By Sara Barnes
With thanks to Samantha Hardy and Conflict Management Academy
When my grandmother handed me the wet clothes and told me to “put them through the wringer,” I had no idea what to do. “Go ahead, don’t dawdle. Get those clothes done.”
My aunt Ruth, a more patient member of the Plymouth, Massachusetts, household, took the clothes. “Here, Sara, I can show you.” She slowly and methodically worked each piece of clothing into and then out of the rollers.
I was struck, though, that this “put them through the wringer” statement was a saying I had heard before, referring to people. Now at the age of ten, I contemplated putting people through this contraption. I wondered—did that really happen? Would there be blood? Were there really people wringers?
I asked my grandmother, “Would you like Daddy to buy you a dryer?” thinking of the white box in my basement that produced perfectly dry clothes, no wringer involved. My grandmother dismissed this idea. “We have a perfectly good system, it’s worked well enough for us all these years. Maybe your father doesn’t think so. But we’ll stick with what we know, thank you very much.”
My grandmother had experienced the turn of the nineteenth to twentieth century, World War I, the advent of women’s suffrage, Prohibition, and a dramatic influx of migrants from other countries. With all six of her children born, the family experienced the economic Depression and World War II. By the 1950s, my grandmother had lived a dramatic 60 years. She, a member of the “Greatest Generation,” and my aunt, who was part of the “Silent/Traditional Generation,” continued to use the clothes wringer well into the sixties, seventies, and eighties. It was a marker of their approach to change. Slow, methodical, solid, traditional.
Spanning Generations
By the mid-twentieth century, there were a lot of us baby boomers in the US. My generation became defined by positive economic times as well as the dramatic cultural shifts of the civil rights, antiwar, and women’s movements. The bright and brash colors and styles including (gasp!) above-the-knee miniskirts clashed with my New England family’s aesthetic, as did many of the modernizing changes in appliances and popular culture.
This generation-spanning conundrum is familiar throughout history. In families and communities, the older generations often take the role of preservationists, the younger become the innovators, and the middle attempt to bring things into balance. For many, this generational conflict plays out within the family and workplace, with each person charting their own path.
Today, we find a unique phenomenon, with five generations who are fully participatory in modern adult life. This is the first time in history such a grand span of ages and birth years are co-existing in society in significant numbers. I’m a baby boomer and my son is a millennial, and I work with traditional, Gen X, and Gen Z folks. Since we have all grown up in different times with divergent core experiences, it requires commitment and flexibility to function productively and negotiate roles and expectations. Charts such as the following can help to show the wide-ranging approaches to core attitudes, broadly defined by each generation.
Read the full version of this Mediator Musings essay here.