This essay highlights the author’s methodology for taking a feminist approach to doing oral history at a large university—particularly her efforts to involve the wider university community in the project of creating an inclusive and multi-perspectival institutional history. This essay is part of a PHR forum on the theme of “Personal Reflections on Feminist Historical Methods,” with additional essays by Judy Tzu-Chun Wu, Y. Yvon Wang, and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. The forum is part of a larger PHR special issue, Feminist Histories.
In early 2023, the Stanford Historical Society published our oral history program’s first-ever book, a collection of interviews with university leaders.1 At a launch event held at the flagship Denning House, with Stanford’s Lake Lagunita sparkling in the background, our former president and provost reflected on university leadership with candor and moving personal anecdotes. As the behind-the scenes person in charge of the book project, I heard but couldn’t fully enjoy the applause at the end of the event. Rather, the remark of a faculty leader resounded in my head: “You know, you really should have included so and so in this volume. She was involved in many of these major initiatives, and it’s a shame her contributions aren’t represented.” That moment brought to the fore the challenges of documenting the history of a large, complex institution as an oral historian. How can we make sure not to leave anyone out, most especially the women staff members whose labor has often gone unrecognized? Is it possible to engage in institutional history, often dominated by the top-down perspectives of leaders, from a feminist perspective?
A grassroots effort started by Society members in 1978, the OHP team comprises scores of Stanford community volunteers and students. We conduct life history and thematic interviews with senior administrators, faculty across seven schools and more than seventy departments, staff members who have been a part of important institutional initiatives, and alumni who can speak to student, academic, and social life at Stanford over the decades. During my tenure as the OHP’s first full-time program manager, we have more than tripled the size of the collections, launched dozens of new projects, offered public history workshops, courses, and conferences, and started a student internship program. As my interlocutor at the book launch reminded me, however, there is still much to do and many stories that I wish we had recorded when it was still possible. Nevertheless, I have worked to apply insights from women’s history and the histories of feminism to the institutional setting in which I operate, and I’ve arrived at a few touchstones that may be of interest to others seeking to use oral history to document organizational history in fresh ways. Through employing techniques that enable stories, noticing what is happening at the margins of the interview, probing project parameters to locate missing voices, and the laborious process of accurately transcribing and archiving interviews, oral historians can work to create a more inclusive historical record.
Enabling Stories: Listening with a Feminist Spirit
“People learn through stories,” commented Professor Chuck Holloway, one of our faculty interviewees, when describing his teaching techniques. We grasp onto stories and anchor them in our memories in ways that are difficult to do with more abstract explanations. As an oral historian, I am continually reminded of the importance of stories not only to learning but also to self-expression and meaning making. I’ve come to understand oral historians as enablers of stories, narrative guides who use an alchemy of historical research, trust-building, open-ended questions, and well-timed prompts to turn even reticent interviewees into storytellers. At their best, oral historians can be special cultural figures, imbued with the power to ask questions and express curiosity in a way that draws people out.
Sometimes, interviewees do not think they have much to offer. Students interviewing relatives for assignments in women’s history courses often encounter resistance: “Why do you want to interview me? I wasn’t a feminist activist or a big career mover and shaker. My life hasn’t been that interesting.” But, of course, everyone has something to which they can bear witness—whether it is a daily routine or work practice, family attitudes toward childcare or dating, or the activities of a religious or community group. Finding the subjects about which an interviewee is uniquely equipped to talk is part of the craft and delight of oral history interviewing.
I’ve heard many students share their surprised enthusiasm after interviewing family elders. “I had no idea how my grandmother came to this country. She never told me,” or “I found out my aunt had been married to someone else before she married my uncle. She never mentioned it.” And, of course, they had never bothered to ask. We are all pretty ignorant of one another—sometimes of even the most basic facts. Oral history can be an antidote to that ignorance, if only a partial one. As such, I view it as an important feminist practice and discipline, one that urges us to put aside our busy schedules and, with humility, devote attention to what someone else is saying.
Listening with a feminist spirit necessitates humility, but it does not mean avoiding difficult questions. We need neither abandon our existing historical knowledge nor use it as a weapon; rather, we can draw upon it to highlight and elicit the cultural contexts, intellectual currents, turning points, and individuals that shaped our interviewee’s particular lived experience. Listening is a skill, however, that one should not assume or take for granted. When training new interviewers, I remind them of the importance of engaged and embodied listening, I share practical tips about how to listen, and I urge them to listen with their hearts. I’ve experienced intense moments of human connection when listening deeply to people’s stories, in some cases seeing my interviewees for a time as younger versions of themselves. Of course, empathic connections can be problematic, but I think I’d rather have those connections during an interview than not.2
Being the recipient of engaged listening can be profound as well. Historian Annelise Heinz, who made extensive use of oral history in her study of mahjong players, once told me that her interviewees frequently cried during their discussions.3 Why, I wondered, would stories of game-playing evoke tears? Part of the reason, Heinz believed, was that no one had ever really asked them about, or accorded importance to, this part of their lives, or about the rich female friendships and spaces they created around mahjong-playing.
Enabling stories can mean giving up control in order to create a more inclusive archive. As the popularity of our oral history program grew, we were inundated with requests for all kinds of Stanford-related oral history projects. Daniel Hartwig, then Stanford’s university archivist, and I put together a set of resources called the Stanford Community History Toolkit, which enabled university groups to launch their own projects, with OHP providing interviewer training and processing support. That effort has yielded an exciting array of projects that have enriched the historical record about the university, ranging from a history of the urban studies program, to interviews with Asian American student activists, to a history of disability at Stanford. Helping actors at all levels of an institution record and preserve the histories that they care about is key to a vital and valued oral history archive.
Remember the Piano Player: Embracing Encounters at the Margins of the Interview
Historian Cynthia Blair, seeking evidence about the lives of sex workers in Chicago, used a surprising source: the memoirs of a piano player who sometimes played in the speakeasies where the women worked.4 He was not a main figure in these transactions—he was playing the piano—but he knew what went down and who was there, and he wrote about it. Oral historians, perhaps especially those who document institutions, should remember to think about the piano players in their particular room—the people who staffed the committees, wrote the reports, designed the systems. “Remember the piano player in the room” has become one of our oral history adages, influencing whom we interview and what questions we pose.
In the fall of 2015, I conducted my very first interview in my new position. The subject was an esteemed professor emeritus of electrical engineering who had devoted his career to the study of magnetic materials and their atomic origins. On top of all the worries about operating my equipment correctly even while I only dimly understood the field to which he had devoted his life, I had to navigate a tricky interview situation. While I’d taken great care to construct a “proper” interview environment, we were subject to an initially unwelcome intrusion. The professor’s wife kept walking in to remind him of things to talk about. Now we had an interruption! How should I respond? Should I turn off the recorder or just keep going?
In pondering that moment, I’ve come to appreciate such interruptions, the encounters at the margins of an interview that yield meaning. As a faculty spouse during the Cold War era who did not work outside the home, the professor’s wife was very much a part of the story of his career. His success told the story of her labor and support, as well as his intellectual acumen, and she wanted him to address all his accomplishments. While I’m always conscious of how the presence of others might shape an interview, I love that she inserted herself into the conversation. I now try to create space in interviews for others who played an important part in an individual’s career, appreciating personal accomplishments while also recognizing the context and familial or cultural structure of which they are a part—together, all these parts tell the story of a life lived.
Who are the Pioneering Women Anyway? On Absences and Intersections
When I began my job, an ambitious feminist oral history effort was already underway. The Stanford Pioneering Women Oral History Project was designed to gather the life stories of women who were among the first in their fields on the Stanford faculty.5 Students in Estelle Freedman’s women’s history class and OHP volunteers conducted the interviews. This project both delighted and terrified me. Hooray that institutional history could interrogate gender in such a meaningful way, but wow, was this a tough project to execute. Many women faculty members were not all that keen to be interviewed only about their experiences as women in academia—they rightfully wanted to talk about their experiences as faculty members more broadly, especially their research. Thus, the interviews became both Stanford Faculty and Pioneering Women project interviews, making for a complex interview protocol but satisfying our interviewees’ concerns. Student involvement in the project was a plus, but training students to conduct interviews with high profile faculty members in varied fields and to complete interviews within the meager ten weeks of the quarter system was a challenge.
In addition to logistical concerns, the bounds of the project were fraught. The list of interviewees that the project organizers had compiled was good, but important voices were missing. Some women pioneers at Stanford never attained the rank of faculty member due to a legacy of sexism in the academy and nepotism rules that forbade spousal hires. Instead, they worked in labs as researchers or as lecturers. Others were no longer at Stanford. Not all pioneers make it to the end of the journey, after all. Some had been denied tenure and moved on; others opted for positions at other universities or pursued careers outside academia. We did interview a few of these women, but their general absence serves as a reminder of the limits of the project. We mitigated these limits somewhat by adding questions about gender and academia into our regular faculty interview protocol, a tactic that bore fruit when male faculty members began recalling reactions to female faculty members to which they were privy. One professor in a male-dominated professional school recalled the obscene graffiti scrawled in the men’s bathroom about one of the school’s early women faculty members, as well as the outrage that male students, imbued with consumer privilege, expressed to him about having to take a course from a young woman.
Moreover, not all pioneering women faculty members became or remained the visible “university citizens” that suggested them as likely interviewees for the project. Research revealed important women pioneers overlooked in the project’s original design, including the first trans-woman on the faculty, and Stanford’s first faculty woman of color, the eminent cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter.6 When I finally tracked Wynter down, she was living in Texas and about to celebrate her ninetieth birthday, but she graciously agreed to a phone interview. I’ll never forget the valuable lessons about anti-colonialism, identity, and intersectionality that she conveyed through her stories. When I asked about her early career as a dancer, she explained the new West Indian cultural community she found herself a part of as a student in England and remembered the transformative impact of seeing the Katherine Dunham dance company:
When she came to England, I remember sitting up in the gallery right at the top, the cheap seats, and I could almost have fallen out. I had never heard such rhythm in my life and the power of that rhythm. That was a powerful influence in my life…It was like taking the roof off, you know. She made me begin to understand that I am lucky because I belong to this powerful tradition and the fact that it had come in the slave ships. Nevertheless, it was there alive and powerful. It would give me a tremendous pride because usually we were ashamed of our African heritage. We are taught to be ashamed of it. That was part of the anti-colonial struggle.7
Asked about other Caribbean women in academia and how she balanced life as a single mother with an academic career, Wynter responded:
At that time, growing up in the period I did, in the anti-colonial movement, as far as I was concerned, I could do anything. That was one of the liberating forces of the anti-colonial movement. Do you know what I mean? Just the very process of seeing this movement around you as you are growing up, and although there are going to be enormous problems, that’s not the point. We are taking things into our own hands. At that time, being a colonized native was so much more powerful than being a woman. You see, what I call these genre terms are so much more powerful than these gender terms.8
Sylvia Wynter made anti-colonialism and intersectionality real to me through her stories. Grappling with the parameters of the Pioneering Women Project embodies what doing feminist history is all about.
There is Beauty in the Backlog: The Labor of Processing Interviews
Conducting oral history interviews can be a profound experience, but transcribing and archiving them can be profoundly time-consuming. While transcription and other processing tasks are important parts of most oral history programs, they often receive too little attention. Some programs intentionally do not transcribe interviews—either due to a lack of resources or because they believe that transcripts can never truly capture the meaning contained in oral testimony—but at the OHP we value transcripts because they enhance public access to our interviewees’ words.
A relatively new rationale for transcribing oral history interviews relates to the digital humanities—where transcriptions are available, historians can analyze collections of oral histories as data, performing text mining, text analysis, and data visualization to identify new insights and patterns. In the Stanford Oral History Text Analysis Project (OHTAP), we use digitized transcripts of oral histories to learn more about women’s experiences with and memories of sexual assault and harassment, along with other research questions. Estelle Freedman, the principal investigator for the project, recently published the first article on OHTAP findings.9 This project, which blends digital approaches with careful qualitative reading and coding, has further accentuated the importance of accurately transcribing oral histories and attaching descriptive metadata.
Finally, we use transcripts to allow interviewees to review content and make corrections, redactions, and additions before their interview ends up in the archives. We make corresponding audio/video edits when we can. In short, we take a lot of care with the stories that people tell us and processing them takes a long time. I’m always worried about our “backlog,” the scores of interviews that have been conducted but sit somewhere in our queue awaiting deposit into the archives. But, in actuality, that backlog embodies a central ethos of oral history—a belief in the value of the words and stories of which we are stewards. Just as feminist historians have helped us recognize and value diverse kinds of labor, the care with which we handle stories after the interview should be part of the work of all who use oral history as a methodology.
Conclusion
As a historian of women, I’ve always valued the discipline of oral history. While an enthusiastic champion, I’m not a naive one. Oral histories, like any source, are imperfect. People forget or misremember things, and memory is shaped not only by brain health but also by intervening events, intersubjective relationships, and interview contexts. Oral history can, however, expose tips of submerged and forgotten icebergs, presenting scholars with strange and fascinating outcroppings that warrant further investigation.10 At its most basic, it embraces the value of an interviewee’s particular perspective and utterances—words that are sometimes incomplete, imperfect, or muddled, or even unfair and wrongheaded. As feminist historians, it behooves us to make the time to listen to those words and stories, to seek out projects and perspectives beyond the obvious, and to take care to preserve the testimonies of our interviewees for future generations of historians to access and analyze.
Notes
I would like thank the many people who have contributed their stories, talents, and resources to make the Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program an innovative hub of community history gathering, archiving and learning. I am especially grateful to Andy DiPaolo, Susan Schofield, and Jan Thomson for their engaged volunteer leadership; to the university archivist Josh Schneider for his support; and to Estelle Freedman for championing oral history as a methodology and moving it in brave new directions and for her inspiring mentorship and spirited collaboration.
Eric Knight, ed., Voices from the Hennessy Presidency: Collected Interviews with Stanford University Leaders, 2000–2016 (Stanford: Stanford Historical Society, 2023).
On the “dilemma of empathy,” see Kathleen M. Blee, “Evidence, Empathy, and Ethics: Lessons from Oral Histories of the Klan,” Journal of American History 80, no. 2 (1993): 596–606, doi:10.2307/2079873.
Annelise Heinz, Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021).
Cynthia M. Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
Stanford Pioneering Women Oral History Project interviews are part of the Stanford Historical Society Oral History Collections (SC0932), Stanford Libraries Special Collections and University Archives. Transcripts and recordings are available at https://exhibits.stanford.edu/shs Additional interviews with early Stanford women faculty and staff are in SC1017 Stanford Oral History Project Interviews.
Born in Cuba in 1928, Sylvia Wynter grew up in Jamaica during a period of British colonial rule. She attended King’s College London and was one of a group of important London-based Caribbean writers. She held faculty positions at the University of the West Indies and the University of California at San Diego before joining the Stanford Department of Spanish and Portuguese and the Program in African and Afro-American Studies in 1977.
Sylvia Wynter, Sylvia Wynter: Oral History for the Stanford Faculty Oral History Project, conducted by Natalie Marine-Street, November 22, 2017, 21, Stanford Historical Society Oral History Program Interviews (SC0932), Stanford Department of Special Collections and University Archives.
Wynter, oral history, 27.
Estelle B. Freedman, “‘Not a Word Was Said Ever Again’: Silence and Speech in Women’s Oral History Accounts of Sexual Harassment,” The Oral History Review (Published online March 15, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00940798.2023.2182695
For one such example, see Holly Miowak Guise, “Who Is Doctor Bauer?: Rematriating a Censored Story on Internment, Wardship, and Sexual Violence in Wartime Alaska, 1941–1944,” Western Historical Quarterly 53, Issue 2 (Summer 2022): 145–65.