Western Women's History: A Review Essay

Armitage, Susan; Gray, Dorothy; Fischer, Christiane; Jeffrey, Julie Roy; Myres, Sandra L.; Faragher, John Mack

doi:10.2307/3346520

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“…As she notes: 'I would put considerably more faith in the ability of some of my male colleagues in oral history to apply what we often referred to as feminist principles than I would some women who are more bound by race, class, gender, and sexual orientation'. 11 Berger confesses that she is bored by the regionalism and the dominant practice of gathering stories in a mostly uncritical fashion, wondering how 'oral history can be both a scholarly and an activist enterprise, [how] it can change our knowledge but also empower people and contribute to social change'. 12 She takes note that for many feminist oral historians (of whom a number have left the field), attention has shifted to memory, representation and meaning.…”

Section: Selma Leydesdorffmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and the Categories of Experienced History

Leydesdorff¹

1999

Gender & History

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In the last few decades several feminist historians have argued that women's history and oral history have points of connection. 1 Oral historians began to query whether the role of methodological debates derived from oral history might enhance a new discussion on the creation of sources and the subjectivity in sources -a set of questions that has been taken up by many feminist scholars; in addition oral historians early joined those who critiqued the narrative structure of historical writing. They also focused attention on the value of micro-histories, which have become much more common now than such histories were in an earlier phase of women's history. Oral history, like sociology and anthropology, has shown the value of localised examples and detailed case studies of small groups. This trend is also becoming visible in women's history of pre-contemporary periods. From the very beginning, international oral history conferences devoted a substantial number of sessions to women's history, repeatedly exploring the theme of the disappeared, silenced, or oppositional voices of women.But many who practise oral history are wondering where to move the field in the future. Much of our work has been the writing of history grounded in the analysis of a presumably representative segment of a particular population, based on the assumption that studying a small sample by using qualitative methods can yield important new insights. In a sense oral historians' theoretical posture is akin to sociologists', but with one major difference: their careful consideration of the dimensions of time and memory. Because time and memory are inherently volatile, however, they make arguments concerning the representative nature or empirical value of a given sample complicated. At the same time, gender has been inscribed in the field, rendering women and constructions of femininity and masculinity central objects of study.In order to combine the analytical strategy of sociology, history, and the study of gender, an alternative has been found in the method of life stories through which a whole life is told by means of an interview employing careful techniques. In creating life stories, an individual's experiences are contextualised within a wider web of meanings. Analysis will,

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Section: Selma Leydesdorffmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender and the Categories of Experienced History

Leydesdorff¹

1999

Gender & History

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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Western Women's History: A Review Essay

Cited by 1 publication

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Gender and the Categories of Experienced History

Gender and the Categories of Experienced History

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