Katrina Srigley

Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century

For women in the Western world, the quest for the autonomous self is closely bound up with the advent of feminism of the so-called second wave.1 The notion of the essentialist self, contained within the biological/reproductive body of woman, has been seen as particularly debilitating to a woman’s ability to create a unique, differentiated personhood or subjectivity that draws on her authentic experience. Women’s liberation from this framework has thus been a key component of feminist writing and campaigning. Driven by a commitment to “research by, about, and for women,” the concept that women’s experiences could be legitimated by listening to their stories, and using them to inform understandings of women’s position in society, became a plank of the emancipation struggle and ongoing project of feminist scholarship.2 It is a circular reinforcing process-each voice or story contributes to an alternative historical narrative for other women, who then feel freer to narrate their own subjective experiences liberated from dominant norms and expectations. Given the recent outpouring of research on feminist activism, which tends to privilege the voices of those who can clearly situate themselves within the organized movement, opening up a discussion about the meaning of feminism to those who watched it from the sidelines is both timely and important.3 Talking about feminism in all its manifestations both with those who positively identify with the movement and those who had little or no active association with it produces a range of memory narratives that broaden and deepen understandings of the past as it was lived and interpreted. It also reminds us that feminist oral history should be open to counter and alternative narratives.

German–North American Colloquium Gendering Modern German History: Rewritings of the Mainstream (19th–20th Centuries)Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto 21–23 March 2003

Writing on the history of German women has like women’s history elsewhere undergone remarkable expansion and change since it began in the late 1960s. Like women’s history generally, the first decade of research culminated in the publication of books with programmatic titles like „Women search for their past“. Since then, the search for a „herstory“ and the question of women’s visibility has become more and more of a moot point. Not only have the questions become more varied and complex (which women are we searching for, which women are visible, in what way, when, where, and in which concrete historical contexts?); there has also been, as in the case of the historiography of other countries, an increasing emphasis on writing the history of women as part of a broader history of gender. Women’s history still continues to flourish alongside gender history but the focus of research has increasingly shifted from women to gender. This shift of emphasis acknowledges the assertion that gender is not only a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes, but also a primary way of signifying relationships of power. Moreover, gender is of crucial importance for the creation of meaning in social and political life. Far from referring only to men and women, gender constructions are used to give meaning to many other fields of the economy, society, and politics, and even everyday life. And here, too, they constitute relations of asymmetry and hierarchy. This understanding of gender has made it possible to make men and masculinity objects of historical research. Research in the field of women and gender in modern German history has followed these general trends of development from women’s to gender history. The number of articles and books by women’s and gender historians with a focus on 19thand 20th-century Germany is still increasing. The best of these studies are among the most innovative in their field of German history. They have pushed forward the move from traditional political history to social history. They helped to develop social history and broaden its focus. Many of them took the „linguistic turn“ seriously. The results of this research have certainly changed our knowledge of German history, but to what extent? Did they also change ’mainstream’ historiography on Germany as early women’s and gender historians hoped? How developed are the differences between North America and Germany in this respect? This were the main questions that stood in the center of the German-North-American Colloquium „Gendering Modern German History: Rewritings of the Mainstream (19th-20th Centuries)” that Karen Hagemann, DAAD-Visiting Professor for German and European Studies at the Munk Centre for International Studies in the academic year 2002/03, and Christine v. Oertzen, research fellow at the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C. (GHI), organized in Toronto on March 21-23, 2003. The conference was coorganized by the Joint Initiative in German and European Studies at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto, and the GHI, and amply supported the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The conveners invited 31 experts from Germany and North-America to perform „a critical stocktaking“ of the field. Altogether nearly a hundred scholars from Germany, Canada, and the US participated in the conference. In her introduction, Karen Hagemann discussed the development of women and gender studies in the field of German history and compared the state of the field in Germany and the United States. She emphasized that by and large the development of women’s and gender history in Germany followed the general trends of the field, but that national differences still remain and not only in the way in which „Gender/Geschlecht“ is defined. The mere fact that the German term „Geschlecht“ means both sex and gender is important for conceptualizing and writing about the field. There are also differences in the way in which German scholars do gender history. These differences are the result, on the one hand, of a distinct historiographical tradition, and on the other of the generally more hierarchical and conservative structures of German academia. In order to gain access to this system, the themes of gender studies tend more frequently to follow the trends of the so-called ’mainstream’ research, while at the same time approaching rese-