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Has feminist oral history lost its radical/subversive edge?

Article · January 2011

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 Autumn 2011 ORAL HISTORY 63

Has feminist oral history lost its

radical/subversive edge?
1

by Sherna Berger Gluck

Abstract: Feminist oral historians from the early 1970s, like other radical historians of that
era, have begun to wonder about the current state of oral history: has it become respectable;
lost its radical/subversive edge? Because our work was anchored in the radical movements
of the period, is it rudderless today in the absence of a unified social movement? Or, do our
own autobiographical and political trajectories deter us from a critical reassessment of our early
work and the radical and subversive potential of contemporary oral history? This paper
discusses the nature of earlier and current feminist oral history by drawing both on the personal
reflections of two generations of US and UK feminist oral historians and an analysis of some
contemporary work. Ultimately, I conclude that despite the different political trajectories of
the second and emergent generations, there is still a tradition of viewing/treating oral history
narrative as a ‘discourse of oppositional consciousness and agency.’

Keywords: Women’s Liberation Movement (US, UK), advocacy oral history, women of colour
(US), social movements, grassroots organising, feminism

Discussing where oral history and feminism narratives and marginalise

have got to in their forty year relationship is
in part autobiographical which, ironically
but perhaps not unexpectedly, presents a
problem. Whatever, some of what I want to
say will undoubtedly feel like special plead-
ing or defensiveness to younger people.2
The first generation – Personal
reflections, take one
In a 2009 piece posted on the International Oral
History Association website, Sean Field, Direc-
tor of the University of Capetown Centre for
Popular Memory, wondered what the implica-
tions were of oral history becoming respectable.
He thought that its increasing use by govern-
ment institutions ‘raises the troubling scenario
that it might be used to validate new master
critical voices’. 3 In other
words, had it lost its radical
potential? His question hit
a raw nerve for many femi-
nist/radical oral historians.
Because most of our work in the
1970s was anchored in the radical movements
of the period, does that mean that it is rudder-
less today in the absence of a unified
movement?
Those of us who are members of the first
generation of feminist oral historians in the US
and UK (dating back forty years) were
convinced and still believe that our early work
had a definite radical and subversive edge. Our
direct and active participation in the women’s
liberation movements in our two countries
64 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2011
informed our work; and our ties to local groups
where we were organising and engaged in
consciousness raising influenced how we used
it. Most of us had not moved from the streets to
the academy – at least not yet – and regardless of
our individual trajectories, we were unapolo-
getic advocates for women’s liberation.
Our oral history interviews with women
empowered both us and our narrators. Most
significantly, in recording the ways that women
had lived out their daily lives and expressed
themselves both through private and public
forms of resistance, we developed new under-
standings. Documenting women’s simultaneous
agency and oppression empowered both us and
the movement and contributed to a very critical
re-visioning of women’s history.
Because we were tied to women’s move-
ments, we also were committed to making our
work and insights accessible. Our projects
usually were not isolated individual ventures and
even if/when they were based in the academy,
they were more than academic exercises. We
wrote for a vast array of feminist newspapers
and magazines, did public speaking in a variety
of community settings, and even incorporated
our narrators’ words in public performances.4
While I remain convinced that these are
accurate characterisations of early feminist oral
history work, I began to question if my nostalgic
view of our past was distorting my view of the
current state of feminist oral history. I wondered
what others of my generation thought, and how
the newer practitioners situated both our past
work and their own. I reached out directly and
Flyer advertising
‘Womens’ History
and Oral History’,
the 1992 Oral
History Society’s
annual conference.
personally both to some of my American peers,
particularly those who had participated in our
early Special Women’s Oral History issues of
Frontiers, and to some of the contemporary
feminist oral historians whose work is challeng-
ing the very concept of the “second wave.”5
At the same time, I posted a notice on the
US H-ORALHIST list announcing the forma-
tion of an online ‘feminist oral history discussion
group’. While most of the respondents didn’t
quite fit my criteria, Graham Smith did, and he
and veteran feminist oral historian, Joanna
Bornat, helped to bring some of the younger
generation in the UK into the discussion. 6
Although not all of those who participated in
the ensuing discussions, either in the feminis-
toralhistory discussion group listserv or through
private communications, are quoted here, they
all helped to shape my own thinking. Obviously,
this is not a comprehensive survey of either
British or US feminist oral historians’ thinking.
Rather it is a sampling of views from those who
were in the thick of things in the heady days of
the women’s liberation movement in our two
countries and those who are updating and re-
visioning that tradition.
The first generation – Personal
reflections, take two
Despite the very real and important contribu-
tions of early feminist oral history, with its
embeddedness in our women’s liberation move-
ments, it is time to lift the veil of nostalgia and
critically revisit that work. US oral historian
Linda Shopes is not alone in her assessment:

Sherna Berger Gluck
introducing Feminist
History Research
Project suffragist
narrator Jesse Haver
Butler, Women’s
Building, Los Angeles,
California 1976.
Certainly within the context of the
women’s/feminist movement, oral history
was part of a huge social and cultural shift
that changed how we think about women
and much about women’s role, status, and
everyday experience. But I’d venture to
suggest that a lot of oral history done by,
with, and for women was not especially
edgy, but rather valorised individual
women/women’s experience without much
critical analysis.7
Even more pointed is pioneering US lesbian
feminist scholar Elizabeth Kennedy’s critical re-
evaluation of the early lesbian/gay work, with
its anchors in both the women’s and gay/lesbian
liberation movements:
I think in the 1970s most people doing
lesbian/gay oral history saw our work as
radical/subversive; it was challenging the
dominant ideas that gays/lesbians didn’t
have a history. Ironically further research
came to question the subversive aspect of
the research, suggesting that our early
research reified sexual identities in ways that
were not helpful.8
Similarly, although feminist oral history’s
emphasis on gender and women’s agency
unquestionably was radical and subversive in its
challenge of patriarchy, ultimately it did little to
challenge class and racial hierarchies. This was
particularly true in the US where the class basis
of feminist scholarship was not as solid as in the
Autumn 2011 ORAL HISTORY 65
UK and where radical feminism morphed into
cultural feminism. This is not to say that oral
histories of working class/poor women and of
and by women of colour were not part of the
early US feminist oral history movement that
coalesced at the 1977 founding of the National
Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). In fact,
the first Special Women’s Oral History issue of
Frontiers that was spawned at that conference
was decidedly inclusive.
However, despite documenting the experi-
ences of diverse women and adding these to the
historical record, the focus in the 1970s centred
on gender oppression and on a relatively narrow
definition of feminist activism that was bounded
largely by autobiographical trajectories. Indeed,
it was almost two decades before the complex
intersection and simultaneity of race/ethnicity,
class, gender and sexuality was problematised,
building largely on the scholarship of women of
colour.
The changing discourse – Transitioning
to the second generation
British historian Joanna Bornat marks a real
shift in feminist oral history in 1991 with the
publication of Women’s Words: The Feminist
Practice of Oral History, noting:
The women who wrote for …[this] collec-
tion were raising the questions which had
become increasingly troubling to me, this
was primarily the essentialist direction
which feminism was taking at that time and
which, given the intersectionality of age,
66 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2011
class and race it seemed not to be realisti-
cally engaging with.9
If this was the turning or not, by 1991 a new
discourse and analysis marked the work of the
next generation of feminist oral historians, influ-
enced especially by feminist scholars of colour
and, to some extent, by poststructural analysis.
Embraced to varying degrees by feminist oral
historians, the growing poststructural emphasis
on textual analysis became a cause for concern,
as noted by UK historian Penny Summerfield:
… it sounded like a recipe for abandoning
the focus on women, individually and collec-
tively, which was so central to the ‘recovery’
of women from and for history in the 1970s.
It appeared to recommend the study of
discourses about women, produced by
powerful institutions, rather than women’s
words and women’s actions themselves.10
The strong ties and commitment to move-
ment activists, even among the early feminist
historians who had already entered the academy,
also seemed to have been supplanted. Instead,
with the use of more and more arcane language
and ‘po-mo-speak’ (as an editor of one feminist
journal dubbed it), feminist oral history became
more of an academic enterprise. Linda Shopes
echoed the sentiment to which many of us early
practitioners alluded, namely that the ‘(over)
theorising of oral history in some academic Women Rising
circles… makes it less and less meaningful and Oral History
accessible to the very people we are often inter- Speakout, Santa
Monica, California,
viewing’.11 12 March, 1983.
Despite these concerns, and the debate over
experience, agency and the role of discourse that
divided many women historians into two camps,
ultimately common ground was found.
Summerfield and others became convinced that
there was no dichotomy between experience and
discourse, adopting Judith Butler’s position that
construction ‘is the necessary scene of agency;
the very terms in which agency is articulated and
becomes culturally intelligible.’12 Following this
line, her oral history of British women’s wartime
experience ultimately relied heavily on discourse
analysis.
Even materialist critics like Canadian oral
historian Joan Sangster found a way to draw on
insights derived from post-structuralism. At the
same time that she became attentive to ingredi-
ents of narrative form as ‘clues to the
construction of historical memory, as well as the
role of past and current political ideology’, she
insisted on a ‘firm grounding of oral narratives
in their material and social context’.13
Furthermore, as US feminists of colour
began to elaborate their own versions of critical
race theory in the late 1990s, oral history
regained some of its earlier ties to community
and a commitment to advocacy. Latino/a Criti-
cal (LatCrit) theory, for instance, is unabashedly

anti-subordination and antiessentialist and links
not only theory with practice, but also scholar-
ship with teaching, and the academy with the
community.14 The advocates of these new theo-
retical developments, with their emphasis on
story telling/counter story telling, embrace some
of the same commitments that characterised
early US feminist oral history – but with a more
complex frame of reference.
The trajectory of feminist oral history in the
UK during these years was similar to the US
development. As Joanna Bornat comments, it
‘has been very much determined by under-
standings of class, of subjective positioning and,
of post coloniality.’ She stresses, however that:
[T]o speak of intersectionality is not to
assume that all differences are somehow of
equal weight and value; it is to use and
understand those histories and ways of
remembering as interconnected and inter-
determining.
Accordingly, in the four women’s oral history
issues of the British journal, Oral History, ‘patri-
archy might only be one determinant, itself
historically configured and delineated.’15
The second generation – Expanding
boundaries
With our autobiographies so deeply embedded
in the women’s liberation and radical move-
ments of our two countries, and often with a
socialist or anarchist grounding, my generation
tends to lament the demise of these movements
and is sceptical about the present state of radi-
cal and feminist oral history. Instead, perhaps it
is time that we challenged the autobiographical
underpinnings of our assumptions and consider
Graham Smith’s comment that ‘claims of others
radicalism [i.e. lack of it] might be a mechanism
for boundary making.’16 He earlier noted:
We should be aware that new forms of
radical challenge are emerging even in the
west. Although gross individualism (which
oral historians contributed to) exists so do
movements against war, famine, poverty and
injustice. And these remain part of the activ-
ity and vocabulary of sections of our youth.17
Smith’s comments forced me to take stock of
the viable organising efforts in the US, including
the anti-globalisation, environmental justice,
anti-war (Iraq and Afghanistan), Palestinian
solidarity, civil rights, LGBT and immigrant
rights movements, among others. In other
words, while there is no longer a radical left
women’s liberation movement like the one in
which so many of us feminist oral historians
participated, there is a plethora of US social
movement groups in which women often are
Autumn 2011 ORAL HISTORY 67
playing leading roles – not to mention local
organising by women around workplace issues,
violence, health and housing.
With apologies to my colleagues in the UK
for my ignorance of their political context, it is
clear in the US, anyhow, that feminists today are
participants in social movements and local
organising campaigns that try to seamlessly inte-
grate class, race/nationality, gender, and sexual
identity. More to the point, some of the most
compelling contemporary US feminist oral
history work to which I now turn focuses on
historical examples of these kinds of activism.
The three work works that I discuss are part
of a growing body of literature by a generation
that is challenging the ‘master narrative’ of the
US ‘second wave’. For these contemporary
historians, their understanding of historical
processes is not tied up with their own direct
experience.18 As a result, they are not invested in
the origin stories of the women’s movement the
way my generation is. Some disrupt the ‘master
narrative’ by documenting how even mainly
white radical feminist groups built local coali-
tions with women of colour and poor women
around specific issues.19 Others give voice to the
activism of women of colour, ethnic working
class women, and lesbian women who strived
to create programmes and spaces to address
their immediate and material needs. Oral history
is a critical element in all of these revisionist
histories, if not a centrepiece.
Drawing on extensive sources, including her
own interviews, Premilla Nadasen was deter-
mined to centre the voices and vision of women
welfare recipients in her Welfare Warriors: The
Welfare Rights Movement in the US.20 Charting
the rise and fall of the welfare rights movement,
beginning with the emergence of local groups in
the early 1960s, she documents the ‘multiple
consciousness’ of mainly poor Black welfare
recipients. This shaped how they defined their
own needs and was the driving force in their
struggle both against the system and the sexist
leadership in NWRO, As she notes:
Although members may not have explicitly
pushed for gender equality, in essence they
advocated women’s liberation: liberation
from poverty and reproductive control.
They tied their campaigns for economic
security to their desire for autonomy as
women. Overall, their struggle represented
a unique brand of feminism emerging in the
1960s.21
Giving voice to the women who engaged in
the movement before some of the key markers
of ‘second wave’ feminist history, Nadasen’s
work does more than disrupt the feminist
‘master narrative.’ Its challenge of periodisation
calls into question the very concept of ‘waves’.22
68 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2011
Like the welfare rights activists, the
consciousness and activism of the racially and
ethnically diverse poor and working class
women who Tamar Carroll interviewed was
forged by the reality of their daily lives at home,
in the family, and in their neighbourhood.
Coming together in the programmes sponsored
by their Brooklyn neighbourhood National
Congress of Neighborhood Women (NCNW),
they engaged in effective coalition work –
despite the often testy relationships between the
white ethnic women who lived in private hous-
ing and the African American and Latina
women who lived largely in public housing.
The NCNW was proactive and didn’t allow
these differences to fracture the coalition, using
‘guided consciousness raising’ to promote trust
and understanding. As Carroll notes, this then
enabled the members ‘to identify areas of
mutual needs and even to work on issues that
did not directly benefit their own group.’23 In
other words, as narrator Linda Duke so nicely
sums it up:
… we all have the same needs, the same
problems, but we’re just in different parts of
the puzzle. But as one puzzle. We all have
the same problems and we all can relate to
one another.24
Carroll’s oral history interviews highlight the
way in which the women in different parts of
the puzzle struggled to relate to one another.
Writing about her interview experiences, she
notes how the interviews also ‘shaped her
understanding of the process of racialisation and
the reason why cross-racial alliances take so
much work to achieve.’25
The final example of contemporary work that
casts doubt on the loss of the radical and subver-
sive edge of feminist oral history is Anne Enke’s
Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested
Space and Feminist Activism. The more than one
hundred hours of oral history interviews that she
conducted with women in four US cities
(Minneapolis-St Paul, Chicao and Detroit)
definitively shaped her work, as she notes:
Oral histories first led me to puzzle over the
connection between space, women’s move-
ment (italics in original) and feminism… the
more I listened with an ear to contested
spaces, the more I heard a story of grass-
roots movement fueled by diverse people
who did not necessarily identify themselves
as political activists or feminists, but who
nevertheless found and founded feminist
activism.26
Enke documents how these women claimed
and built commercial and civic spaces like bars,
bookstores, cafes and parks and created new
institutions to meet women’s needs like shelters,
health clinics and coffee houses. Her innovative
framing seamlessly incorporates the role/contri-
butions of lesbians, bisexual and passing
women, who are usually incorporated into femi-
nist movement histories ‘only if and when they
politicised their sexual identity’.27
I can’t possibly do justice in this brief discus-
sion to how innovative and important these
works are; nor to the potential that their case
study approach has for empowering formerly
unrecognised activists. Beyond that, these
authors are part of a new generation committed
to advocacy oral history and community
activism.28 They are joined by others whose
work is not necessarily focused on re-visioning
feminist historiography. Dolores Delgado
Bernal, for instance, employs a critical race-
gendered epistemology in the field of education,
using oral history to advocate on behalf of her
Chicano/a students. As she notes:
[T]his does not mean replacing one old body
of knowedge that purports to be the truth
with another. Rather, it means acknowledg-
ing and respecting ‘other ways of knowing
and understanding, particularly the stories
and narratives of those who have experi-
enced and responded to different forms of
oppression’.29
The most fitting commentary on the radi-
cal/subversive nature of the work I’ve been
discussing is Chandra Mohanty’s conclusion to
an early essay on third world women and the
politics of feminism: ‘story-telling or autobiog-
raphy is a discourse of oppositional
consciousness and agency’.30 So, perhaps in
some ways we have come full circle since the
early days of feminist oral history, but with a
more complex analysis of that oppositional
consciousness and agency.
Nurturing the next generation
These works show that the pernicious corporati-
sation of the academy and the institutionalisation
of oral history that concerned many of the earlier
generation have not completely dulled oral
history’s radical potential. Indeed, Chicana histo-
rian Vicki Ruiz argues:
… the institutionalisation of feminist oral
history over the last three decades is not a
betrayal of radical beginnings but an act of
radicalism. We no longer have to justify the
legitimacy of our methodology… And
indeed, through the mentorship of under-
graduates, graduate students and of public
oral history projects, we have reached far
more than people than we could have imag-
ined decades ago and that I think is a very
radical legacy.31

Los Angeles
Women Rising
collective sorting
historical fliers and
leaflets, 1982.
This legacy is being nourished in the US by
radical historians like Robin Kelley and Maylei
Blackwell. Kelley’s goal in creating the ‘Social
Justice Movements’ website project with/for his
students was ‘[t]o teach activism as alive and
meaningful.’ 32 Working collaboratively, the
students researched and interviewed organisers
and created a web page for each organisation. In
the process, they not only learned that activism
was alive and well, but the groundwork was laid
for inspiring and even recruiting a new genera-
tion of activists.
Taking a lesson from Kelley and drawing
on the streaming audio model of the Virtual
Oral/Aural History Archive website
(www.csulb.edu/voaha), Maylei Blackwell is
similarly working with her students in her under-
graduate Chicano/a studies courses (Women’s
Movements in Latin American, Transnational
Organising and Chicana Feminisms) to use oral
history to create digital narratives.33 Her goal is to
make the social documentation and stories gath-
ered by students accessible to community
organisations ‘who will benefit by having their
history or projects documented as well as a
permanent bridge to this work.’ In other words,
the generation of our own students is now
nurturing the next generation. Many of the emer-
gent generation in the US, as Linda Shopes has
noted of her recent experiences at the Columbia
Oral History Institute, are ‘doing enormously
creative – indeed radical work – some of it femi-
Autumn 2011 ORAL HISTORY 69
nist inflected, some of it involved in broader
struggles’.34
The context in the UK, where there has
been a history of state support for oral history
projects, is more complicated, and as
Margaretta Jolly notes, even paradoxical. For
instance, despite its nationalist framing, the
Heritage Lottery Fund, fuelled by lottery ticket-
shoppers, has funded hundreds of diverse,
often very radical community oral history
projects like the Black Cultural Archive oral
history project of the Black women’s move-
ment. 35 Additionally, other state-funded
research councils as well as private foundations
have increasingly supported academic oral
history-based research, like Jolly’s own Lever-
hulme Trust funded large scale oral history of
feminism in Britain. These developments lead
Jolly to muse hopefully ‘that there may be room
for new kinds of radicalism even in more insti-
tutional settings; that the space of the
university can be used, counter-intuitively, to
avoid some of the conservatisms of community
politics’.36
British oral historian Carrie Hamilton is a bit
more pessimistic, pointing out how funding
sources have ‘already co-opted [oral history] for
something other than progressive political ends.’
Yet, she notes:
One potential way out of this is to become
involved in popular oral history projects that
70 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2011
are not strictly speaking ‘research’ and
therefore do not have to conform to institu-
tional demands.37
In fact, many feminist oral historians in both
the US and UK strive to maintain the radical
nature of their academic work in an increasingly
corporatised academy at the same time that they
are engaged in community activism and grass-
roots projects. For Premilla Nadasen in the US,
for instance, it means working with transna-
tional domestic workers.38 Similarly, Carrie
Hamilton in the UK is engaged in an LGBT oral
history project in her trade union.39
Conclusion
When I read Sean Field’s piece asking if oral
history has ‘lost its critical and subversive edge,’
my first reaction was that certainly feminist oral
history had. But that was because I had not yet
lifted the nostalgic veil of my own political past.
There were few remnants of the 1970s women’s
liberation movement as we had known it, let
alone other left social movements. However, as
I engaged with other feminist oral historians, I
was able to reassess our earlier feminist oral
history work, re-value contemporary opposi-
tional activism, and appreciate the innovative
and significant contributions of feminist oral
history practitioners whose work is defined by
their own trajectories.
Some of the US work that I have cited uses
oral history as a centrepiece in the continuing
challenge of the ‘master narrative’ and also in Women Rising
re-visioning feminist history and historiography, Oral History
Speakout, Santa
challenging what, in effect, had become the Monica, California,
master narrative of US ‘second wave’ feminism. 12 March, 1983.
Many of the second and now emergent genera-
tion also see themselves and their work as agents
of social change. For example, Tamar Carroll
gave a resounding ‘No!’ to the question if femi-
nist oral history had lost its radical/subversive
edge, noting:
Feminist oral history shares with feminist
activism more broadly the disruptive poten-
tial to upset oppressive dichotomies such as
public/private and good girl/bad girl.40
Premilla Nadasen shares the belief of veteran
feminist oral historians that the work over the
past forty years was significant in creating a new
past.41 But she goes further, noting that it played
and continues to play ‘a critical role in social
change.’
…By acknowledging and providing a plat-
form for progressive voices, historians are
directly contributing to radical social
change, because the inclusion of these
voices in the political discourse fundamen-
tally changes the frame of reference and the
boundaries of discussion.42
Similarly, Maylei Blackwell argues:
 Autumn 2011 ORAL HISTORY 71

[E]ssentially what is radical about the work
shifts as does where we think the cutting
edge is… what each generation thinks is
radical or subversive is mobile and each
generation’s ability to move the horizon of
meaning and analysis is built on the ground
the prior generation established.43
The role that feminist oral history plays in
moving the horizon of meaning and analysis
today extends beyond work on women, as so
tellingly illustrated by Carrie Hamilton’s expe-
rience in Cuba. When an audience member
raised a question about feminist theory during
her talk on politics and painful pasts – which
focused mainly on men – Hamilton realised
how her questions and conclusions have been
shaped by ‘a commitment to feminist research
methodologies’.44
As my 1970s generation passes the mantle
to the current and emergent generations of femi-
nist oral historians, we would do well to follow
the lead of our successors and to heed the advice
of veteran feminist scholar Liz Kennedy ‘to
listen carefully to what people are saying to us
about resistance’;45 or, coming full circle to
Joanna Bornat:
[T]here [might] be a whole lot more going
on that is oral history related than we can
ever keep our eye on and that those of us
older oral historians may need to learn to
recognise how and where oral history is
happening.46

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to express my deep appreciation to
all those who gave their time and thought
to the topic addressed here:
Sue Armitage, Maylei Blackwell, Tamar
Carroll, Liz Kennedy, Laurie Mercier,
NOTES
1. Paper delivered at the International Oral
History Association Conference, Prague,
July 2010.
2. Joanna Bornat email to
feministoralhistory discussion group,
1 September 2009.
3. Sean Field, ‘From Step Child to Elder:
Has Oral History Become “Respectable?”’,
International Oral History Association [web
page], Accessed online at
www.iohanet.org/debate, 15 February
2009.
4. For the range of US projects and
presentations, see the first Special
Women’s Oral History of Frontiers: A Journal
of Women’ Studies, vol 2, no 2, 1977, See
also reprint in Women’s Oral History: A
Frontiers Reader, Lincoln and London:
University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
5. The US participants included Sue
Armitage, Maylei Blackwell, Tamar Carroll,
Liz Kennedy, Laurie Mercier, Premilla
Nadasen, Vicki Ruiz, and Linda Shopes.
6. In addition to Joanna Bornat and Graham
Smith, the UK participants include Carrie
Hamilton, Tineke E Jansen, and Margaretta
Jolly.
7. Linda Shopes email to feministoralhistory
discussion group, 17 August 2009.
8. Kennedy, Elizabeth Lapovsky. Electronic
communication to feministoralhistory
discussion group, 21 September, 2009.
For recent work in queer oral history, see
Nan Alamilla Boyd and Horacio Roque
Ramírez (eds), Bodies of Evidence: The
Practice of Queer Oral History, New York:
Oxford University Press, forthcoming,
2012.
Premilla Nadasen, Vicki Ruiz, and Linda
Shopes (from the US); and Joanna Bornat,
Carrie Hamilton, Tineke E. Jansen,
Margaretta Jolly and Graham Smith (from
England). If I quoted each of them directly
9. Joanna Bornat email to
feministoralhistory discussion group,
1 September 2009, referencing Sherna
Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai (eds),
Women’s Words: The Feminist Practice of
Oral History, New York and London:
Routledge, 1991.
10. Penny Summerfield, Reconstructing
Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and
Subjectivity in Oral Histories of the Second
World War, Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1998, p 10.
11. Linda Shopes email to
feministoralhistory discussion group,
17 August 2009.
12. Summerfield, 1998, p 11, quoting
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism an
the subversion of identity, London:
Routledge, 1990.
13. Joan Sangster, ‘Telling our Stories:
Feminist Debates and the Use of Oral
History,’ Women’s History Review, vol 1,
no 1, 1994, pp 8-9. For further
discussion of how both Summerfield and
Sangster applied their understandings to
their work, see Sherna Berger Gluck,
‘Women’s Oral History: Is It So Special’?
in Thomas A Charlton, Lois E. Myers and
Rececca Sharpless (eds), Handbook of
Oral History, Lanham/New
York/Toronto/Oxford: Altamira Press,
2006, pp 373-375.
14. See especially Richard Delgado and
Jean Stefancic, The Latino/a Condition: A
Critical Reader, New York: New York
University Press, 1998; and Elizabeth M.
Iglesias, ‘LatCrit Theory: Some Preliminary
Notes Towards a Transatlantic Dialogue’,
or not, they all contributed greatly to my
thinking and forced me to revise my
original pessimistic view of the state of
feminist oral history.
http://personal.law.miami.edu/~iglesias/
transatlantic.htm.
15. Joanna Bornat email to
feministoralhistory discussion group,
1 September 2009.
16. Graham Smith to feministoralhistory
discussion group, 25 July 2009 .
17. Smith, 1 July 2009.
18. Earlier critiques of the historiography of
the ‘second wave’ include, Sherna Berger
Gluck, ‘Whose Feminism, Whose History?
Reflections on Excavataing the History of
(the) US Women’s Movement(s)’, in Nancy
Naples (ed), Community Activism and
Feminist Politics: Organising Across Race,
Class and Gender, New York:
Routledge,1998, p 33, p 54. See also
Mary Ann Clawson, ‘Looking for Feminism:
Racial Dynamics and Generational
Investments in the Second Wave,’ in
Feminist Studies, vol 34, No 3, 2009.
Analysing five works published between
2004 and 2006, Clawson ultimately
‘confirms, contravenes and complicates
Gluck’s provocative assertion’, p 526.
19. See especially Anne Valk, Radical
Sisters: Second Wave Feminism and Black
Liberation in Washington DC, Urbana and
Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2008,
and the contributors to Stephanie Gilmore
(ed), Feminist Coalitions: Historical
Perspectives on Second Wave Feminism in
the US, Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2008.
20. Premilla Nadasen, Welfare Warriors:
The Welfare Rights Movement in the US,
New York and London: Routledge, 2005.
21. Nadasen, 2005, p 229.
72 ORAL HISTORY Autumn 2011
22. Premilla Nadasen, ‘Black Feminism:
Waves, Rivers and Still Water’, Feminist
Formations, vol 22, no 1, 2010, pp 98-
110.
23. Tamar Carroll, ‘Unlikely Allies: Forging a
Multiracial, Class-Based Women’s
Movement in 1970s Brooklyn’, in
Stephanie Gilmore, 2008, p 214.
24. Cited in Carroll, 2008, p 202.
25. Tamar Carroll email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 21 January 2010.
26. Anne Enke, Finding the Movement,
Durham and London: Duke University
Press, 2007, p 5.
27. Enke, 2007, p 6.
28. It is not just feminist oral historians who
are engaging once again in advocacy oral
history, as demonstrated by a stream
devoted to the topic at the 2009 Oral
History Association conference in Louisville,
Kentrucky. The papers in this stream
discussed a homeless project, the use of
oral history to engage the Spanish speaking
families of fourth grade students, and how
oral history is being used by native people
to challenge boundary disputes.
29. Dolores Delgado Bernal, ‘Critical Race
Theory, Latino Critical Theory, and Race-
Gendered Epistemology: Recognising
Students of Colour as Holders and Creators
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of Knowledge’, Qualitative Inquiry, vol 8,
2002, p 120.
30. Chandra Mohanty, ‘Cartographies of
Struggle: Third World Women and the
Politics of Feminism’, in Philomena Edded
and David Theo Goldberg (eds), Race
Critical Theories: Text and Context, Maiden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2002, p 213.
31. Vicki Ruiz email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 1 August 2009.
32. For more elaboration on this and similar
projects, see Jonah Bossewitch, John
Frankfurt, Alexander Sherman with Robin
DG Kelley, ‘Wiki Justice, Social Ergonomics,
and Ethical Collaborations’, in Robert E.
Cummings and Matt Barton (eds), Wiki
Writing: Collaborative Learning in the
College Classroom, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press: 2008, p 53, and especially
pp 67-69.
33. Personal conversations with Maylei
Blackwell and her ‘Electronic Bridges’
proposal for an Instructional Improvement
Grant, UCLA , 2009.
34. Linda Shopes email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 30 June 2009.
35. Margaretta Jolly emails to Sherna
Berger Gluck, 15 March 2010 and 15 June
2011.
36. Margaretta Jolly, email to
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feministoralhistory discussion group,
2 August 2009.
37. Carrie Hamilton email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 20 March 2010.
38. Premilla Nadasen, email to Sherna
Berger Gluck, 11 March 2010.
39. Carrie Hamilton email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 12 March 2010.
40. Tamar Carrol email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 21 January 2010.
41. See Armitage, ‘The Stages of Women’s
Oral History,’ in Donald A Ritchie (ed), Oxford
Handbook of Oral History, New York: Oxford
University Press, 2010; Joanna Bornat,
‘Women’s History and Oral History’, in
Women’s History Review, vol 16, no 1, 2007.
42. Premilla Nadasen email to Sherna
Berger Gluck, 22 January 2010.
43. Maylei Blackwell email to Sherna
Berger Gluck, 28 May 2010.
44. Carrie Hamilton email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 12 March 2010.
45. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy email to
feministoralhistory discussion group,
21 September 2009.
46. Joanna Bornat email to Sherna Berger
Gluck, 24 March 2010.
Address for correspondence:
sbgluck@csulb.edu