Sisterhood and After: Individualism, Ethics and an Oral History of the Women's Liberation Movement

Abstract

Abstract In this article, we address the question of ethics in the study of social movements from the perspective of ‘Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project’, which will record life history interviews of 50 key activists in the UK for the British Library Sound Archive. Our research is inspired by the democratic ideals of oral historical methods and of feminism itself, yet we have discovered tensions concerning the status of individual experience and the practicalities of selection and method. Turning to other feminist scholars of women's movements we identify four broad justifications for focusing on the individual: a political understanding of the personal; situated knowledge; an investment in interview relationships and a psycho-social framework of analysis. Testing these justifications against some of the oral histories we have gathered, we conclude that they go a long way to answering the paradox of studying a movement through a few individuals' stories. But we are frank about the ethical and intellectual limits that a life history method imposes on capturing social movements. Examples from interviews with Mia Morris, Beatrix Campbell, Lesley Abdela, Ellen Malos and Juliet Mitchell will illuminate the history at stake. Keywords: Ethicswomen's movementfeminismlife historyBritainindividual Acknowledgements The authors thank Beatrix Campbell, Ellen Malos, Mia Morris, Juliet Mitchell and Lesley Abdela for their permission to quote from unpublished interviews conducted with them under the auspices of Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project. They also thank the Leverhulme Trust for its support and the anonymous referees for this paper. The authors would like to dedicate this article to their Advisory Board, to Sally Alexander for her personal encouragement, and to their interviewees. Notes 1. See http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhlwr/1-7-11.html 2. See http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary/aboutthecollections/research/wlmnetwork.cfm 3. See http://www.bcaheritage.org.uk/programme 4. Mia Morris, interview with Rachel Cohen, July 2010. 5. Beatrix Campbell, interview with Margaretta Jolly, September 2010. 6. Lesley Abdela, interview with Margaretta Jolly, March 2011. 7. The British Library's Social Science department was formed in 2007. The Social Science team work closely with colleagues across different library departments to develop the library's social science collections. For more information see http://www.bl.uk/reshelp/bldept/socsci/index.html 8. The British Library's Oral History department accepts deposits of oral history recordings but also fund-raises, under the auspices of the National Life Stories (NLS) collection, to record, collect and archive its own recordings. 9. NLS projects have included the following collections: Artists Lives; Architects Lives; Lives in Steel and An Oral History of the Post Office (http://www.bl.uk/nls) 10. Joanna Bornat, founder editor of the Oral History journal and society and a pioneering feminist oral historian has also had an important influence. 11. Community oral history projects supported by the library include the Vietnamese Oral History project and the Moroccan Memories in Britain project. Previous partnerships have included ESRC/AHRC-funded Cultures of Consumption project titled ‘Manufacturing Meaning Along the Food Commodity Chain’ (http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/research/jackson.html). For further information about public engagement programmes see the Oral History Society's training schedule available at: (http://www.consume.bbk.ac.uk/research/jackson.html) 12. See http://www.femcit.org/ 13. Ellen Malos, interview with Margaretta Jolly, October 2010.