Sisterhood and After: Individualism, Ethics and an Oral History of the Women's Liberation Movement

Abstract

In this article, we address the question of ethics in the study of social movements from the perspective of ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project’, which will record life history interviews of 50 key activists in the UK for the British Library Sound Archive. Our research is inspired by the democratic ideals of oral historical methods and of feminism itself, yet we have discovered tensions concerning the status of individual experience and the practicalities of selection and method. Turning to other feminist scholars of women's movements we identify four broad justifications for focusing on the individual: a political understanding of the personal; situated knowledge; an investment in interview relationships and a psycho-social framework of analysis. Testing these justifications against some of the oral histories we have gathered, we conclude that they go a long way to answering the paradox of studying a movement through a few individuals' stories. But we are frank about the ethical and intellectual limits that a life history method imposes on capturing social movements. Examples from interviews with Mia Morris, Beatrix Campbell, Lesley Abdela, Ellen Malos and Juliet Mitchell will illuminate the history at stake.