Feminist Research Methods

Exemplary Readings In The Social Sciences

Joyce McCarl Nielsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367005443
• eBook ISBN: 9780429709821
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminist inquiry has affected the nature of research in ail the social and natural sciences over the past decade, but much contemporary writing on feminist methods simply offers a critique of traditional methods. This book, one of the first to offer a practical guide to conducting research informed by feminist methods, is based on the premise that abstract discussion of methodological issues is most meaningful and instructive in conjunction with examples of actual research. A comprehensive and far-reaching introduction defines feminist research and explains how it differs from traditional methodology in the social and natural sciences. In a beautifully clear style, Dr. Nielsen guides the reader through a number of philosophy of science, history of science, and sociology of knowledge issues that are fundamental to understanding the nature of scientific method in its traditional sense and the role of feminist scholarship in the larger intellectual movement that is transforming and redefining scientific methodology. Part One presents the best of feminist commentary on both feminist and traditional methods. Part Two consists of readings that illustrate particular feminist methods, including oral history, linguistic analysis, feminist anthropology informed by feminist literary criticism, and reinterpretation and reanalysis of empirical data from a feminist perspective. Substantive issues addressed in the readings include women's suffrage in the United States, women as shamans, sex differences in suicide rates, sex differences in cognitive abilities, gender dominance through conversation, gender and public policy, and public-private sphere dichotomies.

4
Beginning Where We Are

Feminist Methodology in Oral History

KATHRYN ANDERSON, SUSAN ARMITAGE, DANA JACK, AND JUDITH WITTNER

Anderson et al. introduce oral history as being ideally suited to the purposes of feminist inquiry. The authors' development of the dialectical nature of female consciousness—for example, the realization that housework is considered work but yet not work—is especially well developed. They emphasize women as experts on their own behavior. Contrast this with traditional theories, which suggest that because of such things as unconscious motives and false consciousness, subjects cannot really know themselves. This chapter also realistically describes dilemmas experienced by the researchers themselves—for example, their need to generalize from particular experiences. Indeed, oral history itself is described as neither a psychological interview nor secondary documentation. Thus the oral historian walks a narrow line between these two. "Beginning Where We Are" is not just about feminist methods; these authors exemplify feminist self-scrutiny and awareness, both in their interdisciplinary collaboration and their sharing of the inside story of their research experiences.

Our means of knowing and speaking of ourselves and our world are written for us by men who occupy a special place in it ... In learning to speak our experience and situation, we insist upon the right to begin where we are, to stand as subjects of our sentences, and to hear one another as the authoritative speakers of our experience.¹

Introduction

Oral history is a basic tool in our efforts to incorporate the previously overlooked lives, activities, and feelings of women into our understanding of the past and of the present. When women speak for themselves, they reveal hidden realities: new experiences and new perspectives emerge that challenge the "truths" of official accounts and cast doubt upon established theories. Interviews with women can explore private realms such as reproduction, child rearing, and sexuality to tell us what women actually did instead of what experts thought they did or should have done. Interviews can also tell us how women felt about what they did and can interpret the personal meaning and value of particular activities. They can, but they usually do not.

Our fieldwork shows us that oral history has only skimmed the surface of women's lives. Women have much more to say than we have realized. As oral historians, we need to develop techniques that will encourage women to say the unsaid. We also need to move beyond individual accounts to make much more systematic use of our interviews. Here, then, we propose an interdisciplinary feminist methodology to achieve these goals.

This paper is the result of a series of collaborations. Initially, historians Kathryn Anderson and Susan Armitage worked together on the Washington Women's Heritage Project exhibit, which illustrated the everyday lives of women with photographs and with excerpts from oral history interviews. Their assumption was that Washington women shared a set of values—a female subculture—but this hypothesis proved more difficult to document than they had expected. Although both feminist scholarship and their own personal sense of self told them that relationships with others have always been a central component of female activity and identity, Anderson and Armitage found that existing oral histories provided very little direct support for this assumption. It was much easier to document activities than feelings and values. Surprised by this finding, each historian pursued the question further. Anderson's critical scrutiny of her own oral history interviews revealed a strong bias against just the sort of information we had hoped to find and led her to reformulate her questions and interview goals. Anderson turned to a colleague, psychologist Dana Jack, and found useful insights in her work and the work of other feminist psychologists. Thus our first interdisciplinary connection was made, and we developed a perspective on women's historical activity that incorporated a methodology to explore and validate personal feelings.

While Anderson was thinking about personal experience, Armitage had begun to try to put women's experience into a wider context.² She was concerned, in particular, with finding a way to generalize from the individual to the common experience. She wondered how much the feelings and values of one individual woman can tell us about female values. Is there really a set of common feelings and values that women of a particular culture, class, or historical period can be said to share? Are there cross-class and cross-race commonalities? How can personal feelings be compared, without resort to sociological "schedules" and rigid interview formats? Just as Armitage was beginning to worry seriously about these questions, she was fortunate to find, in Judith Wittner, a feminist colleague who was thinking about similar questions within a sociological framework. Thus was forged the second interdisciplinary connection, as the life history tradition in sociology was brought to focus upon the wider questions raised by women's oral history.

The final collaboration brings us together to tell from our originally separate disciplinary perspectives how we have forged an interdisciplinary approach to the oral history of women's lives.

Theoretical Framework

Recent feminist scholarship has been sharply critical of the systematic bias in academic disciplines, which have been dominated by the particular and limited interests, perspectives, and experiences of white males. Feminist scholars have insisted that the exploration of women's distinctive experiences is an essential step in restoring "the multitude of both female and male realities and interests" to social theory and research.³

Assembling women's perspectives seemed necessary to feminist scholars because women's experiences and realities have been systematically different from men's in crucial ways and therefore needed to be studied to fill large gaps in knowledge. This reconstitution of knowledge was essential because of a basic discontinuity: women's perspectives were not absent simply as a result of oversight but had been suppressed, trivialized, ignored, or reduced to the status of gossip and folk wisdom by dominant research traditions institutionalized in academic settings and in scientific disciplines. Critical analyses of this knowledge often showed that masculinist biases lurked beneath the claims of social science and history to objectivity, universal relevance, and truth.⁴

The injunction to study women's realities and perspectives raised methodological as well as substantive issues. Dominant ideologies distorted and made invisible women's real activities, to women as well as to men. For example, until recently it was common for women to dismiss housework as "not real work." Yet, unlike most men, women also experienced housework as actual labor, as a practical activity that filled their daily existence. In effect, women's perspectives combined two separate consciousnesses: one emerging out of their practical activities in the everyday world and one inherited from the dominant traditions of thought. Reconstructing knowledge to take account of women, therefore, involves seeking out the submerged consciousness of the practical knowledge of everyday life and linking it to the dominant reality.

The perspectives of two feminist scholars, Marcia Westkott and Dorothy Smith, have especially influenced our thinking about oral history. Westkott provides us with a basic approach to individual consciousness. She describes how traditional social science assumes a fit between an individual's thought and action, "based on the condition of freedom to implement consciousness through direct activity." But within a patriarchal society, only males of a certain race or class have anything approaching this freedom. Social and political constraints customarily have limited women's freedom; thus in order to adapt to society while retaining their psychological integrity women must simultaneously conform to and oppose the conditions that limit their freedom.⁵

In order to understand women in a society that limits their choices, we must begin with the assumption that what they think may not always be reflected in what they do and how they act. Studying women's behavior alone gives an incomplete picture of their lives, and the missing aspect may be the most interesting and informative. So we must study consciousness, women's sphere of greatest freedom; one must go behind the veil of outwardly conforming activity to understand what particular behavior means to her, and reciprocally to understand how her behavior affects her consciousness and activity.⁶

Dorothy Smith has argued that feminist sociology must "begin where we are" with real, concrete people and their actual lives if it is to do more than reaffirm the dominant ideologies about women and their place in the world. Smith suggests examining how these ideological forms structure institutions and shape everyday life; her "institutional ethnography" begins with the actual daily lives of women and moves from there to examine how their activities appear in organizational processes. As an example, Smith examines the articulation of two forms of women's work, mothering and teaching, to show in what ways the organizational processes of institutionalized education organize how women in these positions work with children, and the effect of institutional education in standardizing their activities, making them "accountable within the institutional context," and rendering invisible any education work that cannot be accounted for within the documentary record.⁷

From the point of view of feminist scholarship on women, therefore, oral history should involve more than simply gathering accounts from informants, itself a difficult process involving considerable skill. These bits of evidence we collect—subjectively reconstructed lives—contain within them formidable problems of interpretation. What theoretical conclusions to draw from these accounts is the additional and enormous task that oral historians face. Using the insights provided by feminist scholars, we explore in the following pages what it means to develop in oral history a feminist methodology situated in women's experiences and perspectives.

The Problem of Meaning (Kathryn Anderson)

As I was interviewing women in Whatcom County for the Washington Women's Heritage Project, a public archive, my colleague Dana Jack was conducting confidential interviews with depressed women for a study of women's development. In the process of sharing what we were learning about women from their interviews, both of us gained valuable insights as to how women understand their lives.⁸

I became aware, as I reviewed my early interviews, that my research questions were more sophisticated than my interview questions; I had not probed deeply enough or listened attentively enough to satisfy my curiosity about how women interpret their existence.

Why have not historians, and especially historians of women, pursued the subjective experience of the past more rigorously? My own interviews and those of others show a definite preference for questions about activities and facts and a conspicuous lack of questions about feelings, attitudes, values, and meaning. Traditional historical sources tell us more about what happened and how it happened than how people felt about it and what it meant to them. As historians, we are trained to interpret meaning from facts. But oral history gives us the unique opportunity to ask people directly, How did it feel? What did it mean?

Activity is, undeniably, important to document; but a story restricted to action and things is incomplete. Oral history can tell us not only how people preserved meat but whether the process was fun or drudgery, whether it was accompanied by a sense of pride or failure. The unadorned story of what people did tells us more about the limitations under which they operated than the choices they might have made. With oral history we can go further, we can ask what the person would rather have been doing.

Reviewing my interviews, I have found that my training in the history of facts and action triumphed over my awareness of a decade of historical research pointing to the importance of relationships and consciousness in women's lives and kept me from hearing the reflections that women were clearly willing to share.

Although I asked what seemed at the time to be enlightened questions about relationships, I now see how often I shied away from emotionally laden language to more neutral questions about activity. My first interview with Elizabeth illustrates the point. We had been talking about her relationships with her mother and half sister when she offered the following:

I practically had a nervous breakdown when I discovered my sister had cancer, you know; it was kind of like knocking the pins—and I had, after the second boy was born, I just had ill health for quite a few years. I evidently had a low grade blood infection or something. Because I was very thin and, of course, I kept working hard. And every fall, why, I'd generally spend a month or so being sick—from overdoing, probably.

Instead of acknowledging and exploring further her reflections upon the physical and mental strains of her multiple roles, my next question followed my imperative for detailing her role on the farm: "What k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART TWO EXEMPLARY READINGS
• 4 Beginning Where We Are: Feminist Methodology in Oral History
• List of Contributors