Beyond Women's Words

Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century

Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, Franca Iacovetta, Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, Franca Iacovetta

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351123808
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Beyond Women's Words unites feminist scholars, artists, and community activists working with the stories of women and other historically marginalized subjects to address the contributions and challenges of doing feminist oral history.

Feminists who work with oral history methods want to tell stories that matter. They know, too, that the telling of those stories—the processes by which they are generated and recorded, and the different contexts in which they are shared and interpreted—also matters—a lot. Using Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai's classic text, Women's Words, as a platform to reflect on how feminisms, broadly defined, have influenced, and continue to influence, the wider field of oral history, this remarkable collection brings together an international, multi-generational, and multidisciplinary line-up of authors whose work highlights the great variety in understandings of, and approaches to, feminist oral histories.

Through five thematic sections, the volume considers Indigenous modes of storytelling, feminism in diverse locales around the globe, different theoretical approaches, oral history as performance, digital oral history, and oral history as community-engagement. Beyond Women's Words is ideal for students of oral history, anthropology, public history, women's and gender history, and Women's and Gender Studies, as well as activists, artists, and community-engaged practitioners.

Section 1

Reflections on women’s words

DOI: 10.4324/9781351123822-32

Introduction to Section 1

Reflections on women’s words

Linda Shopes

DOI: 10.4324/9781351123822-2

The obvious questions to ask when reading Beyond Women’s Words are in what ways do the essays go “beyond” the earlier eponymous volume and what do these “beyonds” tell us about changes in feminist oral history, or as the subtitle of the previous volume put it, “the feminist practice of oral history,” in the intervening quarter-plus century? The five chapters in this first section suggest some answers, not incidentally because three of them are written by scholars whose work also appeared in the first Women’s Words.¹ It is to these we turn first.

The section begins appropriately enough with Katherine Borland’s reprise of her original Women’s Words contribution, “That’s Not What I Said.” In that chapter, she discussed how she and her grandmother, Beatrice Hanson, resolved disagreement over Borland’s interpretation of her interview with Hanson, particularly her imposition of a feminist analysis on certain elements of Hanson’s story, a perspective and a movement with which Hanson did not identify. The chapter raised important questions about interpretive authority in oral history, and while Borland maintained that oral historians need not have their work “validated by our research collaborators,” she did conclude by suggesting that we might “re-envision the fieldwork exchange” to include explicit discussion of meaning.² Borland has not changed her mind about this in the intervening years. What has changed, however, is the way she now frames issues of interpretive authority. In line with oral historians’ more recent attention to cultural theory, including the work of George Herbert Mead and Mikhail Bakhtin, she argues that social interaction, performed through language—what oral historians sometimes refer to as intersubjectivity—is a continuous process of identity formation; consequently, “[t]he self in narrative becomes not an essence to be uncovered but a matter of narrative positioning in a specific context for a particular end.”³ Interpretive differences are thus not a problem to be solved but intrinsic to the active process of talk. Accordingly, whether or not Hanson was a feminist is not the issue, exploring points of difference is.

The section concludes with Rina Benmayor’s chapter about teaching digital storytelling to undergraduates, many the children of Mexican migrants, in a Latina Life Stories class at a California public university. Similar to Borland’s work, it both resonates with and differs from themes in her essay in the earlier volume. Though the students and settings are different—in the earlier case, participants in a Spanish-speaking adult literacy program at Hunter College’s Center for Puerto Rican Studies in New York City—both chapters consider oral history within a continuum of first-person narrative forms; both affirm that a pedagogy employing these narrative forms can sharpen students’ sense of identity and encourage personal empowerment; both link students’ work to testimony, or testimonio in the Latin American tradition, which seeks to connect the personal to a broader social critique as a step towards change; both locate gender within a range of social identities and structures, assuming rather than interrogating a feminist perspective. As with Borland, where the two chapters differ is in interpretive perspective, also reflecting broader shifts in oral historiography. The earlier piece is situated within Freirian notions of popular education, which aimed at “reciprocity and mutual ‘returns’” between researchers and communities of study as a way to disrupt the unequal power relations characteristic of traditional modes of social research, ideas that underlay numerous community-based oral history projects in the 1980s.⁴ The current chapter, however, focuses on “the centrality of emotion,” as well as the role of voice and image, in the pedagogical practices described.⁵ If it is memory that shapes stories, then it is emotion, Benmayor suggests, that unlocks memories.

The third repeat author, Daphne Patai, whose chapter “When is enough enough?” is also the third in this section, reiterates the similar/different dynamic of the previous two. Her earlier piece was a bracing reflection on certain dilemmas of feminist oral history based on her own experience interviewing third world women: attempting to address inequality while operating from a position of privilege; the limits of informed consent, narrator empowerment, and “returning the research” once the researcher goes home to do her work; a tendency towards the emotional seduction of narrators, raising unmet expectations among them; the “fraud” of a “purported solidarity of female identity.” For Patai, there is no resolution to these dilemmas. They are embedded in structural inequalities that lie beyond the realm of individual research; one simply carries on as best one can.⁶ The current chapter speaks with a sharper contrarian voice and steps outside the feminist frame to critique much of the current oral history enterprise including an excessive focus on identity, often accompanied by inflated claims of “methodological innovation and theoretical sophistication”; a privileging of reflexivity over content; and the subordination of empirical research to political commitments and the conflation of empirical accuracy with narrative truth.⁷ There are savvy warnings here, but Patai’s work overreaches, belied by Borland’s and Benmayor’s. For Borland, identity and narrative are intrinsic to an interview’s epistemology, not categories that, as Patai suggests, can stand outside it. And Benmayor demonstrates how a carefully developed, methodologically innovative practice focused on identity and grounded in a specific set of circumstances can be non-exploitative and empowering, while also reaching outward to broader theoretical concerns.

But what of the two newcomers to the volume, if not to oral history? In what ways do they go “beyond” the earlier Women’s Words, and in what ways does it matter? Sanchia deSouza’s and Jyothsna Latha Belliappa’s “The positionality of narrators and interviewers: Methodological comments on oral history with Anglo-Indian schoolteachers in Bangalore, India,” the second chapter in this section, suggests a couple of answers. Admittedly, its problematization of the positionality of interviewers vis-à-vis narrators and related ethical issues echoes themes taken up in the original volume and in feminist oral history more generally. The piece’s primary value lies in its subject, which extends beyond the geographic range and social identities of narrators discussed in the original Women’s Words.⁸ And that matters because it speaks to the internationalization of oral history in the last quarter century—and expands the knowledge of readers like me by introducing an unfamiliar female experience. But the authors also note an equally important, more localized value to their interviews with teachers: it is a response to the call of scholars of education in India to address the “insufficient attention paid to teachers’ rich perspectives and experiences.”⁹ Content, in this case, matters.

The final chapter under discussion and the fourth in this section is Kathleen Blee’s “Feminist oral histories of racist women,” theoretical reflections on her studies of women who are former members of white supremacist groups in the United States including the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and more recent neo-Nazi and white power skinhead groups. As Blee suggests, the very subject of her work falls outside mainstream feminist oral history, with its overwhelming focus on women with whom we presume to share—despite real and acknowledged differences (a la Borland, e.g.)—a certain sisterhood, whose experience we value, even valorize, whose voices we wish to amplify, and whom we wish to restore to the mainstream of history. The subject of Blee’s work challenges these assumptions and leads her to identify two analytic tools that advance a feminist approach to her interviews and by extension are more widely applicable to feminist oral history: master status and trauma. The former, a concept from sociology, refers to a status or identity that trumps all others, in her case “racist,” leading to an inquiry that tends to skew certain aspects of identity and experience while ignoring others. Combining the category of gender with that of racist thus complicates the story. The latter concept, trauma, which Blee defines as “those experiences that alter a person’s (or a societal) identity in deep and seemingly irrevocable ways,” is a pathway to understanding women’s involvements in racial extremism.¹⁰ Taken together, Blee avers, notions of master status and trauma can help create the analytic space to approach interviews that in their subject matter demand not simply the empathy characteristic of much feminist oral history, but also a critical distance.

How then might these five chapters collectively address the questions posed at the beginning of this Introduction? Certainly older themes and issues continue to resonate with and trouble our work. But what we are also seeing are multiple layers of integration into the ambit of feminist oral history: integration of more diverse subjects, extending the range of our inquiries; of new theoretical approaches, reflecting broader intellectual developments and giving our work greater depth; and of a more mature, less insistent feminism, assimilating with greater ease into our analytic repertoire. Historians do not predict the future, but what we have here is evidence of a field’s and a practice’s continuity with its past, expansiveness in its present, and a vitality that suggests optimism for its future.

Notes

1 Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, eds., Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (New York: Routledge, 1991).

2 Katherine Borland, “‘That’s Not What I Said’: Interpretive Conflict in Oral Narrative Research,” in Women’s Words, 63–75; quoted material on 73, 74.

3 Katherine Borland, Chapter 1 of this volume, 33.

4 Rina Benmayor, “Testimony, Action Research, and Empowerment: Puerto Rican Women and Popular Education,” in Women’s Words, 159–174; quoted material on 160.

5 Rina Benmayor, Chapter 5 of this volume, 64.

6 Daphne Patai, “U.S. Academics and Third World Women: Is Ethical Research Possible?” in Women’s Words, 137–153; quoted material on 144.

7 Daphne Patai, Chapter 3 of this volume, 48.

8 While the original Women’s Words was exceptional for its time in incorporating work from around the globe (by my calculation, 23 per cent of the chapters were about oral history practiced in non-Western countries, and an additional 15 per cent in Europe) and chapters in the current volume, reflecting the intersectional identities of our age, are harder to categorize, it is nonetheless true that the book in hand reflects a greater range of experiences.

9 Sanchia deSouza and Jyothsna Latha Belliappa, Chapter 2 of this volume, 40.

10 Kathleen Blee, Chapter 4 of this volume, 59.

1 “That’s not what I said”

A reprise 25 years on

Katherine Borland

DOI: 10.4324/9781351123822-3

On 4 August 1944, 35-year-old Beatrice Hanson put on a pale, eggshell-colored gabardine dress with big gold buttons down the side, a huge pancake-black hat, and elbow-length gloves, and off she went with her father to see the sulky (harness) races at the Bangor fairgrounds. The events that ensued produced a lively wrangle between father and daughter as they vied to pick the winner, and that night, bubbling over with enthusiasm, Bea recounted the story to her two adolescent daughters. Two days later, Bea wrote to her husband, Frank, who was serving overseas, to tell him about it. Somewhere between 1950 and 1983 she revised the letter slightly and included it in an epistolary novel (never published) about their lives during the war. In 1985, as we passed a racetrack while driving down the New Jersey Turnpike, Bea was reminded of how much she enjoyed horseracing and told me the story. A year later, on 28 December, my sister, her husband, Frank, and I were treated to a highly structured and thoroughly entertaining narrative that I recorded for later transcription and analysis.

My grandmother and I were delighted to be working together—until I sent her a copy of the essay I had written for my graduate class in folklore and performance the following fall. On 22 January 1988, I received a typed, 13-page, single-spaced rebuttal of my feminist interpretation of the story. Insisting that she was not and never had been a feminist, Bea wrote:

So your interpretation of the story as a female struggle for autonomy within a hostile male environment is entirely YOUR interpretation. You’ve read into the story what you wished—what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Biographies
• Preface and acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• SECTION 1: Reflections on women’s words
• SECTION 2: Doing feminist oral history then and now
• SECTION 3: Decentering and decolonizing in feminist oral history
• SECTION 4: Feminists in the field: Performance, political activism, and community engagement
• SECTION 5: Listening to and learning from stories in the digital world
• Index