Oral History In Teaching Women’s Studies

Abstract

Women's Studies is an exciting, fast-developing area of scholarship and teaching, which asks new questions and looks for answers to these questions in new places. It is broadly eclectic, putting together insights and approaches from different disciplines as they are useful or necessary. Moreover, Women's Studies, as the academic offspring of the women's movement, is centrally committed to using the new knowledge to shape, deepen, and strengthen advocacy of social and political change. Women's Studies classes provide a place for students to sort through their own responses to issues raised by the women's movement, often together with people who are confused about their own views and values or outright antagonistic to one or another set of ideas about sex roles, sex differences, the desirability of social change, and what form it might take. In this atmosphere of (at best) high passion and tension, it is important to keep rhetoric, either feminist or traditionalist, from floating free of facts. All generalizations and beliefs about roles, sex differences, and women's and men's history must be doubted until tested. primary value of oral history in this context is in showing the living, human reality that must be understood and accounted for. Oral history is particularly well-suited for inclusion in women's history curricula because it attempts to articulate a past for those people who may not have been articulate themselves. Mary Ryan elaborates on the special nature of women's history: The investigation of womanhood leads to a unique encounter with the past, undertaken on novel premises and requiring special historical methods. This is necessary because women have been consistently