Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader

Western Folklore, Fall 2002 by Hanson, Debbie A

Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader. Edited by Susan H. Armitage with Patricia Hart and Karen Weathermon. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002. Pp. xii 392, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $29.95 paper)

At the conclusion of her article, "Digging Beneath the Surface: Oral History Techniques," Sherry Thomas writes, "Absolutely ordinary people matter and count, their stories are important, and we need all of their stories" (60). Thomas's statement could well serve as the underlying credo for the anthology Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader. Since its founding in 1975, the thrice-yearly Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies has been regarded as a publication interested in recording and examining the lives of all women in ways which reach beyond academia and into the community at large (ix). This collection of well-selected, well-researched, and well-written essays carries on the Frontiers tradition in its careful and respectful treatment of the experiences of a multiplicity of women whose stories the editors and contributors obviously believe are narratives which definitely "matter and count."

With articles concerning everything from the life of a North Carolina millworker to the fluctuating roles of Palestinian camp women to the history of illegal abortions in Montana, Women's Oral History: The Frontiers Reader offers readers a wide variety of topics and approaches from which to choose. The selections are unified, though, not just by the consistently fine research which supports them but also by their engaging, thoroughly readable presentations. In the first portion of the volume, the Women's Oral History: Resource Section and Judy Yung's article, "Giving Voice to Chinese American Women," provide valuable advice on conducting oral history interviews, including sample questions and release forms. Additional articles in this section and elsewhere in the anthology explore other methodological issues, including the need for creative questioning techniques (Strobel 47), the ethical concerns involved in recording the words and lives of others (Broughton 175), and the conditions that must be addressed when dealing with outside sources of funding (Kesselman et al. 162; Broughton 177; Marchant 184). Such matters, often obscured by pedantic language elsewhere, are expressed clearly and concisely in these cases. This concern for clarity and quality research is evident in other essays as well. Anne M. Butler and Gerri W. Sorenson's "Patching the Past: Students and Oral History," for instance, describes in detail how oral history can be effectively used in the classroom and presents this information from the viewpoints of both teacher and student. Other essays, such as Dolores Delgado Bernal's "Grassroots Leadership Reconceptualized: Chicana Oral Histories and the 1968 East Los Angeles School Blowouts," Jean Calterone Williams's "Domestic Violence and Poverty: The Narratives of Homeless Women," and Harriet Wrye and Jacqueline Churilla's "Looking Inward, Looking Backward: Reminiscence and the Life Review," explores events and groups which have been generally neglected and argues persuasively that the narratives that comprise oral histories have sociological, political, and therapeutic value.

While editors Susan H. Armitage, Patricia Hart, and Karen Weathermon have produced a significant, insightful collection, a few minor problems do exist in some essays. For example, further analysis might have strengthened "The Southern Paiute Woman in a Changing Society," by Lucille Jake, Evelyn James and Pamela Bunte. In addition, some of the material republished from the first two issues of Frontiers devoted exclusively to oral history sometimes comes across as uncomfortably dated. Margaret Strobel's opening paragraph in "Doing Oral History as an Outsider" suggests that African women's oral histories will likely continue to be collected, processed, and disseminated primarily by more educated outsiders for the foreseeable future, overlooking the fact that oral histories can, of course, be collected, processed, and disseminated orally by the very individuals who produce them, even without the advantages of "literacy, higher education, money, and power" (43).

Likewise, Sherna Berger Gluck's "What's So Special about Women?: Women's Oral History" mentions the possible loss of "the history of black, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American women" if outsiders do not share with them the skills and equipment necessary to record their narratives, neglecting the possibility that these stories may already be preserved in other ways by those who are telling them (9). Gluck also refers to the custom of valuing, remembering, and repeating the experiences of ordinary people as having been brought from Africa, when it could be argued that some Native American traditions, such as the winter counts of the Great Plains tribes, are evidence that similar customs are common among the indigenous peoples of North America. Gluck does provide a partial remedy for these errors in "Reflections on Women's Oral History: An Exchange," authored jointly with Susan H. Armitage specifically for the present volume, where she acknowledges being "terribly embarrassed" by some aspects of her 1977 article-but, to forestall confusion in present-day readers, explanatory head notes preceding the older essays might have been preferable to a later discussion of them.