Oral History and Feminist Memory

Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory This is the Published version of the following publication Stephens, Julie (2010) Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory. Oral History, 38 (1). pp. 81-90. ISSN 0143-0955 The publisher’s official version can be found at http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/journals/journal_indexes/38A1.php#4 Note that access to this version may require subscription. Downloaded from VU Research Repository https://vuir.vu.edu.au/15542/ OUR REMEMBERED SELVES: ORAL HISTORY AND FEMINIST MEMORY Julie Stephens In retrospective accounts of the women’s movement, personal memories of ABSTRACT feminists have taken on a public and collective significance. What has come to count as an official memory and what has been forgotten is invariably KEY WORDS: contested. Oral history interviews with Australian feminists looking back on the feminism, women’s movement challenge sanctioned accounts of second wave feminism memory studies, and raise important questions about memory and oral history. This article composure, explores some of the creative possibilities of interlinking memory theory, oral cultural scripts, history and feminist reminiscence. In examining oral testimonies about mid- maternalism twentieth century feminism, a more multifaceted and ambivalent dialogue about the women’s movement emerges than that found in memoir and autobiography. Oral reminiscences resist some of the pressures to conform to dominant representational frameworks. In retrospective accounts of mid-twentieth movement. This includes writers, historians, century feminism, debates about history and academics, public commentators, activists and memory intersect. The personal recollections of those who achieved considerable success in the feminists have taken on a public and collective political and executive arenas. The oral history significance, informing conferences, journals, unit of the library continues to build its strong memoir, autobiography and of course, popular collection of interviews documenting discourse.1 Efforts to stabilise or selectively Australian feminism and the history of the shape these memories into a sanctioned version women’s liberation movement in Australia. of the past are always fiercely debated. By exam- While some of the interviews to be discussed ining an oral history collection held at the here were conducted with this aim firmly in National Library of Australia, I will suggest that view,2 others were part of oral projects on interpretative approaches from oral history and Australian historians,3 political activists, acad- memory studies can work against fixed versions emics or women members of parliament and of feminism’s history and allow more ambiva- the senior bureaucracy. In the course of a wider lent dialogues to emerge. While there is an project researching the political consequences overlap between the oral record and written life of the different ways feminism has been narratives, attention to oral history can chal- remembered,4 I grouped together eighteen lenge some of the dominant public memories of recorded interviews with prominent Australian second wave feminism. feminists that share the characteristic of The National Library of Australia Oral ‘looking back’ and remembering the early History Collection contains a wide range of women’s liberation movement.5 These inter- interviews with well-known Australian women views have not been assembled in this way who were active in the women’s liberation before or analysed collectively. Spring 2010 ORAL HISTORY 81 The interviews not only provide retrospective bration of subjectivity12 as an important tool of narratives of the women’s movement but also analysis, rather than as a shortcoming of share a certain generational perspective. With research. Many of the interviewers are also active few exceptions, the interviews are with women participants in the Australian women’s move- who ‘discovered’ the women’s movement at ment and often friends of the interview subjects. similar ages or life-stages. Significantly, most As examples of feminist rejection of the separa- interviews were conducted at the turn of the tion between researcher and researched, these century between 1998-2003. As narratives are very dynamic and interactive interviews. recorded at the end of the twentieth century, They follow informal conversational idioms with they mirror the widespread view at the time that interjections, qualifications and even at times something had passed and was lost — never to disputes over respective memories of particular be retrieved again. In the Australian political dates. Consequently, the kind of oral testimony context, this perspective was reinforced by an to be discussed in what follows, also provides increasing hostility to John Howard’s conserva- pointed insight into the relationship between tive government during this period. The inter- personal and public memory. views also coincided with and reproduced an I will argue that interpreting these interviews emerging cultural interest in memory, a ‘memory through the lens of memory studies and oral wave’ reflected at the time in films, novels, history theory highlights different ways these popular discourse and the rise of the memoir. oral narratives resist dominant representational The revived intellectual interest in memory also frameworks. First, they avoid the binary logic of shaped the burgeoning interdisciplinary field of many historical and popular accounts that tally- memory studies. Accordingly, a compelling way up the successes and failures of feminism. of viewing these oral history interviews is to see Secondly, they acknowledge and dramatise the them as end of millennium narratives conducted affective dimensions of the women’s movement during a personal testimony epidemic. and the role of the emotions in the formulation My approach to these oral sources shares of activist strategy and identity. This is in some methodological characteristics with what contrast to the flattening out of emotion in is currently known as a secondary analysis (even certain feminist memoirs. And finally, I will though no primary analysis of this material has propose that these interviews contest dominant been done before). This method is defined by cultural representations that naturalise an oppo- Janet Heaton as the study of ‘artefactual data sition between feminism and motherhood. This derived from previous studies, such as field- article will explore each of these areas and the notes, observational records and tapes and tran- creative possibilities of interlinking memory scripts of interviews’.6 Joanna Bornat and Gail theory, oral history and feminist reminiscence. Wilson build on this definition in ‘Recycling the Where appropriate, contrast will be made with Evidence’ and outline some of the ethical and written memoir and biography. conceptual issues posed by the re-analysis of interviews and life histories.7 Elsewhere, Bornat ‘THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS MY shows how the relationship between the COUNTRY’13 meaning and context of an interview can be illu- The poetic and political force of oral narratives minated by re-analysis. Inevitably, ‘second takes’ often resides in what Daniel James calls their at interviews bring ‘additional theoretical frame- ‘messiness’, their paradoxical and contradictory works to bear on the data’.8 While my approach nature.14 Certainly, some interview subjects to the National Library of Australia interviews attempt to shape reminiscences about their lives feels like a ‘first-take’, it is important to into neat, coherent and somehow instructive acknowledge that my re-grouping of these inter- accounts, such as what they may have learned views in a different context does open up possi- from their experiences or how present circum- bilities in the recorded material that could fall stances appear to have logically emerged from outside the original purpose for which the inter- their past. In a searching interview, however, views were conducted. such attempts are never entirely successful. This As Alistair Thomson reminds us, oral history process has been theorised by oral historians as (like memory) is shaped by particular social and the seeking of composure15 or as the need to intellectual forces.9 As well as reflecting a gener- construct a ‘safe and necessary personal coher- alised interest in life narratives and memory ence out of risky, unresolved or painful pieces of research,10 these particular oral histories are past and present lives’.16 The concept of shaped by earlier ideas about the radical poten- ‘composure’ has a dual meaning. Following tial of allowing women to ‘speak-for-them- Graham Dawson, it refers to both the process selves’.11 The interactive approach to of composing a life story and to the narrator interviewing also dramatises later feminist striving to be composed, calm and coherent.17 critiques of positivism in the 1980s and the cele- A struggle for personal coherence is clearly 82 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2010 evident in some of the recorded interviews with Australian feminists in the National Library of Australia oral history collection. Yet, the interactive nature of the interviews, the friendships and familiarity between the interviewers and interviewees, the breaks and interruptions, the interjections and shared involvement in memory production means there is ample space for contradictions, paradoxes and discontinu- ities. This closely accords with Penny Summer- field’s observation that composure is always provisional in life narratives and

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