What's in a Butter Churn? Objects and Women's Oral History

Abstract

An object, such as a butter churn, can provide the starting point for many insights into women's history. By its very presence it symbolizes women's past. There is the churn, a material object, and it becomes a metaphor for the hours women spent at that churn raising and lowering the dasher. But an object like a butter churn can be even more valuable when combined with oral history. Oral history can provide the context for the use of the churn. The churn, on the other hand, can provide a context for women's memories of their work. With the help of oral history, a historian can begin to describe the function of the object, the skills a woman needed to use it, the environment within which she used it, and finally, the feelings she had about it. With the help of objects, in turn, an historian can draw a woman back into her past, encourage her to remember the objects with which she surrounded herself, and form a bridge with the past. Objects and oral history seem naturally to belong together in the study of women's history. There are several ways in which oral historians can prepare to use this symbiotic relationship to advance women's history. The first is simply being aware of the importance of objects to women's history. Familiarity with a few basic studies can start the oral historian out in the right direction and give her ideas of how to ask and what to ask about objects, artifacts, or material culture-terms all used fairly interchangeably by scholars. Learning about the objects women commonly used in their lives will lead to questions about the artifacts, how they were used, why they were kept, and what they meant to women. Using other women's descriptions of objects and processes, pictures in catalogs, or pictures of women using an object can extend the range of questions an oral historian asks. Mary Johnson's interview of Mary Morrell of Johnson City, Tennessee, is a case in point. Mary Morrell was born in 1892 and spent all her life in the area of east Tennessee where the traditional arts of housewifery survived into the 1960's. Although mining and lumbering have been local industries since the nineteenth century, farming was the dominant economic activity, and families prided themselves on self-sufficiency. In the last quarter century, the old ways have begun to vanish. The influx of industries from the North into Appalachia utterly transformed the region's socioeconomic profile. That change was symbolized in Mrs. Morrell's life by the sale of her farm and her move into her daughter Imogene's home in Johnson City, one of the most densely populated areas of contemporary east Tennessee. While her daughter Imogene worked at a local textile mill, Mrs. Morrell attended to all the household work-cleaning, sewing, cooking, gardening, and laundering. A small woman who dressed immaculately in dresses she continued