Family History and Oral History

Abstract

For three years I have been using family history in my women's history classes. I ask students to use oral history techniques and interview the oldest women in their families. We tend to have three groups of women to study--those born at the end of the nineteenth century, those born in the early twentieth century, and those born after World War I. The class breaks down into small groups according to these age divisions, so that students can compare cross-cultural differences. Then we come back together to pick out parts of our collective histories for further examination and analysis. Here at New Mexico State University students are approximately 20 percent Chicano, 3 percent Native American, 2 percent Black, and 75 percent Anglo. The women's history class tends to have about the same proportions. Most of the students come from working-class or lower middle-class families. They have begun to impress their families (and themselves) with the importance of knowing and understanding their cultures and have begun to talk to each other about the difficulties their families have had working to survive, instead of being embarrassed that their families did not fit into some abstract ideal of the middleclass American family. For students, studying family history brings history down to a very personal level. It encourages contact with older women and an understanding of their lives. It also allows students to see how an individual family was organized, how persons interacted within it, and particularly how the women functioned within it--what their status, duties, and powers were within the household. The student can see how these family relations changed over time. Each woman participates in at least two, or even three generations-her mother's, her own, and possibly the next generation. What she remembers of her own mother's life as she was growing up and how she relates this to her own childhood and youth may then be contrasted with her own adult life and perhaps to her children's experiences. The intersection over time of one woman's life with a family reveals important ways in which women react to change and how change affects their lives. These lives can then be contrasted in the classroom with larger generalizations about women's lives during the period to see how they differed. Oral history is the core of all family history. By utilizing oral history in the classroom, students can learn to use it self-consciously as a method rather than as just a means to gather content. Family history provides an easy access to the experiences of women. Through this process, students can learn about and practice oral history skills with a woman who is known and special to them. Their work often results in precious tapes and biographies which are passed on to other family members and preserved for later generations. In fact, the response of the students to these family history projects has been overwhelmingly enthusiastic. For some granddaughters, it has been the first real contact with the lives of their grandmothers. Mothers and daughters have talked about women's role in their families and about family problems which they had avoided discussing before, sometimes because they did not know quite how to raise the subject with each other. The