|
|
|
Reviews / Comptes Rendus
| Linda K. Cullum, Narratives at Work: Women, Men, Unionization, and the Fashioning of Identities (St. John's: ISER 2003)
|
| HOW WOULD you explore the oral history of a union of which the members have no memory? The Ladies Cold Storage Workers Union (LCSWU) was marginal to the masculine St. John's waterfront union movement of the 1940s and 1950s, and, it seems, marginal in the memories of the women who worked at Job Brothers' fish plant. |
1
|
|
This study began with the premise that people's identities shift constantly, not only through the changing material conditions of their lives, but also as they imaginatively recreate their past lives through narrative. So any oral historian who sets out to recover a narrative of the past, Cullum proposes, will generate multiple competing narratives. Many of these narratives are artefacts of the study. They are the result of a dynamic process through which the researcher and the informant influence each other. Cullum's study primarily focuses upon the process of studying how people shape their own identity. She discusses recruiting these informants and how her relationship with them evolved. Even the silences of those who refused to talk to her are grist for the mill. She found that her informants wanted to please her, and shaped their narratives to what they thought she wanted to hear. In a very practical way, the presence of the sociologist and the questions she posed created narratives that would otherwise have never existed. |
2
|
|
There are many interesting observations here. Cullum notes, for example, many informants denied the importance of race when they categorized the union's founding president, a woman of African ancestry and the only woman of colour working at the plant, as nice or hard-working and one of the girls. A literal reading of the transcript would support the conclusion that race was irrelevant in the women's relationships. The interviews even imply that racism did not exist until the arrival of American servicemen during World War II brought in American-style racism, a claim of which Cullum is rightly sceptical. Cullum suggests, in a reading of the interviews based upon American scholarship, that race does matter and her informants created race as a meaningful category by refusing to give a name to it. Had the first president been of English or Irish ancestry, then the informants would likely not have felt the need to explicitly include her as one of them when speaking to the author. |
3
|
|
Cullum has other observations to make about the relationship between the male Longshoremen's Protective Union and the LCSWU. The male union helped its fledgling sister organize and win higher pay, but may have undermined the women's cause by assuming that men should be paid at a higher rate for their labour. Gender was central in how people experienced their lives on the waterfront. Men in the plant saw their masculinity as defined by their levels of skill, necessary physical strength, and ability to work in freezing temperatures. Women's work in the plant required all the same attributes as men's work. Thus the boundaries between men's and women's work were contested. When Cullum examines the material conditions of people's lives, the discussion is strained through the creation of identity. |
4
|
|
The narratives Cullum collected reveal little about the institutional history of the union. Many of the members do not remember attending the meetings. Their narratives of their lives at work reveal the stresses of physical labour in the cold plant and memories of socializing with co- workers. Neighbours, friends, and family were more important in the ways these women imagined their lives than their period of wage employment. Cullum confides that she started her project with the intention of recovering the labour history of these women. But she realized that the collection of evidence to support such an authoritative narrative would create something that did not exist in the narratives of the women who had experienced work at Job's fish plant. To put this in a different way, she suggests that constructing a narrative of her own would be to impose an interpretation. So she tries to allow the informants to speak for themselves. |
5
|
|
There are moments of the author's autobiography in this book, and substantial passages in which interviews are parsed for the process though which interviewing creates narratives rather than any larger meaning. The author's constant introspection about the role of the sociologist stands as a useful reminder that the narratives we all create are problematic. Many who are about to embark upon an oral history project could profit from some of these observations. Cullum's awareness that narratives are artefacts that undermine each other leads to a study that contributes to the development of a decentred feminist oral history methodology. |
6
|
| | |
Jeff A. Webb
Memorial University of Newfoundland |
|
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|