Gender and Memory

Luisa Passerini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781351518130
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Gender and Memory brings together contributions from around the world and from a range of disciplines--history and sociology, socio-linguistics and family therapy, literature--to create a volume that confronts all those concerned with autobiographical testimony and narrative, both spoken and written. The fundamental theme is the shaping of memory by gender. This paperback edition includes a new introduction by Selma Leydesdorff, coeditor of the Memory and Narrative series of which this volume is a part.

Are the different ways in which men and women are recalled in public and private memory and the differences in men's and women's own memories of similar experiences, simply reflections of unequal lives in gendered societies, or are they more deeply rooted? The sharply differentiated life experiences of men and women in most human societies, the widespread tendencies for men to dominate in the public sphere and for women's lives to focus on family and household, suggest that these experiences may be reflected in different qualities of memory.

The contributors maintain that memories are gendered, and that the gendering of memory makes a strong impact on the shaping of social spaces and expressive forms as the horizons of memory move from one generation to the next. They argue that in order to understand how memory becomes gendered, we need to travel through the realms of gendered experience and gendered language.

1 Introduction

Selma Leydesdorff, Luisa Passerini and Paul Thompson

We work with memory, and we work with gender. We are aware of a notably strong and rapidly growing feminist scholarship on autobiography, which is the focus of Laura Marcus’s review article in this volume. And intuitively we have felt that there are differences between the ways in which men and women remember. We have all had direct experiences, both in our personal lives and in our research activities, which anecdotally support this feeling. We also know that our intuitions are widely shared. Indeed, it would seem common sense, given the sharply differentiated life experiences of men and women in most human societies, and the very widespread tendencies for men to dominate in the public sphere and for women’s lives to focus on family and household, that these experiences should be reflected in different qualities of memory. Hence, when we hear on the radio a public memory contest, for example about past football scores, or identifying snatches of music, we are not at all surprised if the winner is a man. On the other hand we would be astonished if we came across a couple in which the woman constantly turned to the man to confirm how and when they first met, when their first child was born, when it was weaned, and so on. It rings very true when John Updike writes, as a novelist, of a husband and wife recalling a former summer together, and how her memories ‘danced ahead, calling into color vast faded tracts of that distant experience . . . It made him jealous, her store of explicit memories . . . Their past was so much more vivid to her.’¹

Equally, however, we are very much aware that masculinity and femininity take different forms in different cultural settings, and also that over time they can evolve in rapidly different ways in the same culture, so that the boundaries between them which seem so clear at one moment may become unrecognizable at the next. It is thus extremely important to avoid giving the impression that distinctions between the masculine and the feminine in one place at one time represent transcultural essential gender differences. More than that, while in any given society we should expect to find some broad gender differences in the forms of memory, it is also clear that there is usually great variety within each gender, and indeed, these individual differences may be greater than those between the general tendencies. With this is mind, let us summarize how the question of gender difference in memory has been examined in oral history and other disciplines over the last twenty years.

Oral historians have noted the gendered nature of memory from very early on. Thus in England in the first ‘Women’s History Issue’ of Oral History Catherine Hall wrestled with the apparently contented memories of Birmingham housewives who had never gone out to paid work since they married; while Elizabeth Roberts, equally surprised by the ‘unfeminist’ views of elderly wives in north-western England, sharply reframed her views in reaction to similar responses.² It was almost as if many of these pioneering feminist oral historians found themselves working against the grain: for while the younger generation wanted to rescue from historical oblivion the contributions which older women had made to the public world of work and politics, it seemed that the memories and interests of the older generation themselves were much more focused on the home. Thus when Diana Gittins, during her research on the spread of contraception among working-class women, discovered that Lancashire women who had worked as married women in the textile mills could talk about their time in the mills with much more enthusiasm and detail than when recalling memories of home and family life, she picked them out as a notable exception, closer to the memory style of men.³ And in France a particularly crucial early step in understanding these characteristic gender differences in men’s and women’s memories was taken by Isabelle Bertaux-Wiame when she pointed out how the language with which French men and women told their stories was fundamentally different: men would place themselves at the centre by using the active ‘je’, the grammatical first person, while women tended to speak through the collective ‘on’ or plural ‘nous’.⁴

When we look for evidence to substantiate these impressions, however, it is surprisingly difficult to find. Oral historians themselves have failed to follow up their initial hunches. Similarly, it is only very recently that socio-linguists have begun to examine gender differences systematically. This is surprising, because since the 1970s there has been a strong tradition of Anglo-American feminist critiques—such as Dale Spender’s Man Made Language—of normal linguistic usages as both reflecting and perpetuating male dominance: classically in the inclusive use of ‘he’ to represent both genders, so that the male is assumed as normal and the female as exceptional or deviant. But despite Robin Lakoff’s pioneering suggestions, such work was primarily concerned with gender in its grammatical sense and rarely touched on actual differences in language use between men and women.⁵ More recently, however, there has been a newly revived interest in such issues, as witnessed by the popularity of Deborah Tannen’s memorably witty demonstration in You Just Don’t Understand how men and women’s speech patterns in conversation frequently diverge to the point of non-communication.⁶ The paper with which we open, by Richard Ely and Alyssa McCabe, represents a new application of the socio-linguistic approach to gender and memory. They reach the very important, and for feminists particularly challenging, conclusion that fundamental speech differences in respect of reporting remembered experience emerge extremely early in life. They found that girls made much more extended use of direct quotation, dialogue, and reported speech when they told personal stories. Boys more typically simply summarized and conveyed the gist of a remembered conversation. It seems as if, in contrast to boys, from an early age girls may pay more attention to what others say. The difference seems so early embedded that it is difficult to explain as an effect of socialization. These are, however, conclusions from research on North American adults and children, and we have as yet no indication of how far the same patterns would be found in other cultures and other linguistic groups. For example, preliminary research in a Hindu family in Jahore, India, indicates that not only the women, but also the men subordinate their grammatical individuality, avoiding the active first person and instead normally using the plural form.⁷ They are also, of course, not only from one culture but from a single moment in time: and we know how quickly gender differences in communication can change. For example, for men to discuss personal problems in public would have been far rarer ten years ago than today, when they can even cry publicly in Protestant countries where this would have been scarcely imaginable.

Psychologists of memory have also paid surprisingly little attention to gender until very recently. General reviews of psychological research suggest that no general differences have been found between (presumably North American) men and women in terms of either the accuracy or the vividness of their memories.⁸ More promisingly however, two more focused studies have recently supported the widely held assumption that women can recall personal events more fully and vividly than men.⁹ Again, we should note that they are based entirely on experiments carried out with North American men and women. There is an obvious danger that such research can be misread to suggest that there are fundamental differences between male and female memory, rather than assume an overlapping spectrum of individually different memory forms within a very particular cultural context. So far no research in psychology, or in any other discipline, has yet attempted a cross-cultural study of gender differences in memory.

The failure of oral historians to follow up their initial insights on gender and memory becomes still stranger if we reflect on the developing relationship between oral history and feminist scholarship. Clearly part of the problem has arisen from difficulties in adequately conceptualizing the question of gender and memory. There is of course an immense literature on the use of oral history for women’s history which has been well summarized elsewhere.¹⁰ We may reasonably think of the two movements as ‘growing up together’.¹¹ For both the initial stage in the 1970s was dominated by the idea of rescuing a hidden history. Oral historians were seeking to introduce the missing voices of the unprivileged to create a new ‘history from below’, while feminists wanted to demonstrate the vital role played by women past and present through a reconstruction of the past which for the first time gave adequate attention to the contributions of women. The title of Sheila Rowbotham’s early classic, Hidden from History, could have equally well symbolized both movements.¹² Since then, however, the symbiosis has ceased to be so simple, because both movements have become subtler and more complex in the Western cultures within which they originated, while at the same time spreading geographically with ever more distant ripples over twenty-five years.

One result is an unevenness of the development of oral history and feminist history in different parts of the world. It is no accident that our only contribution on the cultures of the Pacific Rim comes from a Westerner; or that Marina Malysheva presents her chapter on the story of a rural Russian woman as an initial contribution towards a ‘genderization’ of Russian economic, social, and political history which has only recently begun. Equally important, women’s history in Eastern Europe is operating today in the frame of ‘heroes’ and ‘martyrs’ precisely because the contrast it provides with an official history, which from war memorials to school textbooks has been dominated by men, helps in the construction of a basis for cultural resistance. The situation is very much parallel to that of much of the more abundant—and also more diverse—oral history more generally in Latin America, where partly because of the failure of effective paths to change through institutional politics, history becomes in itself a vital field of everyday political struggle.¹³

Paradoxically this very spread to other cultures has had a diametrically opposite impact on North American and European feminism, with its now much more cautious insistence on the cultural diversity of gender difference and the need, before making grand propositions, to take account of what Hannah Arendt has termed ‘plurality’ as a basic feature of the human condition.¹⁴ A recognition of ‘plurality’ alone should warn us against any sweeping assertions on the relationships between gender and memory. We must always allow for the possibility of fundamental differences in gender structures between social classes, ethnic groups, occupations, religions, regions, or nations. This is one of the interests of Ulrike Schuerkens’s chapter here on black women in the Ivory Coast.

Feminism has also become more complex, and the need to recognize ‘plurality’ has become compelling, because it has long ceased in the West to be simply a social and political movement of middle-class women. It has invaded the arts and the economy, and intertwined itself with institutions as diverse as trade unions, abortion and natural birth movements, churches, lesbian and gay pressure groups, professional societies, and political parties right across the spectrum. The sheer diversity of both attitudes to gender and the gender structures and experiences to which these relate have splintered the very category of gender itself. In short, a plurality of viewpoints must always be taken into account in envisaging the politics of gender. And it follows that for us, one of the strengths of this Yearbook is the diversity of perspectives, both in terms of geography and disciplines, which it encompasses.¹⁵

In somewhat different ways, the problems created by geographical dispersion and time lag, and also the growing diversity of possible subject groups, has also affected oral history. More strikingly, feminism and oral history have converged in the development of both methodology and interpretation. Both came very quickly to recognize personal feeling as an important focus of investigation, and to emphasize the significance of everyday patterns of behaviour and experience. Both moved on from discovering the value of qualitative research to challenging the traditional ‘objectivity’ of social science, emphasizing not only the usefulness but the ethical imperatives of empathy. And, more recently, it is feminist researchers who have most effectively focused on the implications of the power imbalance which characterizes the typical interview situation—even when both interviewer and interviewed are women.¹⁶

Perhaps most fundamental of all has been the common move from the emphasis on the discovery of new social realities through hearing hidden voices to a recognition that their subjective dimension is fundamental to understanding them. Certainly it has been crucial to hear female voices, whether in politics or in women’s groups, discussing present or past experiences. The rediscovery of female voices in history has affirmed the need for female voices now, and vice versa. These women’s voices provided a past with which feminists could identify: it felt as if the words of thousands of women were our words, or the words of oppressed groups for whom we were fighting. These spoken histories were considered a new kind of ‘truth’. Although we were aware that oral sources were volatile and ‘subjective’, it seemed sufficient to deal with the problems which arose from them through a careful conventional historical scrutiny of the transcripts. The crucial shift, which began right at the end of the 1970s, was when the subjectivity of oral sources came to be seen as a point of strength, a vital clue to changing consciousness, rather than as an intrinsic weakness.

As subjectivity became one of the core approaches to research in the rapidly expanding field of women’s history in the 1980s, it also became a theme of central concern and interest within the oral history movement. More broadly, the subjectivity of oral sources subsequently served as a paradigm for challenging the uncomplicated validity of any historical source, and beyond that for criticizing the myth of objectivity in history as a discipline, and proposing intersubjectivity in its place.¹⁷ Memory came increasingly to be understood as part of a way of thinking, a form of mentalité, so that the focus of much research shifted to collective forms of memory, with increasing attention given to forms of language and expression: less to what was said, and more to just how stories were narrated. The problem of subjectivity has been rethought as much in feminist theory as in oral history. Debates in these fields have become intertwined and have enriched each other. Much recent research discusses not only questions on the historical past, but also questions about how contemporary society deals with the past. How are stories forgotten, and is it possible to learn more about how a male-defined collective memory is shaped?

Some of those who have posed such questions have been exclusively concerned with theoretical issues, leaving empirical historical research to others. Hence theoretical positions in the debate have too often been discussed as contradictions, while social historians have accused theoreticians of lacking any real interest in historical knowledge. We do not accept such polarization and this volume reflects our belief that any work on memory can be fruitful only when supplemented by empirical work and historical knowledge.¹⁸ Nor do we go along with those who argue that because it is fundamentally subjective, oral memory, like written autobiography, and indeed almost all historical evidence, cannot and should not be used in attempts to reconstruct past experience. We cannot afford to abandon our aim to ‘give voice’ to women’s past experience, not only because it has been the driving force behind the whole project, but also because to do so would be to accept an existing framework of scientific knowledge whose epistemologies systematically marginalize or exclude women.¹⁹

There is, however, provided it is not used in a negative fashion, an important fu...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Gender Differences in Memories for Speech
• 3 The Social Experiences of a Countrywoman in Soviet Russia
• 4 Clubmen and Functionaries: Male Memory in Two Berlin Working-class Neighbourhoods from the 1920s to the 1980s
• 5 Ubiquitous but Invisible: The Presence of Women Singers within a Basque Male Tradition
• 6 Women and the Mafia
• 7 Love and Ambition
• 8 Women in the Ivory Coast: The Intertwining of Memory and Gender
• 9 Gendered Moments and Inscripted Memories
• 10 Male Work and Mill Work
• 11 Remembrance, Romance, and Nation
• 12 Stepchildren’s Memories of Love and Loss
• Review Article