Women's Oral History Research Articles

Special Topics in Women's Oral History: Towards an Inclusive History of U.S. Feminist Activism

Research Article| May 01 1996 Special Topics in Women's Oral History: Towards an Inclusive History of U.S. Feminist Activism Sherna Berger Gluck Sherna Berger Gluck Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Radical History Review (1996) 1996 (65): 142–147. https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1996-65-142 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sherna Berger Gluck; Special Topics in Women's Oral History: Towards an Inclusive History of U.S. Feminist Activism. Radical History Review 1 May 1996; 1996 (65): 142–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1996-65-142 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsRadical History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1996 by MARHO: The Radical Historians' Organization, Inc.1996 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Teaching Radical History You do not currently have access to this content.

Women's history, oral history and active learning: an experience from southern England

Abstract This article aims to open up a discussion on teaching methodologies in history and women's studies, particularly in relation to oral history as a form of ‘active learning’. It contains an account of a course in which a group of third-year history students undertook a joint research project on domesticity in Britain in the 1930s and the 1950s.

Women's history, oral history and active learning: an experience from southern england

women's history, oral history and active learning: an experience from southern england

The Problems, Difficulties and Advantages of Women's Oral History in Rural Society

My introduction to women's oral history in rural Lincolnshire came about as a result of my joining a local Workers’ Education Association class, entitled ‘Women's role’ My interests finally resulted in the book We Didn't Know Aught: a Study of Sexuality, Superstition and Death in Women's Lives in Lincolnshire During the 1930s, '40s and '50s. My background and approach were in some ways unlike the normal ‘academic’ ones, and so it may be worth initially recounting to readers how this study developed, before discussing some of the difficulties in considering a range of topics that often raised many sensitive and moral issues.

To live a better life: an oral history of women in the city of Harare, 1930-70

To live a better life: an oral history of women in the city of Harare, 1930-70

Challenging the imbalances of power in feminist oral history: Developing a take-and-give methodology

Synopsis For decades, feminists have been arguing that oral histories of women are empowering for all those involved. They provide a voice for women whose stories would otherwise go unrecorded and offer readers personal stories of and insights about groups of women they might not otherwise meet. They provide feminist researchers with a way to uncover significant information about women and to further political causes by weaving women's stories into a narrative. Recently, however, practitioners have begun to question the ethics of oral history work. Arguably, researchers have far more to gain in this process than respondents do. This article explores several ethical issues and suggests that any oral history project should begin by asking what the researcher will do to compensate respondents for the information they provide, in an effort to acknowledge, address, and minimize the inherent imbalances of power and of benefits.

The Black women oral history project: from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the history of women in America, Radcliffe College

The Black women oral history project: from the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the history of women in America, Radcliffe College

Peacework: oral histories of women peace activists

Peacework: oral histories of women peace activists

Editors' Note and Acknowledgements

Editors' Note and Acknowledgements This issue is the second of two special issues (the first was Vol. 1 No. 2, Fall 1989) on women in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, which we have co-edited. We feel it is both academically and politically important for a journal concerned with women's history to strive to present materials that reflect the various classes, races, ethnicities, religions and nationalities of which women are members. It has been a pleasure to participate in implementing this ideal with the Journal of Women's History. In this issue Janaki Nair examines the constructions of Indian womanhood in the thought of Englishwomen who accompanied officials of the Raj or who were missionaries, employees or travelers in their own right. In asserting that these women (directly or indirectly) enjoyed privilege and power vis-a-vis Indian women she seeks to locate their visions of Indian womanhood at the intersection of two sets of discourses: the growing resistance in India to British imperialism and the changing configuration of forces in the feminist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Michelle Maskiell also examines gender under the Raj, but as a crucial variable, along with kinship and the state, in the labor relationships of colonial Punjab. She argues that economic changes accelerated by the policies of the colonial government and the activities of indigenous elites contracted wage work opportunities for women at the same time as they were expanding for men. Also evaluating discourse, E. Frances White analyzes the way AfricanAmericans use the African past to construct a counter discourse against racist ideology and oppression. While the political memory of the African past is used to foster pride, she argues that it is also used to shape and judge gender relations among black people in ways that can be confining and conservative even as a radical stance towards racist oppression is maintained . In Latin America René De La Pedraja Toman looks at the expansion of women's roles in organizations in Colombia between 1900-40. From participation in only religious and educational associations in 1900 women became active in a broader spectrum of philanthropic, civic and cultural groups and eventually labor union activity. He credits the Catholic Church with playing an important role in legitimizing female entry into previously male preserves. Also in Latin America Mary Kay Vaughan, utilizing the life histories of three women school teachers, focusses on the interaction between the © 1990 Journal of Women-s History, Vol. 2 No. 1 (Spring) 1990 EDITORS' Note 7 individual, socio-political movements, and state formation during the Mexican Revolution. Moving to Africa, Karen Hansen brings cultural and ideological factors to bear on an explanation of why domestic service was constructed primarily in male gender terms during the colonial period in Zambia, and the legacy of that practice in the present. She delineates historically how and why African women's gender became constructed in sexual terms which made colonial white women reluctant to employ them, but rather prefer African men, as household servants. Important and exciting aspects of women's history, particularly in the nonwestern world but also among certain classes of women in the western world, is often based on and /or incorporates oral evidence. Susan Geiger discusses the relationship between doing women's oral history and a feminist understanding and approach. She argues that many issues must be addressed for oral history research with women to be considered a feminist methodology. Embedded in her approach to the development of a feminist methodology is a critique of several concepts common in social science research which have tended to undercut the serious consideration of oral accounts and more particularly, women's oral accounts. These two special issues have not been done in the interest of consigning certain women's histories to a "special topics" focus, a cursory glance once in awhile outside the "mainstream." Rather, the attempt has been to highlight the important work being done, both for its own sake, and for comparative purposes. The Journal maintains a serious commitment to the publication of women's history in the entire world. Cheryl Johnson-Odim Margaret Strobel Special issue co-editors ...

What's So Feminist About Women's Oral History?

What's So Feminist About Women's Oral History?

Oral Histories of Women

Oral Histories of Women

Oral Histories of Women

Oral Histories of Women

Oral Histories of Women

Oral Histories of Women

Women's Oral History in the Classroom: Three Views on Sources

When I began teaching women's studies in 1974, there were no materials in what we now proudly identify as women's oral history-oral history that, guided by a feminist sensibility, leads us to an examination of women's lives, consciousness, values. Except for the work of the Bancroft Library, there were not even many available oral histories of women. Additionally, methodological articles and books never addressed the special nature of women's oral history. In those early days, I relied on several standard methodological sources: Willa Baum's booklet on local history, Norman Hoyle's article, and Lewis Dexter's book on specialized interviewing. Now, almost ten years later, there is a growing body of literature in/on women's oral history, including methodological articles and guides, published interviews, and documentary films. I draw on the full range of these materials, in different ways for different classes and different purposes. First, when I offer students the option of an oral history as a class project, in any number of classes, I insist that they read my own methodological article in the Special Issue of FRONTIERS (Women's History, 2, No. 2). This, combined with the various topical outlines published in that issue, provides them with a good basis. (In the one-unit Oral History Methods class which I teach, I rely heavily on Edward Ives, assigning my own article as a supplementary reading.) I also suggest to students that they review the entire FRONTIERS issue so that they are exposed to the various ways that oral history can be used. Their oral histories, which are the basis for an interpretive paper, have been consistently good. Second, because we lack extensive social history documents for the study of women's everyday lifeparticularly the lives of working-class women and women of color-oral history provides much of the reading for my course, Women's Lives (an interdisciplinary course on the lives of women in the United States from the eighteenth century to the present). It is especially valuable as a means of examining the lives of Latina, black, Native American, and Asian American women. Although short fragments of interviews are usually not too fruitful for an intensive examination of women's lives, I do find that sections of Las Mujeres and of the Generations issue of Southern Exposure are very useful. As short as the segments in Las Mujeres are, certain themes can be explored, including generational change. Likewise, though the oral history fragments in The Ways of My Grandmothers cannot provide the detailed exploration of consciousness that more complete life histories do, within the total context of the volume they lead to a fruitful exploration of the Native American woman. Though perhaps not technically oral history, selections in Coming Out Stories provide some moving as well as humorous insights into the lesbian experience.

From Oral to Visual: A First-Timer's Introduction to Media Production

In the past ten years a number of impressive media products have helped to popularize women's oral history. Slide shows, video productions, and films based wholly or in part on oral interviews have helped bring women's history to a larger public audience and have been used in women's studies classrooms. Pathbreaking historical documentary films like Union Maids and The Emerging Woman were followed by Great Grand Mother, With Babies and Banners, The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, and Talkin' Union.2 Some video productions have been sponsored by public television, such as Plainswomen, Men and Children.3 Hardest to market and least well known, slide-tape programs like Good Work, Sister! have reached local audiences and occasionally regional or national markets. They have the virtue of costing less to produce than film or video.4 Merging as they do technical and historical skills, most of these projects have involved collaboration between academics and media professionals. In many instances, historians or persons active in the women's movement simply decided there was a story that should reach a larger audience, and they learned media production techniques in order to achieve that goal. Julia Reichert and James Klein, who produced Growing Up Female and Union Maids, set out not to become filmmakers but rather to provide accurate images of women to combat popular media stereotypes. Just as women's historians began using and refining oral history techniques to gather data that was not available in written records, so we have also begun to explore visual media in order to reach a larger audience. Motivated by a desire to educate the public about women's historical contributions, and thus to empower more women, the temptation is strong to move from tape recorder and print to a media product. The technical problems of translation from one medium to another, however, and of moving from an academic to a popular mode, can be as overwhelming as they are seductive. We speak from experience. This does not mean we speak from expertise. In 1978-79 we co-produced a slide-tape presentation about working-class families from the Cripple Creek, Colorado gold mining district, entitled We Were Never Supposed To Be Rich. It was an unfortunately prophetic title. Like most women's oral history media products, this one involved the sharing of skills and expertise. We both have academic backgrounds, Jameson in American studies and history, Lenfest in English. Lenfest is experienced with still photography and film and had produced experimental films and a documentary, but he had not previously used historical material in media. Jameson was the historian for the project, which was based on interviews she had begun in 1975 with elderly residents of Cripple Creek. In 1977 we began trying to raise funds to make a film based on the experiences recorded in those interviews. We were unable to raise enough money, but we did receive funding to produce a slide-tape oral and visual history. At the time we saw the project as preproduction for the film we wanted to make. Slide-tape was not our preferred medium for a number

Building Multicultural and Intergenerational Networks through Oral History

The Cambridge Women's Oral History Project was designed to give voice to people whose stories are least recorded in traditional historical sources-working women from many cultural communities. Carried out in 1980 and 1981, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanities and Public Policy, and with the sponsorship of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Arts Council, CWOHP involved over 100 local residents in the preservation and analysis of community women's history. Project participants, who were mostly women, ranged in age from twelve to 100 and represented nearly every cultural group in the city. Participants completed oral history interviews of thirty older women above the age of sixty and produced a slide-tape presentation as well as a visual portfolio that includes portraits of the narrators, excerpts from the interviews and historical photographs. The interviews were conducted primarily by women of high school age. Since 1980, several community celebrations have drawn over 1,000 participants and supporters, and over 300 local groups have participated in discussions and workshops based on the slide-tape presentations. In a subsequent project women and girls created two vibrant appliqued quilts, each of the fifty-two blocks documenting a woman active at work or play. These activities created a community base for the Cambridge Oral History Center, an organization committed to the development and dissemination of multicultural and feminist social history.1 The Center is providing resources to twenty oral history projects initiated by individuals and groups in the greater Boston area.

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

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

Hearing Voices: Oral History as an Aid to Reading

Reading and listening are skills; are also arts. They can be taught and must be honored. Reading and listening, no less than writing and speaking, are activities. When are passive, the intellectual and imaginative losses are great. But how do you teach reading and listening to students who think already know how-who do know how, if we narrow the definition? I have found that way is through teaching oral history which, in addition to granting access to the stories of people who may write and read infrequently, can help students themselves to read-if by reading we mean not merely decoding, but meaning-making. My involvement a teacher of oral history began with the MLA-FIPSE project, Teaching Women's Literature from a Regional Perspective. One of the goals of that project was to reach students who might have been turned off by the traditional demands of research papers. I also found that students cowed by writing, but also in need of interpretative skills, might learn those skills learn to do oral history. Students need to understand what it is are doing when read; need to be self-reflective about the activity, aware that it is a collaborative act, a creative act, a responsible interaction. This is difficult if consider what are reading to have been always it is-a finished product, spewed forth whole from a writer's mind or gut-or if, on the other hand, see the work somehow authorless, disembodied, and consequently do not feel have any obligation to it. A corrective to both these extremes is to see the work a response or a series of responses, often made and modified over a period of time. For some, this is hard to do when an essay is already completed, in print. It can, of course, be done using a writer's drafts, and that is valuable. But it can also be done through the medium of oral history with its emphasis on process well product. Doing and interpreting oral history can also help students recognize that who are and what know (and do not know) may also affect their reading. In her essay, What's So Special About Women? Women's Oral History, in FRONTIERS (2, No. 2, Summer 1977, 7) Sherna Gluck, without setting down any hard and fast rules, indicates the extent to which an oral history can be enhanced when the interviewee realizes that the interviewer is one of them, whether they are a religious, a racial, or a gender group. Gluck points out that an outsider conducting an interview has an obligation to prepare as best she can so that she can understand the attitudes, vocabulary, and body language of the group or subgroup with which the interviewee identifies. Furthermore, behind this call to responsible preparation is an acknowledgment that (at least in a sex-stereotyped society) gender is an unavoidable determinant of meaning. While Gluck's insight stemmed from her experience creating interviews, a similar recognition comes from interpreting them. I realized this when I had students analyze completed interviews which, though recognized for their value local history, had not been prepared with any special attention to their potential usefulness for women's history. I asked two students to consider where in the tapes would have proceeded differently, probed further; where felt the (male) interviewer had stopped short or undervalued a particular observation. The students were appropriately tentative in their criticism of the more experienced interviewer, but even their introductory work in

What's so Special about Women? Women's Oral History

Refusing to be rendered voiceless any longer, women are creating a new history--using our own voices and experiences. We are challenging the traditional concepts of history, of what is historically important, and we are affirming that our everyday lives are history. Using an oral tradition, as old as human memory, we are reconstructing our own past. When women historians first began the task of creating and expanding the field of women's history, we relied on traditional historical concepts and methods. We busily searched for hidden clues to direct us to lost heroines, and, whenever possible, we sought out those who were still alive in order to record their past experiences. Because so little documentation was available on the lives and activities of these women, we found ourselves in a situation similar to that of Allan Nevins, who developed the method of oral history in 1948.1 With the advent of the telephone and the decline in the practice of journal writing and lengthy correspondence, historians were faced with a drying up of many of the sources on which they traditionally depended. Oral history, emerging then as the sound recording of the reminiscences of public figures, was hailed as a method which could create alternative sources.

Modernization and Family History: Perspectives on Social Change

Previous articleNext article No AccessRevisions/ReportsModernization and Family History: Perspectives on Social ChangeTamara K. HarevenTamara K. Hareven Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Signs Volume 2, Number 1Autumn, 1976 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/493339 Views: 57Total views on this site Citations: 29Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1976 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Varangrat Nguanchoo, Prasit Wangpakapattanawong, Henrik Balslev, Angkhana Inta Hmong Medicinal Plant Knowledge Transmission and Retention in Social Modernity, Human Ecology 50, no.33 (Jun 2022): 419–433.https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-022-00326-4Ting Li, Yongai Jin Leaning to the disadvantaged or pursuing maximum utility? The allocation of intergenerational relationship resources in C hinese families with multiple children, Family Relations 71, no.22 (Sep 2021): 526–541.https://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12592Junru Cui, Can Cui, Richard Ronald, Shan Yu, Xueying Mu The dynamics of gender in the intergenerational transmission of homeownership: A case study of young couples in Shanghai, Population, Space and Place 27, no.66 (Feb 2021).https://doi.org/10.1002/psp.2428Ting Li, Wenting Fan, Jian Song The Household Structure Transition in China: 1982–2015, Demography 57, no.44 (Jun 2020): 1369–1391.https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-020-00891-7Li Mo A Longitudinal Study of the Long-Term Predictors of China’s Divorce Rate, Marriage & Family Review 56, no.33 (Jan 2020): 217–240.https://doi.org/10.1080/01494929.2020.1712299María M. 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