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Reviews
Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader
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Edited by Susan H. Armitage, with Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon
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University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2002. Photographs, notes, index. 408 pages. $29.95 paper.
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Reviewed by Laura McCreery
University of California, Berkeley
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| Some practitioners of oral history subscribe to the notion of a thirty-year rule. That is, they have come to believe it takes about thirty years after a major historic event for society to look that event squarely in the eye. Any lesser span of time is somehow awkward; the aftermath of the event is too evident, the participants too raw, and public opinion too subjective. But let a full generation pass, and the time for oral history becomes ripe. Think of the civil rights advances of the 1960s or the height of the Vietnam War in the early 1970s. |
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There's a certain moment in Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader when one realizes with full force that the research method we call women's oral history now meets the thirty-year test. Here is the anthology that recollects and deconstructs that moment, that fork in the road, when interviews on women's lives were pronounced distinct from men's. The assessment of where things started and what has changed comes from key participants and witnesses in their own words, making the book a sort of meta-history of women's oral research on the lives of other women. |
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Central to this long view is the essay "Reflections on Women's Oral History," based on an electronic exchange between the anthology's lead editor, Susan H. Armitage, and Sherna Berger Gluck, both professors of history and women's studies who have shaped this concept from its inception. The book consists of reprints from issues of the women's studies journal Frontiers published between 1977 and 1998, along with Armitage's and Gluck's recent comments on the state of women's oral history. (The electronic discussion with one another is odd, though, for people who have built their careers on live conversations.) |
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The big questions are familiar. What are the pros and cons of being an insider or an outsider among those you interview? What are the considerations before starting a project, and what are the responsibilities during and after? How can we best make allowances for cultural and language issues? Finally, as Armitage asks, "Is there really a female subculture in all times and places, and does it really function as a defense against male dominance?" (p. 68) The treatment of some questions is thoughtful and routine, but the matter of women's subculture has the scholars politely sparring. We need this. |
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Do not fear that Women's Oral History is solely an exercise in academic navel-gazing, which the authors caution against. The collection is far broader than a scholarly assessment. Its three parts — Basic Approaches, Oral History Applications, and Oral History Discoveries and Insights — include myriad voices from many academic communities, and the interviewees described in the essays range from coal-mine strikers and millworkers to farm women, Paiute Indians, and urban Chicanas. |
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A number of the essays have been anthologized or developed into book-length studies since their original appearance in Frontiers. Judy Yung's study of her Chinese American forebears, Sally Roesch Wagner's biography of suffragist Matilda Joslin Gage, and Amy Kesselman's work on Northwest shipyard workers in Portland and Vancouver (presented here with co-authors Tina Tau and Karen Wickre) have all appeared as books. Even Gluck's useful essay from 1977, "What's So Special about Women?" has been widely available for years in Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology (1984). |
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The book's treatment of oral history methods in general and of women's issues in particular is not new. Those approaching the practical aspects of oral history for the first time will want to look elsewhere for the basics. Others who use this anthology in the classroom may want to pair it with other substantial works in women's studies and oral history methods. While Women's Oral History cannot by itself bear the full weight ofguiding those who interview women, it succeeds as a thoughtful and inspiring selection of essays. |
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Now that some oral historians of women have accomplished so much, those coming along later are fortunate to build upon groundwork already laid. The "invention" of women's oral history may not rank with civil rights or war as an event in our collective consciousness, but if the thirty-year rule holds, we can now face that invention with a clearer eye. To that end, this volume is essential. |
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