The Nana Project

When Victoria Brown, L.F. Parker Professor of History, became a grandmother in 2007, she set out to read a history on grandmothers in America — and found there wasn’t one. “There are many books on the histories of motherhood and of being a daughter and a wife, but there’s no attention paid to the cultural and socioeconomic construction of the grandmother,” she says. “This piqued my interest: It’s seldom a historian comes across a topic that is so wholly unstudied.”

Brown has begun to piece together a history herself. Drawing from sociological journals, popular culture, and interviews with women who have witnessed multiple generations of grandmothers in their own lives, she is developing a complex picture of grandmothers’ roles across racial and ethnic groups and throughout the last century. In particular, Brown is examining how the role has evolved due to changing gender roles and economic needs. 

“African-American women have worked outside the home in higher numbers longer than white women, so the role of the grandmother as an at-home child care provider has historically been more important,” she says. “I’m interested in asking the question: Are white grandmothers becoming more like African-American and Hispanic grandmothers in the role they play in the family? Have economic and gender changes altered the role of white grandmothers, across class, over time?”