Women's Studies International Forum 35 (2012) 132–134

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Women's Studies International Forum

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Using biographical narrative and life story methods to research women'smovements: Sisterhood and after

Polly RussellThe British Library, 96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB, United Kingdom

a r t i c l e i n f o

0277-5395/$ – see front matter © 2012 Published bydoi:10.1016/j.wsif.2012.03.008

s y n o p s i s

Available online 19 May 2012

The use of oral history as a tool for archives, museums and libraries is well established, as is itsassociation with feminist research methodologies and histories. Sisterhood and after is an oralhistory research project with an archival aim. Providing a detailed account of the oral historymethod undertaken, we argue that though distinct, these two remits are not incompatible.Drawing from interview examples we argue that the requirements of building an oral historyarchive creates a wealth of material which challenges any single narrative of feminist historyand that even though the method focusses on the individual, it situates that person in abroad context and so keeps the social in view. Oral history is therefore an invaluable tool fortoday's researchers of today and for those building archives for tomorrow's researchers.

© 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd.

The voices of activists have a power and a fascination likeno other. Activists in women's movements have been at theheart of both popular and academic analyses of SecondWave feminism, providing insight into the internal historiesof struggle, and into political successes and failures. Seekingout the voices of activists is the approach that we havetaken in Sisterhood and After: TheWomen's Liberation Oral His-tory Project. Opposite in many ways to the approach de-scribed by Sasha Roseneil (this volume) in the intimatecitizenship sub-project of FEMCIT, which sought to assessfeminist impact through interviews with ‘ordinary’ andsometimes unpoliticised people, we have wished to under-stand it from the perspective of those at the forefront of his-torically new ideas. We have used a life story method thatallows our interviewees a large amount of space to expressthose perspectives, and to explain them in the context of awhole individual life story. What follows is a description ofthe life story method, a discussion about why it is appropriatefor the project's aims, and a of the research questions our re-cordings allow us to examine.

Taking seriously the individual voice within the collectivemovement has ideological and political connotations that cannotbe separated from the feminist project itself. Oral historymethods disrupt traditional academic disciplines and becausedisruption is central to the feminist project, the two often go

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hand in hand (Cosslett, Lury, & Summerfield, 2000). It is not,therefore, surprising that the emergence of late-twentieth centu-ry feminism coincided with the emergence of oral history as anacademic discipline and as a key tool for the preservation of con-temporary history by museums, archives and libraries (Davis &Paine, 2004; Gluck & Patai, 1991; Thomson, 2007). In the USAthere are several sustainable and large-scale second wave oralhistory collections such as Voices of Feminism, Sophia Smith Col-lection, the Schlesinger Library collection and Smith College. InEurope, the Amsterdam Institute for Women's History is com-mitted to collecting and preserving the voices of second genera-tion feminist activists.

However, in the UK, despite the popular and academic recog-nition of the post-1960s UKwomen's movement, there has beenno single, sustainable, institutionally supported archive of secondgeneration feminist oral histories. The Sisterhood and After re-search project, a partnership between the British Library, theUniversity of Sussex and the Women's Library, was primarilydriven by an impetus to create an accessible archive, and thishas therefore been crucial to our project design. The ‘biographicalnarrative interpretive method’ (BNIM) method undertaken byFEMCITwas, aswithmost research projects, selected and shapedto best answer a series of research questions. By contrast, withSisterhood and After, because the British Library's Oral History de-partment specifies a life story approach, our methodology was

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largely decided for us and, as a consequence our research ques-tions have been determined by what it makes possible. Admit-tedly, the life story method creates particular challenges foracademic researchers, particularly in terms of analysis. Evenwith the advantage of full transcripts, detailed summaries andeasily accessible digital recordings, sifting through over 350hours of recordings is an onerous task. Systematic, line by lineanalysis of thematerial, in theways proposedby theBNIMmeth-od is not possible. Instead we are analysing the material using athematic approach that enables us to analyse a topic—family re-lations for example—interviewee by interviewee—and builds abroad, if complicated, picture we are then able to theorise.

Our life story recordings are loosely chronological, start-ing with birth and encompassing description and reflectionon family, childhood, education and work, as well as focusingin detail on an individual's contribution to a particular field orevent. As Joanna Bornat states, the life story interview is‘more than just an extraction of information around a partic-ular topic, it becomes an object in itself with a shape and to-tality given by the individual's life’ (Bornat, 2007: 346). Therecordings last anywhere from six to twenty hours, thoughten is the norm. At the end of the recording process the inter-viewee is asked to sign a consent form handing over copy-right for their recording to the British Library so that theirmaterial can be accessed by researchers and the general pub-lic. Interviewees are able to prevent access to their recordingsby closing all or part of their interviews for up to 30 years ifthey wish.

As we interview, we hold in the forefront of our minds ourfocus on second generation feminism but we are also aware ofthe spectre of a future researcher listeningback to a given record-ing for an unknown reason. The life storymethod gives the inter-viewer and the interviewee permission to explore those avenuesof a life that might not relate directly to the feminist experience.The life story resists reducing the interviewee to a single,straightforward narrative and provides archival material whichincludes but goes beyond the specific focus of the researchproject.

Despite the capaciousness of the material, our oral historyframework perhaps paradoxically also contrasts with theopen-endedness of BNIM or other narrative methods, sincethe interviewer explicitly guides and prompts with questionsabout place, time or context. Our interviewees will be identi-fied and are often well-known campaigners, rather than anon-ymised ‘datasets’, and their interviews are the product of anegotiated encounter between the interviewer and interview-ee. BNIM ensures interviewee anonymity and allows the inter-viewee to project onto a seemingly blank canvas—as a result,the BNIM researcher is given considerable interpretive controlof the resulting data. By contrast, the identification of the inter-viewee and the ‘shared authority’ of the life story method limitour interpretive control and make it harder to analyse the un-conscious elements of our interviewee's stories. However, un-like interviewees engaging in a semi-structured interviewfocused on a specific question, our interviewees define theirown terms of reference andmeaning and this, for the purposesof creating an archive of second generation feminist voices,seems fitting.

We are well aware that the life story approach raisesquestions of representation and validity for any social scien-tist. However it has been still more challenging for us to

answer feminists' questions about who we are interviewingand why. We have discussed in detail elsewhere the strate-gies for selection we have deployed (Jolly, Russell, & Cohen,2012), but suffice to say that we have prioritised as criteriacampaign involvement and innovation in political visionacross a range of ideologies, sectors, places and majority/mi-nority communities. What is significant for the purposes ofthis discussion is that our struggles to ensure representative-ness bring to the fore issues around definition and ownershipthat have characterised feminist debate itself. On one handour attempt to be ‘representative’ is inevitably doomed. Buton another, we recognise that representativeness is not thebest criteria for judging an oral history, but rather, approach-ing the individual for what they can tell us about the socialand the collective. The relationship between the individualand the collective in our method therefore itself has prece-dents in the women's movement. One of feminism's achieve-ments was to insist on the significance and politics of theintimate, the private, the bodily and the domestic, alongsideeconomic, political and public life. Life stories allow us to de-tail the ways in which an individual encountered, shaped andcontributed to the collective and to therefore assess the im-pact of feminism on aspects of the social, while also taking se-riously the terrain of intimate citizenship.

Take just one example, our interview with Ellen Malos,whomwe approached as a hub of thewomen's liberationmove-ment in Bristol, a catalyst forWomen's Aidnationally, and apow-erful thinker on the politics of housework.1 Malos describedreading ThomasMerton's Elected Silence as a child by the embersof the fire in her family's wooden house on the edge of a goldmining town in Australia. She talked about deciding she wantedto be amonk aged twelve, of her rebellion againstMethodismbyAnglican flirtation, and of defiant dances with immigrant boysand curly eyeliner on a fat teenage face. All this spoke of her re-fusal of her mother's life, a knitwear operative who had givenup work on marriage. But doors closed similarly upon her inthe1950s and1960s,when sheherselfmarried andhad children.This provided the context to her discovery of feminism in 1969.

Malos' interview also recordsmore obvious impacts from thetireless activism that followed. Amongst these, we could count:achieving local council funding for a shelter for women sufferingfromdomestic violence at a timewhen therewas only one in thecountry; getting such women recognised as legally homeless;establishingwomen's studies in local adult and university educa-tional curricula; organising with early Women's Aid, co-writinghandbooks subsequently used in social work training; leadingthe creation of Britain's only Centre for Policy Research on Gen-der Violence. These achievements are told as part of a life story,without numbers, with varying names, and with modestyabout her contribution.

Malos describes, for example, the informal atmosphere ofearly feminist meetings in Bristol, the way that agendasemerged democratically and how meetings were mostlyattended by ‘women with children’. She goes onto describehow the group ‘would go to a local the big housing estate atHartcliffe and talk to women about what they wanted, byjust parking ourselves in the shopping centre, and walkingup to them’. From these encounters Malos' group highlightedthe failure of a local factory to provide childcare for thesewomen workers. The life story gives an account of the socialworld and the materiality of women's lives—childcare, work

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and the domestic—and how this was perceived, challengedand changed by Malos and her activist colleagues. But her in-terview is always a personal story and also conveys just aspowerfully her own immersion in this struggle as a scholar-ship girl, wife, mother, wife, immigrant and widow.

There are a number of implications of doing life story re-search for the history of women's movements. Our materialinevitably brings to the fore the contradictions and complex-ities of accounts. Take, for example, the descriptions we havecollected of consciousness raising groups. These have becomean associated feature of popular and academic accounts ofthe movement, seen as a crucial way women came togetherand embarked on a social and political journey towards fem-inism (Rucht, 1990; Sebestyen, 1988). This version has cer-tainly been echoed by some of our respondents. Otherinterviewees, however, have either forgotten their engage-ment with consciousness raising groups or described theirexperience as stifling or, on occasion, intimidating. These dis-parate accounts do not undermine the individual and socialsignificance of consciousness-raising, but instead open upquestions about the other forms of experience that shapedand defined the movement—the workshops people joined,the activist groups or the communes that they lived in. Thecontradictory nature of life stories challenges a single narra-tive and enriches our understanding of the ways the move-ment gained purchase in people's lives.

While we are mindful of the pitfalls of the life stories, of theirparadoxical tendency to invest in the individual rather than thegroup, we know that the key to their success will be how theyareused, by scholars, but also by teachers, journalists, school chil-dren and indeed, other activists too. For them, our method pro-vides the fullest archive possible. Sisterhood and After andFEMCIT provide two different research project models. Yet bothprojects are fit for purpose in assessing, as Sasha Roseneil de-scribes, both the ‘lived life’ and the ‘told story’2 of feminism and

feminists at a range of different scales from the most intimateto the most public. Perhaps the best policy is not to become fix-ated on the best method, certainly not the best feminist method,but to work on aggregating the results to show, as carefully aspossible, where and how women's movements have changedour worlds. The feminists we are recording were activist pio-neers who demanded a world which had never been imaginedbefore. Their voices are not representative or ordinary—theyare specific and extraordinary—and they need to be captured sothat something of the cultural memory of that time and the leg-acy they left behind is understood and never forgotten.

Endnotes

1 Ellen Malos interviewed by Margaretta Jolly, October 2010.2 See Roseneil, this issue.

References

Bornat, Joanna (2007). Biographical methods. The Sage handbook of social re-search methods. London: Sage.

Cosslett, Tess, Lury, Celia, & Summerfield, Penny (2000). Feminism and auto-biography: Texts, theories, methods. London: Routledge.

Davis, Stuart, & Paine, Crispin (2004). Talking about museums: The insider'svoice. Oral History, 32(54–62).

Gluck, Sherna Berger, & Patai, Daphne (1991). Women's words: The feministpractice of oral history. New York; London: Routledge.

Jolly, Margaretta, Russell, Polly, & Cohen, Rachel (2012). Sisterhood andafter: Individualism, ethics and an oral history of the women's liberationmovement. Social Movement Studies, 1–16.

Rucht, Dieter (1990). The strategies and action repertoires of new move-ments. In R. J. Dalton, & M. Kuechler (Eds.), Challenging the politicalorder: New social and political movements in western democracies(pp. 156–175). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Sebestyen, Amanda (1988). '68, '78, '88: From women's liberation to feminism.Bridport: Prism.

Thomson, Alastair (2007). Four paradigm transformations in oral history.Oral History Review, 34, 49–70.