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

Beyond Women’s Words unites feminist scholars, artists, and community activists working with the stories of women and other historically marginalized subjects to address the contributions and challenges of doing feminist oral history.

Feminists who work with oral history methods want to tell stories that matter. They know, too, that the telling of those stories—the processes by which they are generated and recorded, and the different contexts in which they are shared and interpreted—also matters—a lot. Using Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai’s classic text, Women’s Words, as a platform to reflect on how feminisms, broadly defined, have influenced, and continue to influence, the wider field of oral history, this remarkable collection brings together an international, multi-generational, and multidisciplinary line-up of authors whose work highlights the great variety in understandings of, and approaches to, feminist oral histories.

Through five thematic sections, the volume considers Indigenous modes of storytelling, feminism in diverse locales around the globe, different theoretical approaches, oral history as performance, digital oral history, and oral history as community-engagement. Beyond Women’s Words is ideal for students of oral history, anthropology, public history, women’s and gender history, and Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as activists, artists, and community-engaged practitioners.

Katrina Srigley is Associate Professor in the Department of History at Nipissing University. Author of the award-winning monograph Breadwinning Daughters: Young Working-Women in a Depression Era City (2010), her current collaborative work with Nipissing First Nation focuses on the history of Nbisiing Anishinaabeg territory.

Stacey Zembrzycki is a teacher at Dawson College. She is the author of According to Baba: A Collaborative Oral History of Sudbury’s Ukrainian Community (2014) and its accompanying website www.sudburyukrainians.ca, and is co-editor of Oral History Off the Record: Toward an Ethnography of Practice (2013).

Franca Iacovetta is Professor of History at the University of Toronto and co-editor of Studies in Gender and History at University of Toronto Press. A past president of the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, she is author or editor of ten books, including the award-winning Gatekeepers: Reshaping Immigrant Lives in Cold War Canada (2006).