Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century ed. by Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta (review)

Beyond Women's Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century, as Sherna Berger Gluck explains in her foreword, arose from a challenge. In 1991 Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, edited by Sherna Berger Gluck and Daphne Patai, burst onto the oral history scene with searching questions for feminist oral historians. They and their authors were unafraid to confront essentialist assumptions about how we interview and what we hear in the voices we record. Like many other women oral historians, I have constantly gone back to that collection, regarding it as a key source when I research, write, and teach. Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta felt it was time for "Women's Words II" (xxii). Gluck's reply was "… go for it," and their result is an exhilarating and truly absorbing collection of chapters. This new version is bigger, with twenty-five chapters divided into four sections, each prefaced by leading oral historians. The size comes not just from the larger number of contributors but also from the tremendous resources provided in the notes accompanying each chapter. Oral history, increasingly written by women, now has a vast literature of its own, and as a practice and theory informs many other disciplines among the humanities and social sciences.

Beyond Women's Words includes a dedication to Gluck as well as her own chapter critically reflecting on the 1991 collection. In their introduction, the editors point out links to Women's Words while setting out their vision for a twenty-first century feminist oral history. Drawing on the storytelling practices of Indigenous women they put forward a "fundamental principle of oral history" to privilege "understanding through relationship, not just inclusivity" (7). Second, they affirm their understanding of "moving beyond" as valuing and respecting oral history's own history in "an act of circling back to earlier, still incisive insights and exchanges" (7). While they acknowledge these links, they also identify a need for persistent critical reflection on deceptive claims to shared identity and the politically radicalizing role of oral historians in a context of persistent and deep inequalities. As a response they affirm the role of storytelling and the contribution of oral history in truth telling, particularly where war, sexual violence, and forced migration disrupt women's lives. Finally they argue for a twenty-first century feminist oral history that can engage with a digital present—as well as a digital future—through a feminist understanding of the potential, as well as the risks involved for interviewees and interviewers when oral history relationships become open to all under conditions not always of our own choosing.

The book opens with contributions from four much-cited authors in the 1991 collection: Katherine Borland, Daphne Patai, Rina Benmayor, and Kathleen Blee. Continuity of debates, as well as critical thinking, is thus set up from the start. Patai questions what she calls the "nouveau solipsism" of a feminist oral history that, she argues, neglects the empirical with its focus on process and self-reflection (49). Included in this opening section, an international counterbalancing echoes Patai's concerns. Sanchia deSouza and Jyothsna Latha Belliappa, interviewing Anglo-Indian teachers, ask if an overemphasis on protection leads us into assuming an inequality in the interview relationship that may not reflect women's own sense of empowerment. Such questions, emerging as they do from our own practice, continue to confront us.

Each of the four sections takes up an aspect of "moving beyond." The editors' call to participate in the volume has led to a wide-range of contributions, though the under-representation of European and Asian women oral historians...