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8 Filipina American Journal Writing Recovering Women’s History Gail M. Nomura In 1985, Dorothy Laigo Cordova, founder and executive director of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS), launched the Filipino Women in America: 1860–1985 project, which resulted in a celebrated traveling historical photo exhibit on the history of Filipina Americans. While simultaneously collecting oral histories, documents , and photographs for the project, Cordova started women’s journal-writing groups to encourage women to write their own histories and share their stories with their families and community. Through journal writing, Cordova helped the women rediscover and write their personal history. This chapter offers some preliminary observations on journal writing as a way to access knowledge of women’s everyday lives so often left unrecorded in history. When writing women’s history, we often are faced with the problem of locating sources to document their daily life experiences. One method to aid in retrieving this record of ordinary women’s lives is the use of journal-writing groups. More than mere memories committed to paper, journal writing can be a powerful tool in recovering personal and community history. Cordova’s journal-writing project is an example of how this way of collecting history can shed new light on women’s history. “Sharing Our Heritage” The idea for collecting women’s history through journal writing emerged when Cordova attended a conference and heard some older people reading from their journals. At a meeting of a group planning the annual Women’s Heritage Month events in Seattle for 1982, Cordova suggested that journal writing might be a good way of collecting history. One of the planning group members was Esther Helfgott, who was writing on Jewish women’s history. Having conducted effective journal-writing sessions with Holocaust survivors, she taught the group about a different kind of journal writing that involved a catharsis as people wrote of images and emotions associated with those images . People were not just keeping a private daily journal but were doing group writing 138 exercises led by Helfgott. It was the reading aloud and sharing of their words and emotions that opened people up. Hearing group members read back their journal entries and share emotions enabled people who had been in denial to see that it was okay to speak about even the unspeakable. Helfgott began training a core group of women planning the Women’s Heritage Month activities in her method of leading journal-writing sessions. This led to the “Sharing Our Heritage” project for the March 1982 Women’s Heritage Month in Seattle , in which the core members led journal-writing workshops for various community groups, encouraging women to write their own histories. Cordova led a women’s journal -writing group on the Filipina American experience. Others led groups focusing on writing Jewish women’s history, Nordic women’s heritage, and discovering our heritage as lesbian women.1 The success of this pioneering effort to blaze a new way of collecting women’s history was lauded by the head of Washington Women’s Heritage, Susan Starbuck, who called the women “Journal Writers Recovering Women’s History.” In a letter to the group leaders, Starbuck thanked them “for creating something new.” She said that they dared “to redefine not only the content of history, but the form of collection as well— the work the historian has to do on herself included in the process of collecting and writing history.” She gave special thanks to Esther Helfgott “for time and sharing of her own process of becoming woman and historian, woman historian, historian of women.”2 Cordova’s Journal Writers Recovering Women’s History met on March 21, 1982, at her home in Seattle. Eight of the twelve who met were second-generation Filipina Americans and four were war brides (military brides). The organization of this group became the template for the later 1985 journal-writing groups Cordova conducted. The group first gathered to eat lunch prepared by Cordova and to socialize, then started the journal-writing session. Cordova deployed the process she had learned from the group sessions led by Helfgott to draw out the women’s thoughts and emotions from the past into their present consciousness and to commit them to paper. Two examples from journal writings collected from this first session conducted by Cordova illustrate the usefulness of this technique in providing powerful insights into women’s lives. For Teresa Jamero, a second-generation Filipina American who had been born and raised in California...

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