages from Landscape for a Good Woman alongside equivalent reflections by Sheila Rowbotham and ten other women: The back cover proclaims that these are ‘twelve women who grew into feminism in the 1970s’. However, for reasons that will be explored in the next section, Steedman’s work (unlike that of other feminist historians such as Rowbotham, Barbara Taylor and Sally Alexander, who all knew each other and worked together in the 1970s) does not fit easily into that profile, with its connotations of friendly sisterhood. Whereas Passerini perceives herself emerging into a public discourse, Steedman by contrast is located deliberately in an individual space.

What Steedman emphasises in her work is not so much mass movements as the personal concept of the labourer, culminating in her later work on the history of domestic service. Steedman’s oeuvre, including Landscape for a Good Woman, builds on the tradition of writing on the labourer in social history, stretching back from the History Workshop movement of Raphael Samuel, for whom Steedman was a protégé and who ‘charted better than anyone else the desperate increase of hard labour [ … ] brought about by Victorian industrial capitalism’ (Steedman, 1997: 53), and to Lawrence and Barbara Hammond’s ‘labourer trilogy’ in the early twentieth century. ⁶ As a left historian working within this tradition, Steedman (2007: 74, 2009: 46) stresses her interest in the actual bodies (and legally-defined personae) of labourers as opposed to the abstract entities of capital. As Victoria Rosner (2000) has said, Steedman perceives herself ‘laboring as a historian’ (p. 17); and the identification with the suffering body of the worker (Dust refers in its title to the breathing-in of archival soot by the working historian, and Steedman’s account of her time as a primary school teacher also emphasises her bodily suffering) is a way of understanding her account of her mother in Landscape for a Good Woman. As a mother, she is a worker, a labourer, an individual suffering body, rather than part of a collective body or mass.

Meanwhile, despite her commitment to comradeship, Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation also reflects a strong sense of the historian’s personal labour. First, she declines to allow the self-knowledge of her interviewees to turn it into a ‘possessive memory’, an auto/biography in which those who participated in the history take control of its meaning (Foot, 2011: 497). Second, she does not follow the feminist approach of entering into an even-handed dialogue with participants’ personal narratives. As she was ‘a few years older’ and had been in Africa at the time, her interviewees had participated in ‘something I didn’t share’ (Passerini, 1996: 60). ⁷ Yet she begins by rejecting what she describes elsewhere as the element of ‘myth-biography’ in their stories (Passerini, 1990: 57–58): ‘My initial reaction to the transcripts of the first interviews is that they are unusable. [ … ] I had already intuited that it would be necessary to wrest this memory from its own protagonists’ (Passerini, 1996: 2). As she explains, such a move is not based on a distinction between the historian’s objective truth and the interviewees’ falsehoods: ‘The guiding principle could be that all autobiographical memory is true; it is up to the interpreter to discover in which sense, where, for which purpose’ (Passerini, 1989: 197). This sense of autobiography’s multiple truths comes across as a nod to French feminism, with its conceptualisation of the female as ‘this sex which is not one’ and its emphasis on the push and pull, and opening and closing, of (women’s) collective identity (Irigaray, 1985: 28). Passerini (1996) describes her sifting of these multiplicities by saying that ‘our identity is constructed on contradictions’ (p. 22). Like Steedman, Passerini emphasises the historian’s personal labour with historical material rather than the communion of the historian with fellow historians and historical subjects.

The ‘generation’ of Passerini and Steedman

Steedman and Passerini part company in their take on the relationship between their generation’s social master narrative and their personal life-stories. Passerini’s (2009) aim is to use the generational event of 1968 – and also of ‘“the long ’68”, a process of at least 10 years’ duration of social and political unrest all over the world’ (p. 22) – to illuminate her personal narrative. ⁸ Passerini (2007) locates the restless spirit and culture of ‘the 1968 years’ over this expanded time-frame (p. 55), and brackets her personal story of her travel to Mozambique in 1967 to work ‘with and on’ local liberation movements, and her appointment in 1974 ‘after some years of teaching in secondary schools’ as Assistant Professor in Turin (Passerini, 2011: 244, 245). She is partly referring to this personal experience when she says that ‘the specialness of the decade 1967–76 superimposed itself on a crucial period in the life of the individual between twenty-five and thirty-five, the period when one usually embarks on work and adulthood’ (Passerini, 1996: 151).

Yet those ages are remembered in Steedman’s biographical note as a lost period when, following the rejection of her PhD thesis in 1973 at the age of 26, she taught at a primary school until 1980, only returning to academia in 1981 at the age of 34, via the back-door (for a trained historian) of the Institute of Education at the University of London. Far from being an invigorating break, Steedman describes this intermission as a dark age of emotional turmoil and intellectual stasis: ‘I knew, with an early clarity, that I shouldn’t stay [at the primary school], but I did – for eight years. All I knew – of nineteenth-century history, the unknown struggles of people getting by under impossible circumstances – swam into sharp focus. [ … ] But it was very bad for me. Hard physical labour stops you thinking, and I didn’t for a long time’ (Steedman, 1985: 124).

In different ways, Steedman and Passerini both attach importance to their post-1968 period of young adulthood. Steedman’s narrative is one of personal crisis in which, after the failure of her studies, she had ‘entered violently the imaginative territory of stupid/not stupid’ (Steedman, 1985: 123), whereas for Passerini it is ‘a decade-long process’, shared by herself and others (especially other women), of ‘personal experience of political involvement’ through the political movements (including the women’s movement) of the Italian left (Passerini, 1992a: 680; 2011: 244–45).

Returning to the theme of contrast, however, Steedman and Passerini’s sense of their generation is profoundly different. For Passerini, 1968 and its aftermath are seen to have brought about a politicised younger generation in Italian society. In Passerini’s (1996) words, the ‘“parents” [are] understood as the previous generation, the generation that had grown up under fascism, and were associated with conformism and apathy’ (p. 74). The national context is provided in Stuart Hilwig’s (2001) analysis of the new generation in post-war Italian society: a generation alienated from their elders, with little sense of belonging to a common inter-generational Italian culture (pp. 584, 590). This concept of division from the preceding generation relates closely to Pierre Nora’s (1996) conception of generation as ‘conflict and self-conscious self-proclamation’ (pp. 514–15). What Passerini (2009) wishes to emphasise, in light of approaches to 1968 that reduce it to ‘a benign transformation of attitudes’ (p. 22), is the violence of generational self-expression. The wider meaning of 1968 is, to Passerini (1996), that of ‘an epochal, generational, emotional revolution’ aiming ‘[t]o shock, to break, to embarrass’ older sensibilities (pp. 79–80).

Overall, Steedman’s idea of being one of the ‘girls growing up in the fifties’ is less violent. Certainly she does, like Passerini, refer to a sense of generational conflict. Heron’s introduction to Truth, Dare or Promise emphasises a shared pattern of difficult relationships with mothers: ‘They were not, perhaps, the warm, supportive, generous and loving beings that sentimentalists see at the core of all women, of all mothers’ (Steedman, 1985: 8). This point is mirrored by Steedman’s (1986) emphasis on her mother’s ‘ambivalence towards my existence’ (p. 93). Steedman’s mother (who died in 1983) had, in accordance with Heron’s generalisation, adopted an economical approach befitting the times of post-war austerity: ‘What came free could be given freely, like her milk: loving a baby costs very little. But feeding us during our later childhood was a tense struggle between giving and denial. We never went hungry, we were well nourished, but fed in the cheapest possible way’ (p. 93).

Yet Steedman (1985) discredits the idea of being part of a resentful generation of daughters, and instead locates herself as part of a well-endowed group: ‘I went to the University of Sussex in 1965 to read history, a statistical component of the Robbins generation’ (p. 123). This generation, the children born in 1946/1947, is positioned by Steedman in a filial relationship to the state. This was the cohort who were first to benefit from the Robbins Report of 1963, which recommended the expansion of higher education in Britain. The Report was symbolised by the creation of the universities of Sussex and Warwick where Steedman was to become, respectively, student and professor. There is gratitude in her remark that ‘my grammar school had sent one girl to university in 1964; sent seventeen of us, the children of 1946–7, a year later’ (p. 123). A few paragraphs later, she recalls her dismay both at disappointing her mother during her years as a primary school teacher and at having to listen to student friends telling her to reform her mother’s decision to vote Conservative (p. 125). Steedman identifies herself and her mother as working-class women, and places them on the same side of a social fault-line dividing classes and sexes rather than generations. In this sense, Steedman’s personal perspective seems to reinforce the notion of British exceptionalism suggested by Pat Thane (2007: 198) and Holger Nehring (2007: 57), both of whom argue that British society at large neither had the same generational conflict, nor the same generational discourse about 1968, as other European countries.

Steedman explicitly rejects the idea of fitting marginal lives into a comprehensive system of meaning. At the close of Landscape for a Good Woman (1986), she says the following:

I know that the compulsions of narrative are almost irresistible: [ … ] the tendency is [ … ] to seek entry for it to a wider world of literary and cultural reference [ … ] But to do this is to miss the irreducible nature of all our lost childhoods: what has been made has been made out on the borderlands. I must make the final gesture of defiance, and refuse to let this be absorbed by the central story [ … while insisting on] a politics that will, watching this past say ‘So what?’; and consign it to the dark. (p. 144)

What Steedman means by the ‘borderlands’ of childhood is partly that children operate at the fringes of the adult reality that surrounds them, with only a partial attachment to its meanings (Steedman, 1982: 98). This sensitivity helps to explain Steedman’s (1995) critique of forms of ‘history and historical explanation’ that absorb peripheral pasts into a collective biography (p. 78), and also her critique of the social master narratives of generation.

Hence, Steedman and Passerini both display a complex relationship between individual and generational narratives. Ultimately, they are the mirror-image of each other. Passerini feels close (though external) to the social master narrative of the 1968 generation, and has a sense of generational belonging to it, while Steedman is positioned as a woman who was young in the 1960s, but is distant from it, denying her membership and not identifying with its narrative. What they have in common is a strong relationship between their personal narratives and the social master narrative of generation in their respective countries: whether one of self-willed attraction to generational conflict, as in the case of Passerini or, in Steedman’s case, one of being drawn into discourses of generation and feeling the need to escape. For both, individual reminiscence intersects with collective memory; and for both, it is a social story that gives rise to, and shapes, their personal narratives.

Steedman, Passerini and ‘1968’

Steedman’s and Passerini’s respective approaches to the event of ‘1968’ underscore their shared but opposite sense of being an insider–outsider to the 1968 generation. Both were, in different ways, absent, or on the margins viewing it from a distance. For Steedman, unlike for Passerini (and for other British 68ers such as Rowbotham), the period of the late 1960s and early 1970s was not a positive political experience at the heart of her personal narrative. Conversely, Passerini positions 1968 at the core of her personal narrative despite not being a student herself or even present as an active participant. Both relate to 1968 in awkward ways. Yet despite this, there is an element of connection that is shared by both authors.

In 1968, Steedman was 21, graduating from Sussex, and about to move into adult education teaching in Edinburgh. She describes herself in Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) as part of ‘the class of ’68’ (p. 48), but only in the context of her year-group at University. In her biographical note in Truth, Dare or Promise, she expresses her disconnection from the historical event of 1968 and its consequences: ‘I have stood, alienated, envious, watching the political currents of my generation, feeling a particular distance from both the politics of liberation and the heavy-metal labourism of the late 1960s’ (Steedman, 1985: 125). The bond between Steedman’s personal narrative and the social master narrative is ideological: ‘From my early teens an outraged sense of justice was my response to my mother’s stance over many things, particularly her treatment of my sister. This outrage was easily translated into a social egalitarianism’ (p. 125).

It is striking that Steedman, expressing ambivalence at the political activities of her youthful peers in the late 1960s, evokes this concept of equality. As Joseph Bristow (1991: 126) has commented, Steedman’s socialism – the classically 1968-ish quality of her thought – is found in that egalitarian principle. In a crucial chapter of Landscape for a Good Woman, she explains her outrage at the social oppression of herself and her sister during her childhood. The fact that she had been born out of wedlock, and that her parents had never married, had caused a perceptible climate of disapproval: ‘Often, before I found out about it in 1977 and saw the documents, the sense of my childhood that I carried through the years was that people knew something about me, something that was wrong with me, that I didn’t know myself’ (Steedman, 1986: 40). So, although Raymond Williams (1986) complained that Landscape for a Good Woman reflected the present day of the 1980s in its individualist personal narratives (pp. 8–9), it could also be argued that Steedman uses the inter-subjective narratives of herself and her mother as a means of protesting at the unfair (but supposedly private) power-dynamics of childhood, the home and the family. In this mixture of socialism and individualism, Steedman concurs with the politics of 1968 in Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation.

What Steedman and Passerini’s personal narratives have in common, in a way that connects each to the social master narrative of the 1968 generation, is the concept of liberation from a rigid set of social norms. Steedman’s concept of equality represents the socialism of 1968 not only in its respect for all individuals regardless of social circumstances, but also in its support for small resistances against the ‘system’ of social order. This appreciation of power is shared by Passerini. Just as Steedman (1984) validates the small resistances of lower-middle-class women such as her mother in Landscape for a Good Woman, and of working-class Victorian police officers in Policing the Victorian Community (p. 58), so Passerini returns in Autobiography of a Generation to the theme of laughter at authority that she had previously observed in Fascism in Popular Memory (1987: 92). In 1968, as in fascist-era Turin, new political meanings had lent power to humour, in this case, ‘the crass jokes that students have always made about their professors, the whispered wisecracks, the notes passed from desk to desk’ (Passerini, 1996: 78). ⁹ In the contexts of historical study chosen by Passerini, as well as by Steedman, such resistances are placed by the author in periods of political change that disturbed social hierarchies. ¹⁰

Through Steedman and Passerini, ‘1968’ may be seen as a nexus of change that included challenges to academia from the outside, the emergence of new approaches to time, auto/biography and historical writing, as well as reconceptualisations of social relations. ¹¹ To conclude with Passerini, and her specific arguments about ‘1968’, her key contention is that it produced a profound shift from ‘the individual’ to ‘the collective’ that has changed the way a life must be understood. This relates particularly to the gravitational pull of social master narratives that ascribe a systematised generational meaning to their experience. Passerini herself alludes to the way in which her book was a product of a wider recognition about how a person is brought into being as a ‘subject’ and a self (Passerini, 2012: 387). In her view, life is not simply a linear trajectory of individual self-development but a path of returns, detours and multiple perspectives that brings the individual into play with the collective. Her resistance to linear time in her writing of Autobiography of a Generation is an expression of her opposition to the individualism of conventional social thought (p. 372). If society is not composed of individuals each engaged in their own private, one-way process of growth and self-consciousness, and is instead a more public process in which diverse stages and places are revisited and nothing is left behind, then the closeness of interpersonal relationships becomes the foundation of social life. This is why it does not matter to Passerini that she was ‘not there’ (p. 382). She is still at one with her ‘group’ as a participant in the effects of 1968.

Conclusion

The process of negotiation between personal and social narratives in Steedman’s and Passerini’s works provides a different perspective on the relationship between memory studies and auto/biographical studies. Conventionally, the two fields are separate, auto/biographical studies being concerned with how life-stories are narrated and understood, and memory studies with how the past is experienced, or sensed, in the present. Yet Steedman and Passerini bring the fields closer together. They follow auto/biographical studies in considering the socio-cultural meaning (or meaninglessness) of their life-stories, and memory studies in bringing to light how they feel about themselves as storytellers. They stand consciously as members of the ‘sixties’ or ‘1968’ generation, yet question and interrogate the nature and even the existence of such an entity, as well as their connection to it.

By questioning the concept of generation that has recently shaped both memory studies and the scholarly treatment of 1968, Steedman’s and Passerini’s writings demonstrate the complexities of generational memory as a whole as well as the generational memory of the 68ers. By the 1980s, the subjective, auto/biographical processes of the 1968 generation included not only a dynamic of personal appropriation by those who wished to achieve greater connection, but also one of ambivalence by those who felt less membership than that which was socially ascribed to them. This applies particularly to Steedman, a writer who was born in 1947 and was a student in May 1968, yet who was not a part of the student protests, sat uneasily with the collective movement and identified closely with her mother. Yet, at the same time, Steedman is an egalitarian, individualist, feminist and ‘labourist’ who was influenced by 1968 and was standing apart from the politics of the late 1960s with a wistful ‘envy’.

People who are ambivalent in this way may use auto/biography to show the tensions in their relationship with the social master narratives of their generation. In Passerini’s Autobiography of a Generation, the personal narrative takes shape as a series of ‘reflections in a jump-cut style’ rather than as a coherent, immersive story. She is ambivalent about the traditional master narrative, and actively breaks it up in her text through self-analysis, because she is trying to create a new one. Yet, although she stands apart from the generation in her methodological approach, she is shaped by her interactions with her interviewees as well as with her analyst. She questions herself, and her autobiography is a transformative process in which the self at the end of the book is more coherent than the self at its beginning. This process tallies with Steedman’s self-reflexive discussions in the context of Landscape for a Good Woman. Although Passerini and Steedman are both ambivalent about 1968, and question it, they are aware of how they are profoundly constituted by it. The important point is this: that what they aim to do, in light of this awareness, is to differentiate their autobiography from their generation, thereby challenging us all to think about generation in more nuanced ways.