“Feminist historians are still really influential, pushing the boundaries of what oral history can do…” An Interview with Lynn Abrams

Who Tells Our Stories? Marcia M. Gallo (bio) Lauren Jae Gutterman. Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. 328 pp.; ill. ISBN 9780812251746 (cl). Jaime Harker. The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 239 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469643342 (cl); 9781469643359 (pb); 9781469643366 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. 592 pp.; ill. ISBN 9781469641096 (cl); 9781469641102 (pb); 9781469641119 (ebook). E. Patrick Johnson. Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. 256 pp.; ISBN 9781478005902 (cl); 9781478006534 (pb); 9781478007241 (ebook). Four recent books on female same-sex, bisexual, and “quare” desire provide rich opportunities for complicating contemporary accounts of lesbian and feminist history.1 In particular, the three authors reviewed here rely on a diverse set of sources—correspondence, oral histories, family albums and archival documents, journalism, fiction, memoir, fantasy, and LGBTQ+ studies—to expand the life stories we can access. For that alone, we owe them thanks, because all three authors bring to the fore an impressive array of people too often missing from our accounts of women who love women, from the mid-twentieth century through the first decades of the twenty first. Lauren Jae Gutterman is cohost of the “Sexing History” podcast and assistant professor in the American Studies and History Departments at the University of Texas at Austin. Her first book, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire Within Marriage, received the 2019 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians award for a “first book that deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality.” Jaime Harker, the owner of the Violet Valley Bookstore in Water Valley, Mississippi, is a self-described “gay bookstore connoisseur” who operates her business as an especially welcoming place for members of LGBTQ+ communities. [End Page 183] With the publication of her first book in 2018, The Lesbian South: Southern Feminists, the Women in Print Movement, and the Queer Literary Canon, she aims to provide readers with “a literary history of a group of writers who, when remembered at all, tend to be approached in isolation” (16). The author of both Black. Queer. Southern. Women. An Oral History and Honeypot: Black Southern Women Who Love Women, E. Patrick Johnson is the dean of Northwestern University School of Communication and the Carlos Montezuma Professor of Performance Studies and professor of African American Studies at Northwestern. He also was a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Johnson’s first book, Appropriating Blackness: Performance and the Politics of Authenticity (2003), examines how Blackness is appropriated and performed both within and outside African American culture. His second book, Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South—An Oral History (2008) is an ethnographic oral history of the lives of Black gay men in the US South which received the Stonewall Book Award from the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association. Utilizing these oral histories, Johnson also created “Pouring Tea: Black Gay Men of the South Tell Their Tales,” an evocative and spellbinding one-man show which he performed at numerous venues from 2006 to 2013. All three of the authors bring their own experiences to bear on their work, but they all focus on the women whose stories they tell. As a group, they utilize familiar sources to ask new questions about female same-sex desire and enrich the existing archives with new and complex narrators. Three of the books focus specifically on the US South, and all incorporate a range of eras, geographies, races, ethnicities, and class statuses to remind us that social institutions such as marriage connect many women’s lives. Lauren Jae Gutterman’s Her Neighbor’s Wife relies on a number of archives, including the treasure trove of materials in the Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin Collection at the GLBT Historical Society in San Francisco. She also makes good use of oral histories—such as those collected by lesbian scholar Kelly Anderson at...

In 1980, Baltimore Voices, a play written from the transcripts of 200 interviews with elderly working-class Baltimore residents taken as part of the Baltimore Neighborhood Heritage Project (BNHP), was seen by thousands of people in Baltimore and on public television. Created by left-leaning oral and public historians, the play was intended to center the voices of white and African American Baltimore residents. However, Baltimore Voices fumbled its opportunity to present a nuanced past to the public through a cascading series of decisions revolving around the ethical question of who had the authority to interpret the oral histories for the stage play and how to frame them for public audiences. Specifically, the play ignored the role of whiteness in shaping Baltimore’s neighborhood history. Instead, the creators saw individual prejudice as the key issue shaping race relations in the city. They forced the stories of Black Baltimore residents into a white ethnic immigrant narrative frame, eliding the privileges that allowed white immigrants to rise in social status and distorting Black history. And they imagined the oral histories and play as modular, with the goal of presenting the history most palatable to the audience. While the theater company practiced sharing authority by giving BNHP narrators multiple opportunities to give feedback during script development, the question remains: when certain community members are more vocal than others, who gets to represent the community? Using extensive archival material, this article discusses Baltimore Voices as a case study of an oral and public history project during a formative moment for both fields. I suggest that progressive oral and public historians at times abdicated their ethical responsibility to frame and contextualize oral history to present complicated histories to the public. Examining whiteness requires this interpretive perspective because the power of whiteness is in its invisibility.

The food Australians ate immediately prior to the 1950s has been popularly remembered in stark contrast to post-Second World War gastronomic upheaval: as a plain, stodgy, monocultural prelude to the increasing diversity and sophistication of food in the second half of the twentieth century. What cultural values did Australians of the 1930s and 1940s attach to food, however? How were the meanings of food understood and contested within the contemporary context of class relations, economic austerity, ethnic identity, regional variation, and gendered social and family roles? And how was the predominant British-derived ‘meat and three veg’ diet implicated in broader notions of Australia’s cultural development and national progress? This study examines these questions in relation to the food culture of 1930s and 1940s Australia and its disputed remembrance in the post-Second World War decades. There have been many excellent academic and non-scholarly empirical studies of twentieth century Australian eating habits and culinary trends. The intended contribution of this study is to step back from questions of food consumption patterns to explore how mid-twentieth century eating habits interacted with broader cultural meanings and social identities. These questions are important, as they address the wider post-war management of White Australia’s cultural memory and the reassuring role food came to have in national storytelling. Although the multicultural culinary revolution deserves its historical prominence, pre-1950s eating habits are better understood as the product of economic austerity, British cultural dominance and the restriction of women’s labour to the home. When these three factors were eroded in postwar life, the old food culture began its popular association with the perceived sins and simplicity of a fading White Australia. This thesis adopts a cultural history approach, constituting a set of linked, illuminating case studies. The research methodology embraces sources that offer evidence of meaning-making in relation to food: diaries, letters, memoirs, oral histories, contemporary print media and government reports. These sources demonstrate that 1930s and 1940s Australians understood food in complex and contested ways. As much of this source material has yet to be examined by historians of food, it is hoped this study will open new avenues of inquiry in the burgeoning field of Australian food history. This primary research is contextualised within secondary scholarship from the fields of food history, food studies, feminist history, gender studies, migrant history, urban history, oral history, media history, as well as broader works of Australian social and cultural history. This engagement with historiographical questions and traditions beyond the food history field is intended to emphasise the non-culinary significance of food and the broader historical contexts within which issues of food history can be analysed.

This chapter focuses on the personal, social, and historical contexts that shaped Donna Sinclair’s career as a feminist historian. The story of Sinclair’s trek to the 2013 Prelinger Award took root in a divorce that left the former army wife alone with three small children. Returning to school reshaped her identity, provided purpose, and led to her life’s work as an oral and public historian, educator, and social justice advocate. In this essay, Sinclair engages in the self-scrutiny that oral historians so often ask of their narrators. As recommended by Antonia Castaňeda, she digs into “the silences, gaps, and interstitial spaces” of experience to examine her journey to the Prelinger and beyond.

This article recounts the creation of an oral and public history project, “I’m Still Surviving,” which seeks to document, write, and display a women’s history of HIV/AIDS in the United States. Using feminist oral history and decolonial methods for both the collection and interpretation of oral history narratives, the project grounds and amplifies self-determination by women living with HIV/AIDS as it decenters the notions that academic historians are the experts on the history of the epidemic. The goal of the project is to collaborate with women living with HIV/AIDS so that together we can produce a decolonized public history of women’s experiences of surviving HIV/AIDS.

This paper is presented in the form of an interview, encompassing the key voice of Troy Phili, the former Unit Manager for Burial Grounds and Graves, at South African Heritage Resources Agency (SAHRA) between 2005-2013. The paper aims to highlight the distortions in the profiling of Charlotte Maxeke and how this could lead to misrepresentations of her unique role in the struggle. From an oral history perspective, an interview with Troy Phili contributes to the correction of such distortions. Thus, the paper is embedded in this oral testimony. The interview emphasized oral history as a means of correcting historical distortions, as was the case of Troy while working towards the declaration of Maxeke’s gravesite as a national heritage site. This paper also relied on desktop analysis of both primary and secondary sources of data. The authors perceive these tendencies not as seeking to downplay Maxeke’s catalytic life, but how oral history as methodology and technique can be used to rectify historical misrepresentations. The paper contributes to the correction of distortions of representations of Maxeke during the declaration of her gravesite. This adds to the understanding of the historical declaration of gravesites in historicizing the role played by individuals such as Maxeke in South Africa. Keywords: Charlotte Maxeke, Conflicting Memories, Oral History, Liberation History, SAHRA, Social History, Phili Troy

Using biographical narrative and life story methods to research women's movements: Sisterhood and after

This interdisciplinary dissertation examines the life of Mary B. Craik, a Louisvillian who was a professor, feminist activist, philanthropist and artist. The project’s main focus is on Craik’s feminist awakening and activism, and their alignment with second wave feminism. The primary method of data collection was oral history and consisted of interviews with Craik and some of her friends, acquaintances, and colleagues. Additional sources included a scrapbook that documented her major life events, the trial transcript from a gender discrimination lawsuit she launched, and art quilts she made in her later years after she retired. This project examines these resources with historiographies related to feminist social, legal, and art histories serving as a backdrop. After examining the data, it can be determined that Craik’s chronicle not only aligns with second wave feminism, it expands our understanding of the scope of this movement. Her years-long experience with a gender discrimination case that she filed paints a clearer picture of what these legal actions entail, including the toll they extract from plaintiffs. Craik’s case illuminates that these lawsuits can effect positive changes that improve institutional patriarchy, but these gains have limitations, justifying the need for continued legal protections for women who face discrimination. The financial settlement from this case enabled Craik to practice her feminism through philanthropic and artistic endeavors in her later years, which brought Craik considerable positive attention. These activities also provide clues into who Craik was as a person, and what motivated her as a feminist. Her artwork offers compelling evidence that turbulent events from her personal life, including a traumatic childhood, affected her more deeply than she admitted. Finally, this study also provides another example to growing scholarship regarding grassroots activism, broadening our understanding of how widespread feminist activism was throughout the second wave.

A third wave feminist approach to feminist oral history, this research essay blends both the visual and the oral as text. We critique a feminist artist's art along with her words so that her representation can be seen and heard. Focusing on three art pieces, we analyze the artist's body to conceptualize agentic ways to understand the meanings of feminist art and feminist oral history. We offer a third wave feminist approach to feminist oral history as method so that feminists can consider adaptive means for recording oral histories and challenging dominant symbolic order.

While feminist historians have long used oral history, and continue to revise the ways oral sources can be employed, historians of masculinities have been slow to embrace new approaches to oral history. Using interviews conducted with women and men for a community study, this article suggests that a gendered, relational reading of oral history is instructive, not just in showing how different men and women's experiences have been, but also how their memories have been shaped by prevailing ideas of gender-appropriate behaviour and values. This raises the issue of the form as well as the content of oral history being gendered.

Feminist historians (Kelly, 1984; Scott, 1998) have argued that documented History is inherently ‘masculine’ and marginalizes women’s life experiences. In order to bridge this gap in History, feminist oral historians in the 1970s began collecting women’s oral testimonies to highlight their subjective experiences (Patai and Gluck, 1990). Building on existing scholarship, this paper argues that oral history as a methodology is indispensable in a feminist re-writing of history. It analyzes oral histories conducted by Indian feminist historians with women survivors of India’s Partition. The first section uses a gendered historical lens to argue that feminist oral history is crucial to writing a women’s history. The second section outlines what constitutes as a feminist methodology to envision what women’s history should look like. The final section examines the difficulties of working with oral testimonies. The objective of this study is two-fold: examining non-hierarchical ways of researching through feminist oral history and drawing attention to oral narratives in the global south.

While feminist historians have long used oral history, and continue to revise the ways oral sources can be employed, historians of masculinities have been slow to embrace new approaches to oral history.Using interviews conducted with women and men for a community study, this article suggests that a gendered, relational reading of oral history is instructive, not just in showing how different men and women's experiences have been, but also how their memories have been shaped by prevailing ideas of gender-appropriate behaviour and values.This raises the issue of the form as well as the content of oral history being gendered.

This chapter explores how engaging feminist pedagogies in a faculty-led, student-driven oral history project can advance social justice learning. Using the case study of Histories of Choice, in which undergraduates interview women and men about their experiences with abortion pre- and post-Roe v. Wade, the authors argue that the application of feminist pedagogies to oral history disrupts conventional interviewer–narrator hierarchies and creates opportunities for developing critical historical thinking and research skills among students. The chapter details the pedagogical and methodological choices that structure each stage of the project, including the recruitment and training of students; locating and interviewing narrators; and transcribing, analyzing, and archiving data. The chapter shows how participation in Histories of Choice pushes students to develop a rich, visceral understanding of reproductive rights history and its relevance for future generations and empowers students to uncover the radical potential of oral history.

The Cambridge Women's Oral History Project was designed to give voice to people whose stories are least recorded in traditional historical sources-working women from many cultural communities. Carried out in 1980 and 1981, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy, and with the sponsorship of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Arts Council, CWOHP involved over 100 local residents in the preservation and analysis of community women's history. Project participants, who were mostly women, ranged in age from twelve to 100 and represented nearly every cultural group in the city. Participants completed oral history interviews of thirty older women above the age of sixty and produced a slide-tape presentation as well as a visual portfolio that includes portraits of the narrators, excerpts from the interviews and historical photographs. The interviews were conducted primarily by women of high school age. Since 1980, several community celebrations have drawn over 1,000 participants and supporters, and over 300 local groups have participated in discussions and workshops based on the slide-tape presentations. In a subsequent project women and girls created two vibrant appliqued quilts, each of the fifty-two blocks documenting a woman active at work or play. These activities created a community base for the Cambridge Oral History Center, an organization committed to the development and dissemination of multicultural and feminist social history.1 The Center is providing resources to twenty oral history projects initiated by individuals and groups in the greater Boston area.

Pre-baby boom women's attitudes and responses to second wave feminism in Ireland