In Pursuit of Life Histories: The Problem of Bias

Abstract

Before beginning a critical look at the process of collecting life histories I need to give a definition of a life history and say a few words in promotion of their use. A life history, as I am using the term here, is a type of oral history embodying the story of a person's life constructed by a researcher from the informant's oral account. If the goal of oral history, or oral traditions, is often to establish what really happened by collecting and comparing various accounts of events, the goal of a life history is somewhat different. A life history differs both from an autobiography, which is a first-person written account of a person's own life, and from a biography, which is a thirdperson written account of a person's life based on written and sometimes oral materials. Biographies are usually written after the death of the subject; life histories can come only from the living. The goal of a life history collector is to present a sample of the type of life lived by the people being studied. Thus subjects are not chosen on the basis of outstanding unique characteristics, as is usually the case with the subjects of biographies or autobiographies. But life histories can be just as extensive as biographies, two of the best examples being Ida Pruitt's Daughter of Han, the story of a Chinese woman, Ning Lao T'ai-t'ai, and Mary Smith's Baba of Karo, the history of a Hausa woman of northern Nigeria. Life histories, then, are a prime tool for the social historian, in particular. They are invaluable for research not only in societies where most people are illiterate, but also where they are literate. Life histories are especially useful for studying the sorts of people whose history otherwise often gets lost. We will know very little in the future about the lives of most of the women alive in the world today without collecting their life histories, because most women are illiterate and come from countries where few or no reliable statistics are kept. Even in the United States today approximately 20 percent of the adult population is functionally illiterate, although the official count of illiterate persons is only 1 percent of the population. Thus, if women's history is to be more than the study of elites, whether white middleand upper-class, American and European, or non-western women, we must use life histories. They are not only the stuff of family, social, and economic history, but also have relevance for local, political, and military history and the history of medicine and science. In short, we can considerably improve our grasp of all sorts of history by collecting life histories. And we must collect them now among old people before they re all lost to us.