Abstract
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.
Highlights
Sugandha Agarwal School of Communication Simon Fraser University Abstract Feminist historians (Kelly, 1984; Scott, 1998) have argued that documented History is inherently ‘masculine’ and marginalizes women’s life experiences
Following Sangster (1994), this paper argues the significance of oral history as a feminist methodology in documenting and surfacing the experiences of women
Of the paper, I draw on Mary Maynard (1994) to outline the tenets of a “feminist” methodology and examine how feminist oral history fits within this framework
Summary
Sugandha Agarwal School of Communication Simon Fraser University Abstract Feminist historians (Kelly, 1984; Scott, 1998) have argued that documented History is inherently ‘masculine’ and marginalizes women’s life experiences. Scott claims that the manner in which this new history would both include and account for women’s experiences would in turn rely on the extent to which ‘gender’, defined “as a way of referring to the social organization of the relationship between the sexes” (Scott, 1988, 28) by feminists, could be developed into an analytic category.
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