Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory

Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory

This is the Published version of the following publication

Stephens, Julie (2010) Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory. Oral History, 38 (1). pp. 81-90. ISSN 0143-0955

The publisher’s official version can be found at http://www.oralhistory.org.uk/journals/journal_indexes/38A1.php#4Note that access to this version may require subscription.

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Spring 2010 ORAL HISTORY 81

In retrospective accounts of mid-twentiethcentury feminism, debates about history andmemory intersect. The personal recollections offeminists have taken on a public and collectivesignificance, informing conferences, journals,memoir, autobiography and of course, populardiscourse.1 Efforts to stabilise or selectivelyshape these memories into a sanctioned versionof the past are always fiercely debated. By exam-ining an oral history collection held at theNational Library of Australia, I will suggest thatinterpretative approaches from oral history andmemory studies can work against fixed versionsof feminism’s history and allow more ambiva-lent dialogues to emerge. While there is anoverlap between the oral record and written lifenarratives, attention to oral history can chal-lenge some of the dominant public memories ofsecond wave feminism.

The National Library of Australia OralHistory Collection contains a wide range ofinterviews with well-known Australian womenwho were active in the women’s liberation

movement. This includes writers, historians,academics, public commentators, activists andthose who achieved considerable success in thepolitical and executive arenas. The oral historyunit of the library continues to build its strongcollection of interviews documentingAustralian feminism and the history of thewomen’s liberation movement in Australia.While some of the interviews to be discussedhere were conducted with this aim firmly inview,2 others were part of oral projects onAustralian historians,3 political activists, acad-emics or women members of parliament andthe senior bureaucracy. In the course of a widerproject researching the political consequencesof the different ways feminism has beenremembered,4 I grouped together eighteenrecorded interviews with prominent Australianfeminists that share the characteristic of‘looking back’ and remembering the earlywomen’s liberation movement.5 These inter-views have not been assembled in this waybefore or analysed collectively.

OUR REMEMBERED SELVES:ORAL HISTORY AND FEMINIST MEMORY

ABSTRACT

KEY WORDS: feminism,memorystudies,composure,cultural scripts,maternalism

In retrospective accounts of the women’s movement, personal memories offeminists have taken on a public and collective significance. What has cometo count as an official memory and what has been forgotten is invariablycontested. Oral history interviews with Australian feminists looking back on thewomen’s movement challenge sanctioned accounts of second wave feminismand raise important questions about memory and oral history. This articleexplores some of the creative possibilities of interlinking memory theory, oralhistory and feminist reminiscence. In examining oral testimonies about mid-twentieth century feminism, a more multifaceted and ambivalent dialogueabout the women’s movement emerges than that found in memoir and auto-biography. Oral reminiscences resist some of the pressures to conform to domi-nant representational frameworks.

Julie Stephens

82 ORAL HISTORY Spring 2010

The interviews not only provide retrospectivenarratives of the women’s movement but alsoshare a certain generational perspective. Withfew exceptions, the interviews are with womenwho ‘discovered’ the women’s movement atsimilar ages or life-stages. Significantly, mostinterviews were conducted at the turn of thecentury between 1998-2003. As narrativesrecorded at the end of the twentieth century,they mirror the widespread view at the time thatsomething had passed and was lost — never tobe retrieved again. In the Australian politicalcontext, this perspective was reinforced by anincreasing hostility to John Howard’s conserva-tive government during this period. The inter-views also coincided with and reproduced anemerging cultural interest in memory, a ‘memorywave’ reflected at the time in films, novels,popular discourse and the rise of the memoir.The revived intellectual interest in memory alsoshaped the burgeoning interdisciplinary field ofmemory studies. Accordingly, a compelling wayof viewing these oral history interviews is to seethem as end of millennium narratives conductedduring a personal testimony epidemic.

My approach to these oral sources sharessome methodological characteristics with whatis currently known as a secondary analysis (eventhough no primary analysis of this material hasbeen done before). This method is defined byJanet Heaton as the study of ‘artefactual dataderived from previous studies, such as field-notes, observational records and tapes and tran-scripts of interviews’.6 Joanna Bornat and GailWilson build on this definition in ‘Recycling theEvidence’ and outline some of the ethical andconceptual issues posed by the re-analysis ofinterviews and life histories.7 Elsewhere, Bornatshows how the relationship between themeaning and context of an interview can be illu-minated by re-analysis. Inevitably, ‘second takes’at interviews bring ‘additional theoretical frame-works to bear on the data’.8 While my approachto the National Library of Australia interviewsfeels like a ‘first-take’, it is important toacknowledge that my re-grouping of these inter-views in a different context does open up possi-bilities in the recorded material that could falloutside the original purpose for which the inter-views were conducted.

As Alistair Thomson reminds us, oral history(like memory) is shaped by particular social andintellectual forces.9 As well as reflecting a gener-alised interest in life narratives and memoryresearch,10 these particular oral histories areshaped by earlier ideas about the radical poten-tial of allowing women to ‘speak-for-them-selves’.11 The interactive approach tointerviewing also dramatises later feministcritiques of positivism in the 1980s and the cele-

bration of subjectivity12 as an important tool ofanalysis, rather than as a shortcoming ofresearch. Many of the interviewers are also activeparticipants in the Australian women’s move-ment and often friends of the interview subjects.As examples of feminist rejection of the separa-tion between researcher and researched, theseare very dynamic and interactive interviews.They follow informal conversational idioms withinterjections, qualifications and even at timesdisputes over respective memories of particulardates. Consequently, the kind of oral testimonyto be discussed in what follows, also providespointed insight into the relationship betweenpersonal and public memory.

I will argue that interpreting these interviewsthrough the lens of memory studies and oralhistory theory highlights different ways theseoral narratives resist dominant representationalframeworks. First, they avoid the binary logic ofmany historical and popular accounts that tally-up the successes and failures of feminism.Secondly, they acknowledge and dramatise theaffective dimensions of the women’s movementand the role of the emotions in the formulationof activist strategy and identity. This is incontrast to the flattening out of emotion incertain feminist memoirs. And finally, I willpropose that these interviews contest dominantcultural representations that naturalise an oppo-sition between feminism and motherhood. Thisarticle will explore each of these areas and thecreative possibilities of interlinking memorytheory, oral history and feminist reminiscence.Where appropriate, contrast will be made withwritten memoir and biography.

‘THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT IS MYCOUNTRY’13

The poetic and political force of oral narrativesoften resides in what Daniel James calls their‘messiness’, their paradoxical and contradictorynature.14 Certainly, some interview subjectsattempt to shape reminiscences about their livesinto neat, coherent and somehow instructiveaccounts, such as what they may have learnedfrom their experiences or how present circum-stances appear to have logically emerged fromtheir past. In a searching interview, however,such attempts are never entirely successful. Thisprocess has been theorised by oral historians asthe seeking of composure15 or as the need toconstruct a ‘safe and necessary personal coher-ence out of risky, unresolved or painful pieces ofpast and present lives’.16 The concept of‘composure’ has a dual meaning. FollowingGraham Dawson, it refers to both the processof composing a life story and to the narratorstriving to be composed, calm and coherent.17

A struggle for personal coherence is clearly


evident in some of the recorded interviews withAustralian feminists in the National Library ofAustralia oral history collection. Yet, the inter-active nature of the interviews, the friendshipsand familiarity between the interviewers andinterviewees, the breaks and interruptions, theinterjections and shared involvement inmemory production means there is ample spacefor contradictions, paradoxes and discontinu-ities. This closely accords with Penny Summer-field’s observation that composure is alwaysprovisional in life narratives and that feministoral history practice may be more conducive toproducing and revealing discomposure.18

In this respect, the strength of oral testimonycan be its failure to entirely control the processof remembrance. In the case of these interviews,singular readings of key historical eventsbecome much more difficult with oral evidence.The tally sheet logic often underpinning publicdiscussions of the legacy of second wave femi-nism (quantifying successes and failures) isnever wholly reproduced. A memory can invokemanifold responses, some of which are outsidethe dominant cultural scripts. Suzanne Bellamy,artist, radical feminist and writer, uses themetaphor of the mosaic in her oral history inter-view to describe the feminist movement inAustralia:

This was never a period of unity. This wasnot a period in which everyone sat downand all agreed. It was a period of creativestruggle out of the fantastic. It’s like thepalette was endless. The palette was, youknow, it was a mosaic…You can’t set it up.But it was an explosive, creative struggleperiod.19

At other points in this interview she remem-bers women’s liberation as ‘an egg-laying extrav-aganza’ and ‘one of those epoch breakingperiods that can only be sustained briefly, butwithin which everything is born’. Her recollec-tions depict the ‘explosive spontaneity’ of thetime as both ‘really precious’ and as having‘wounded everyone in various ways’. Refusingthe role of the auditor, retrospectively calculat-ing the achievements or shortcomings of femi-nism, Bellamy instead embraces the‘disconnects’ of the day and resists the tempta-tion to seek the ‘composure’ or ‘safety’ thatsome interpreters of oral history see as charac-teristic of personal testimony. This gives herparticular interview an almost meta-narrativequality, where memories are recalled and theo-rised at the same time.

There’s a sense if you’re only going to lookat a person’s life as, like messy, that you’ll

say that they are sometimes connected withthemselves and then they’re sometimesdisconnected with themselves…But in anhistorical sense, that’s often a useful creativetool for looking at movements of change,that they draw to them – first of all theydraw to them a really disparate group. Imean, you know… that we drew to us thebest and the worse, worse in invertedcommas and best, because I think that wewere the cream of our generation and alsosome of the most loopy.20

An example of the interactive nature of theinterviews in this archive and the often reflec-tive and irreverent approach to memory is in thefollowing exchange. Bellamy is discussing withthe interviewer Biff Ward, the relationshipbetween the verbal and the visual in thewomen’s movement, in poster art and in thelayout of the first Australian women’s liberationnewspaper Mejane.21

BW. My memory of it, just as you speak isthat it always had in terms of layout a kindof space – and it wasn’t that there was ashortage of material, of blank spaces, but itwasn’t as dense visually as everything elsewas at that time. It was almost as thoughthere was room to breathe.

SB That’s good. That’s good that that’s yourmemory. I dare say I think that probably isn’ttrue, but that’s a wonderful memory,because the breadth was in there, in the idea– wasn’t it? That’s why you’ve got thatmemory possibly.22

Getting it together(A Women’sLiberationConference) 1979screenprint, printedin colour, frommultiple stencils,National Gallery ofAustralia, Canberra.Purchased 1982 ©Toni Robertson.


If there is a particular ‘template of remem-brance’ informing how feminism is recalled,Suzanne Bellamy refuses to follow it. More thanany other in these interviews, Bellamy rejectsofficial versions of the women’s movement inAustralia as a story just about nation building orthe integration of women into a nationalistnarrative. Her reference points are not legisla-tive changes or policy battles but the relation-ship between feminist anarchist guerrillaactivism and art movements such as dada andsurrealism. She refers to a secret history of femi-nism that has not yet been documented aboutsuch direct actions and the difficulty in findingan intellectual language creative enough tocapture the underground narratives of the move-ment. This accords with views expressed bysome radical feminists in Australia that theirhistory has been overshadowed by more main-stream accounts of the achievements of liberalfeminism.

The other oral history interview in this collec-tion which both recalls the early days ofwomen’s liberation and views personal andcollective experience through a different culturallens is that of Jill Matthews, Professor of Historyat the Australian National University. Memoriesof music and cultural protest, the differentexpressions of lesbian culture in the Australiancities of Adelaide and Melbourne and the detailsof the first women’s liberation posters are richlydrawn in this interview. Matthews recalls thetimes, not as ‘the unfolding of activism into acareer path’,23 but rather as a period when,Matthews declares, ‘we were absolutely rabid’.24

The extent to which Australian feminist culturalradicalism has been eclipsed, or to use termsfrom memory theory, ‘actively forgotten’ is atopic for another paper. I concur with MargaretHenderson’s persuasive observation that theautobiographies and histories of Australianfeminism that emerged in the mid to late 1990stend towards a persistent ‘othering’ of radicalpolitics.25

Oral historians grapple with questions aboutthe relationship between individual and collec-tive memory and whether personal recollectionalways follows a cultural script.26 The oral narra-tives of Bellamy and Matthews, and many othersin the National Library of Australia collection,illustrate that there is ‘space for the consciouslyreflective individual’, to use Anna Green’swords, and that oral reminiscence is not alwaysdetermined by a pre-existing cultural script.27

Green raises questions about cultural theorisa-tions of memory that devalue or reject notions ofindividual memory. She argues that the culturaland linguistic turn in memory theory has riskeda form of cultural determinism where personalreflection is always subsumed under the rubric

of a collective, social memory.28 Green convinc-ingly argues against the automatic conflation ofindividual and collective memory. In referenceto the wider field of cultural history, WulfKansteiner also suggests a widening unease withthe failure of memory studies to sufficientlyconceptualise individual autobiographicalmemory as distinct from collective memory.29

Turning back to the interviews, there is nodoubt that at certain points in the oral narra-tives, cultural scripts do seem to emerge. In myview, this is more likely to be the case wheninterviewees are asked sweeping chronologicalquestions. The questions themselves follow atemplate. This is evident in questions about aperson’s first encounter with feminism. Theinterviewee is prompted to tell of a ‘conversion-like’ experience. Going to the first women’sliberation meeting, for instance, is rememberedas being ‘totally new’, like nothing ever experi-enced before. Sara Dowse, writer and the inau-gural head in 1974 of the Women’s AffairsSection of the Australian Department of PrimeMinister and Cabinet remembers being ‘trulyblown away [at] that first meeting’.30 Julia Ryan,feminist, educator and a founding member ofthe National Foundation For Australian Women,depicts her first meeting with the women’s liber-ation group in Canberra in 1970 as being like‘hearing the word. It was very much a feeling ofthat’.31 Deborah McCulloch, feminist andWomen’s Advisor to the South AustralianPremier (1976-1979) echoes this interpretation:

In later years, looking back it was like whathappened to St Paul. It was a total, totalconversion. I was then dedicated [raucouslaughter] oh my God, to the women’s move-ment and I was! Everyone else came a verybad second.32

Biff Ward, along with Sara Dowse is one ofthe key oral history interviewers in this collec-tion. She was prominent in the women’s move-ment in Canberra, the women’s refugemovement and the women’s peace camps at theAmerican base at Pine Gap in the 1980s andrecalls her emotional response to her firstwomen’s liberation meeting in Sydney aboveBob Gould’s first bookshop:

I had an epiphany of extraordinary propor-tions, in that I was almost winded. I felt likeI had been hit by a huge implement in thegut in recognition that that’s how I alwayshad lived and that at some level, that meantthat I hated what I was, which waswoman….So I got completely turnedaround and came out of that meeting justgabbing.33


Margaret Bearlin, teacher, educator andsocial activist echoes this collective memory byremembering her first meeting as being ‘like abombshell’ where she was ‘learning to see withnew eyes and to listen with new ears’.34 Yet, thespace is created in these interviews where amemory can also embody two things at once.Other prominent feminists describe their firstwomen’s liberation meeting as more like a home-coming. Joan Russell, member of the Women’sElectoral Lobby, public servant and the firstwoman leader at Casey Station in Antarctica in1991 recounts both the newness and the famil-iarity: ‘It was like one of those instantaneousfeminist conversions. These women speak mylanguage, they feel the way I do, this is where Ibelong – a coming home feeling’.35

These recollections conform more to a recog-nisable public discourse about the ‘before’ and‘after’ of a conversion experience. Similar‘templates of remembrance’ would be apparentin written biographies and memoirs. However,the ‘both at once’ characteristic of thesepersonal testimonies underscores the value oforal records as less ready to adopt binary modesof thinking about collective experience. Impor-

tantly, there is space for individual reflection andresistance to unitary cultural scripts where thepersonal is erased by dominant notions of thecollective view. Unlike historians or memoirists,the oral history interview subjects have morecontrol over when, how and to whom the oralrecord of their interview is released. This maymean there is less pressure to regulate or tonedown discomforting reminiscences or to try andfit them into an existing dominant representa-tional framework.

Binary logic, however, seems to unwittinglyinfuse academic debate about feminism’s legacyor the trajectories of women’s history. Take forexample Susan Magarey’s otherwise illuminat-ing analysis of four interweaving strands in thedevelopment of women’s history in Australia inWomen’s History Review 16.36 Her analysis isframed by a perceived conflict between a cele-bratory view of women’s history and what sheviews as a more negative perspective. She citesStuart MacIntyre’s claim that women’s historymarks one of the most significant changes to thediscipline in the last twenty years, as represen-tative of the former, and Jill Matthews’ commentthat feminist historians should now turn their

Women on the marchwave their placards at the InternationalWomen's Day march,Melbourne, 8 March1975. Photographer:John McKinnon.National Library ofAustralia[http://nla.gov.au/nla.pic-vn3510654].


hands to other things, as representing the latter,‘an occasion to fall on one’s sword’.37 It shouldbe noted that this binary approach appearsuncharacteristic, as elsewhere Magarey cele-brates the disorderly conduct associated withwomen’s liberation and its various forms ofcultural expression.38 Yet, the impulse to defini-tively capture and pin down the legacy of diverseand disruptive forms of protest seems difficultto resist in retrospective analyses of social move-ments. It is an impulse that is rejected inBellamy’s use of the metaphor of the women’smovement as an endless ‘mosaic’. Similarly,Todd Gitlin, activist and commentator, uses theidea of a ‘sand painting’ to indicate that theoutcomes and meanings of social movementsare always provisional and shifting in historicaltime.39 Interpretive strategies from memorystudies and oral history provide a useful frame-work for keeping this provisionality firmly inview. If memory is seen as a narrative, a form ofinterpretation, not a replica, as Marita Sturkenreminds us,40 then tally sheet versions of historyare less likely to surface.

‘WOUNDS IN THE TISSUE OFMEMORY’41

Aside from the manifold dimensions of memorybeing recorded in the oral testimony ofAustralian feminists, the National Librarycollection richly documents in more detail thanmost written accounts, the emotional charge of

the early days of the women’s liberation move-ment. Feminist history has long been predicatedon an interest in the emotional lives of women.Yet, feminist histories and memoirs of thewomen’s movement can also be strangelydevoid of affect. This is all the more puzzlinggiven the genuinely passionate commitment tothe idea of the personal as political at the time.The reflections of Lynne Segal, Australian-bornProfessor of Psychology at Birkbeck CollegeLondon, in her Making Trouble: Life and Poli-tics are a case in point. It is a book opening withthe provocation: ‘This is not a memoir’.42 Segalrejects popular and scholarly assessments ofsecond wave feminism as a form of historicalrevisionism and tries to do something differentin recalling her own political journey. She offersa ‘portrait of a political moment, placing oneselfwithin it, however cautiously, knowing thelimits of retrospection’.43 Her detailed reminis-cences make compelling reading partly becauseher experiences are so unconventional on theone hand, and so typical of the day, on the other.

Understanding life backwards the spirit ofeach decade I entered in my adult lifeappears, remarkably, in perfect harmonywith my needs of the moment. I embarkedon sexual life in the Sixties, in the growingclamour for sexual liberation. I became asingle mother in the Seventies, as feminismbloomed again. In the late 1980s, I began aretreat into the responsible shores ofacademe when, if you were lucky, you couldbe both paid (though increasingly poorly)and acclaimed for performing your ‘opposi-tional’ politics on lecture circuits, just at themoment when Left and feminist activismwere largely vanishing from more accessiblepublic forums, in preparation for the dismaldecade of the 1990s.44

This narrative could easily fit the lives ofmany of the feminist oral histories recorded bythe National Library of Australia. Yet, does theconventional shape of this narrative illustrateSummerfield’s observation that in reproducingthe self as a social entity, we necessarily draw onfamiliar public renderings of history?45 Unlikethe oral testimonies discussed here, Segalchooses to recall the details of campaigns andstruggles more than the feelings and emotionsthey inflamed. Aside from the extracts fromother people’s letters and memoirs, MakingTrouble is notable for, and perhaps limited by, itsrelatively impersonal voice. While Segal isadamant that her book is not meant to be aconfessional narrative, the silence around herinterior life (the exception being a brief sectionon ageing), can work to undermine the gendered


and embodied, and in short, the ‘feminist’ char-acter of the narrative. The struggle for composureor personal equanimity can be at the expense ofregistering the emotional texture of the experi-ences that are remembered.

Margaret Henderson highlights this contra-diction in her analysis of the autobiographies ofnotable Australian feminists. She offers apersuasive critique of three memoirs by femi-nists who were prominent in government, themedia, education and the corporate sector inAustralia (Susan Ryan’s Catching the Waves,Wendy McCarthy’s Don’t Fence Me In and AnneSummers Ducks on the Pond). Henderson turnsto a review by celebrated novelist DrusillaModjeska, who observes that in these memoirs,it is possible to get a good sense of what thesewomen have done but ‘not much of who theyare’.46 Henderson carefully details the way aspecifically masculine kind of subjectivity isfashioned from the ‘limited engagement with theintersection of fantasy, desire, the irrational andthe emotional in the subject of women’s move-ment politics’.47 She asks the important questionof how might a feminist activist’s life be narratedin a feminist mode?48

Listening to oral accounts, where theemotional intensity of feminist recollection is sopalpable, a very complex history of the women’sliberation movement emerges. As all oral histo-rians would know, the aural experience of listen-ing to the interview is crucial to this complexity.A written transcript does not provide access tothe wild laughter provoked by particular memo-ries, or the performative aspects of an interview.Listening to the interviewee struggle with thecontradictory emotions produced by the processof recall and the effort to compose a coherentnarrative of disparate fragments, provides richinsight into the personal and public stakes offeminist involvement. This is not always evidentfrom reading written records (histories ormemoirs) of the women’s movement and asHenderson contends, a toned-down, domesti-cated rendering of feminist lives can be theresult. The implication is that a more directengagement with the emotional would allowdifferent forms of subjectivity to surface.

The ‘affective turn’ in cultural and criticaltheory is evident in recent attempts to theorisethe way emotion works to ‘inform and inspireaction’.49 The oral histories of the Australianwomen’s movement are stories of passionateattachments: to political ideals, to activist iden-tities, to utopian senses of feminist community,to other women and to particular forms ofcultural expression. They are also stories of loss,of political and personal rivalries, of anxieties,angers and disappointments. If these affectivedimensions of the women’s movement are

culturally forgotten and are absent from thepublic discourse then there is little wonder thatcurrent media representations of feminism takesuch firm hold.

‘ALTERNATIVE DREAMS OF MUTUALITY– BACK THEN’50

Clearly, attention to oral history can work tochallenge some of the sanctioned public memo-ries of feminism. We are all familiar withpopular culture representations that naturalisean opposition between feminism and mother-hood. Feminism is remembered as having beenanti-child, of promising that women could ‘haveit all’ and of producing a work-obsessed careerwoman. In the early part of the twenty-firstcentury, anxieties about the historical accuracyof these representations have been played out inthe opinion pages of newspapers in Australia.Perhaps the pertinent question here is notwhether feminism failed motherhood, but whyis feminism remembered as having forgottenmotherhood? Listening to the dramatic oralrecollections of this period, I was more thanonce struck by the memories of women strug-gling to tackle issues that affected the lives ofmothers and young children. Moreover, thesememories were not recounted in abstract,gender-neutral policy language. Instead,campaigns around women’s refuges, violenceagainst women, rape crisis centres or childcarewere rendered as emotionally fraught, disturb-ing and often very contradictory experiences. Ahistory of affect was being recorded as well as anarrative of key events. Moreover, in my view,this oral record unearths a maternalist ethosforgotten or hidden in many contemporaryrenderings of feminism.

While Sara Ruddick reminds us of the signif-icance of ‘maternal thinking’ to feminist politicsand theory,51 others depict the women’s move-ment as a repudiation of maternalism. Forinstance, in Australian Feminism: A Companion,Marilyn Lake divides the Australian women’smovement into five overlapping phases. Shetraces the way a maternalist orientation wasdiscarded in the struggle for equal opportunity(1940s-1960s) and replaced by the language ofcitizenship and then by the language of revolu-tion in the 1970s.52 Maternalism is a complex andambiguous political configuration, as Lake deftlyillustrates in Getting Equal.53 Even Ruddickdescribes maternal politics as always ‘partial,imperfect and limited by context’.54 Yet, shemakes a powerful case for maternal thinking asa constitutive element of a ‘feminist standpoint’.55

This is evident in the interviews under review. Aform of maternalism surfaces in memories of anactivism which had, as its central aim, to trans-form the concerns of mothers and children from


a private responsibility into public policy.56 Thenurturing impulses of this kind of activism seemto have been overshadowed or buried in sanc-tioned cultural memory. It is as though there hasbeen a cultural forgetting of the nurturing femi-nist,57 so much so that even putting the two termstogether feels distinctly uncomfortable. However,cross-generational examples from the oral historyrecord illustrate that the language of love andprotection (seen to be a characteristic of thematernal phase of Australian feminism) is notneutralised by the emergence of other more self-consciously political calls for equality, citizenshipor revolution.

Observe, for example, Ann Turner’s inter-view with Phyllis Johnson in 1995. I haveincluded this interview in the group underscrutiny because it illustrates a feminist activismwhich spans the whole of the twentieth century.Johnson, who describes herself as a ‘lifelongcampaigner for women’s equality’, was born in1917 and went on her first InternationalWomen’s day March in 1936. In her oral historyinterview, Johnson describes the ‘tender lovingcare’ that was given to the women and childrenwho came to the Betsy Women’s Refuge inBankstown in 1975.58 While she discusses therallies and protests outside Parliament that wereorganised at the time and the slogan ‘no silenceagainst domestic violence’, Johnson’s languageis expressly maternal. She describes how she andFrankie Oats would cook meals for the womenand children when they first arrived at therefuge. Her words and her emphatic tone reveala different picture to that of militant feministideologues discussing patriarchal power rela-tions and women’s collectivities with the victimsof domestic violence.59 Johnson exclaims, ‘Ohthe love, the love that we gave the children – thecuddles and the cosseting’.60

Not surprisingly, the term ‘cosseting’ doesnot recur in the other later interviews. However,the nurturing impulses do resurface. Biff Wardrecalls how ill-equipped many feminists werewhen working in the first refuges and unpre-pared for the experiences that would confrontthem. She discusses the grief she and others feltabout the children of women who came seekingprotection from violence:

Another memory I have is of a meeting, astaff meeting, where we decided, we had amajor topic for this weekly meeting and wewere going to finally really talk about thechildren…Virtually everybody in the roomhad enormous distress around these chil-dren and could hardly bear to look at them,and tried to kind of look over their heads allthe time and to avoid…I mean, everyonehad different things, but all of them were

just saying ‘my grief in looking at these chil-dren is too great and I can’t bear it’.61

Julia Ryan speaks in her oral history inter-view of how emotionally damaging it was towork at the refuge: ‘Although I was not actuallydirectly involved in any terrible incidents withguns or violence, just the whole feeling oftension all the time, and the misery and thehardness of it, I found it very, very demoralis-ing’.62 She remembers how one of her roles wasto provide statistics at the end of each month,calculating the number of women and childrenwho had come to the refuge in search of a safeenvironment. She would frequently be unwellduring this time and only later realised theconnection between her empathy for the womenand children, and her physical illness. Both inter-views, in recording the affective dimensions offeminist activism, open a space where sanc-tioned cultural memory can be challenged.

The lens through which feminism is viewedbackwards, is not that of the contemporary‘work/family divide’. Sara Dowse not onlyspeaks very movingly about the birth of her sonSam when interviewed but of children being adistinct advantage in the policy arena when shewas head of the Women’s Affairs Section of theAustralian Department of Prime Minister andCabinet.

There were two things that helped me –apart from my feminism and being, if youlike, an expert because nobody else in thedepartment had a clue. First, I had no ambi-tions in this area at all. I was truly a disin-terested public servant. I didn’t envisagespending the rest of my life as a bureaucrat.I was surprised to discover what a goodbureaucrat I could be, but I had no ambi-tions there. The second thing was havingkids ...You know, if you have to go homeand cook the dinner, you can’t take yourselfall that seriously. It’s a grounding…You canbe in an absolutely tremendous combat, asubtle but nonetheless tremendous combatin an interdepartmental committee, and gohome and have to look for the frozen peas!I knew that there was nobody else in thedepartment that had that experience. If theyhad to go home to dinner their wives wouldjust present it to them. Although it made iteasier in some ways, it isolated them terri-bly and did bad things to their egos. So youknow, I think that those things did see methrough what proved to be a very, veryhectic, dynamic time.63

Dowse makes it clear that she did not investher sense of identity in paid work and in 1977


resigned from public office to devote herself toher writing. Other interviews with prominentAustralian women in the National Library ofAustralia oral history collection,64 also cut throughthe conventional ‘women as nation-builders’version of feminist history and frequently runcounter to public discourses about the historicallegacy of mid-twentieth century feminism.

CONCLUSIONPersonal memories of second-wave feminism areoften given public prominence in populardiscourses about motherhood, work and thecontemporary legacy of the women’s movement.Oral history recollections of women’s liberationin Australia both reflect and critique these domi-nant narratives. By engaging in a secondaryanalysis of a group of oral history interviewsfrom the National Library of Australia, I haveattempted to show how oral accounts can workagainst ‘tally sheet’ versions of the successes andfailures of feminism and move towards moremultivocal, self-questioning and open-endeddialogues. Different forms of subjectivity emergein oral narratives to those expressed in feminist

memoir and autobiography. While the writtenrecord tends to skirt around the emotionaldimensions of feminist activism, oral accountsfrequently focus on feelings and emotions andprovide a significant alternative, affective historyof the women’s movement. Interpretative frame-works from oral history and memory also high-light some of the ways these oral narratives resistdominant representational frameworks and donot follow accepted cultural scripts. This isparticularly evident when these interviewsdepart from culturally prevailing assumptionsabout work-centered feminism. The interviewscan be interpreted as unearthing a forgottenmaternalist ethos in early feminist activism andquestioning popular representations that natu-ralise an opposition between feminism andmotherhood. Green calls on oral historians topay closer attention to the ways individualsnegotiate competing belief systems or findspaces between dominant discourses.65 In thecase of the oral testimonies discussed here, thisinterpretative approach creatively opens a spacefor oral history to provide different insights intofeminism, history and memory.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSThis research was conducted as part of aHarold White Fellowship at National Library ofAustralia. Particular thanks go to Kevin Bradley,Margy Burn and Marie-Louise Ayres at theNational Library. I appreciate the warm supportI received from interviewees and interviewersfrom the Oral History Collection at the NLA,especially Suzanne Bellamy, Biff Ward andSara Dowse.

NOTES1. See for example Susan Magarey, ‘Feminismas Cultural Renaissance’, Hecate, vol 31, no 1,2004, pp 23-46; Natasha Compo, ‘Having ItAll or “Had Enough”: Blaming Feminism in TheAge and the Sydney Morning Herald 1980-2004’, Journal of Australian Studies, Issue 85,2005, pp 63-72; Susan Magarey, ‘Memoryand Desire: Feminists Re-membering Feminism’,Lilith, vol 14, 2005, pp 1-13; The ‘Living in theSeventies’ issue of Australian Feminist Studies,vol 22, Issue 53, July 2007.2. For example, in the oral history interview BiffWard does with Suzanne Bellamy, she explicitlyopens with the following: ‘this archive has so farbeen mostly concerned with political reform. It’sbeen interviews with women who’ve struggledand had successes and failures in the politicalexecutive arenas, the feminist women who’veworked there’, National Library of Australia,2000, TRC 3988. 3. See for example Susan Marsden’s interviewwith Anne Curthoys, National Library of

Australia, 2002, ORAL TRC 4911.4. To be published as Post-Maternal Thinking:New Questions of Feminism, Memory andPolitics, New York: Columbia University Press(forthcoming).5. My arguments in this article were informedby the following interviews from the NationalLibrary of Australia Oral History Collection: EvaCox interviewed by Ann Mari Jordens, 2002;Sara Dowse interviewed by Ann Turner, 1998;Sara Dowse interviewed by Biff Ward, 1998;Deborah McCulloch interviewed by Biff Ward,2000; Anne Summers interviewed by SaraDowse, 2002; Jill Julius Matthews interviewedby Biff Ward, 2000; Marian Sawerinterviewed by Sara Dowse, 2002; AnneCurthoys interviewed by Susan Marsden,2002; Meredith Burgmann interviewed by AnnTurner, 2000; Suzanne Bellamy interviewed byBiff Ward, 2000; Biff Ward interviewed bySara Dowse, 1998; Julia Ryan interviewed bySara Dowse, 1990; Elizabeth O’Brieninterviewed by Biff Ward, 2000; Joan Russellinterviewed by Biff Ward, 2000; Lyndall Ryaninterviewed by Sara Dowse, 2000; MargaretBearlin interviewed by Biff Ward, 2000; PhyllisJohnson interviewed by Ann Turner, 1995;Mavis Robertson interviewed by Sara Dowse,2003. Written permission has been given toquote from the interviews I discuss here.6. Janet Heaton, Reworking Qualitative Data,London: Sage, 2004, p 6.7. Joanna Bornat and Gail Wilson, ‘Recyclingthe Evidence: Different Approaches to the Re-

Analysis of Elite Life Histories’ in RosalindEdwards (ed), Researching Families andCommunities: Social and Generational ChangeLondon: Routledge, 2008, pp 95-111.8. Joanna Bornat, ‘A Second Take: RevisitingInterviews with a Different Purpose’, OralHistory, vol 31, no 1, 2003, p 50.9. Alistair Thomson ‘Four ParadigmTransformations in Oral History’, The OralHistory Review, vol 34, no 1, 2007, p 50.10. As discussed by Anna Green, ‘IndividualRemembering and “Collective Memory”:Theoretical Presuppositions and ContemporaryDebates’, Oral History, vol 32, no 2, 2004, p 35.11. See Joanna Bornat and Hanna Diamond,‘Women’s History and Oral History:Developments and Debates’, Women’s HistoryReview, 16 (1), 2007, p 21. 12. See for example, Liz Stanley and SueWise, Breaking Out: Feminist Consciousnessand Feminist Research, New York: Routledge,1983.13. This is a quotation from Suzanne Bellamyin Biff Ward’s interview with her for the NationalLibrary of Australia Oral History Collection, 10thMarch, 2000, ORAL TRC 3988.14. Alistair Thomson citing Daniel James’Dona Maria’s Story: Life History, Memory andPolitical Identity, in ‘Four ParadigmTransformations in Oral History’, p 64.15. For a discussion of the idea of composureand how gender intersects with culture andmemory see Penny Summerfield, ‘Culture and


Composure: Creating Narratives of theGendered Self in Oral History Interviews’,Cultural and Social History, vol 1, no 1, 2004,pp 65-93.16. Alistair Thomson, Anzac Memories: LivingWith the Legend, Melbourne: Oxford UniversityPress, 1994, p 9 also cited by Green in‘Individual Remembering’, p 40.17. Summerfield attributes the concept toGraham Dawson in Soldier Heroes, see‘Culture and Composure’, p 69.18. Penny Summerfield, ‘Dis/composing theSubject: Intersubjectivities in Oral History’, inTess Coslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield(eds), Feminism and Autobiography: Texts,Theories, Methods, New York: Routledge,2000, pp 91-107.19. Suzanne Bellamy interviewed by BiffWard, National Library of Australia OralHistory Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 3988.20. Bellamy interview.21. Mejane was published from 1971-1974.22. Bellamy interview.23. To borrow a phrase from MargaretHenderson ‘The Tidiest Revolution: RegulativeFeminist Autobiography and the De-facement ofthe Women’s Movement, Australian LiteraryStudies, vol 20, no 3, 2002, p 186.24. Jill Julius Matthews interviewed by BiffWard, National Library of Australia OralHistory Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 3967.25. Henderson, p 187.26. See Anna Green ‘Individual Rememberingand Collective Memory’, pp 35-44.27. Green, p 36.28. Green, p 37.29. Wulf Kansteiner, Finding Meaning inMemory: A Methodological Critique ofCollective Memory Studies’, History andTheory, vol 41, 2002, p 180.30. Sara Dowse interviewed by Biff Ward,National Library of Australia Oral HistoryCollection, 1998, ORAL TRC 3801.31. Julia Ryan interviewed by Sara Dowse,National Library of Australia Oral HistoryCollection, 1990, ORAL TRC 2651.

32. Deborah McCulloch interviewed by BiffWard, National Library of Australia OralHistory Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 4591.33. Biff Ward interviewed by Sara Dowse,National Library of Australia Oral HistoryCollection, 1998, ORAL TRC 3764.34. Margaret Bearlin interviewed by BiffWard, National Library of Australia OralHistory Collection, 2000, ORAL TRC 4553.35. Joan Russell interviewed by Biff Ward,National Library of Australia Oral HistoryCollection, 2000, ORAL TRC 4593.36. Susan Magarey, ‘What is Happening toWomen’s History in Australia at the Beginningof the Third Millennium?’, Women’s HistoryReview, vol 16, no 1, 2007, pp 1-18.37. Magarey, p 2.38. See for example Susan Magarey,‘Feminism as Cultural Renaissance’, Hecate, vol31, no 1, 2004, pp 231- 46 which includesrepresentations of songs, poster art andexamples of disorderly conduct associated withthe women’s liberation movement.39. Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope,Days of Rage, New York: Bantam Books,1987, p 433.40. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: TheVietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic and thePolitics of Remembering, Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1997, pp 1-7.41. This beautiful quotation is from LuisaPasserini’s Memory and Totalitarianism, 2005,p13 cited in Summerfield, ‘Culture andComposure,’ p 93.42. Lynne Segal, Making Trouble: Life andPolitics, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2007, p 1.43. Segal, p 61.44. Segal, p 32.45. Summerfield, ‘Culture and Composure’, p 68.46. Modjeska cited by Henderson, ‘TheTidiest Revolution’, p 183. 47. Henderson, p 185.48. Henderson, p 178.49. Kristyn Gorton, ‘Theorizing Emotion andAffect: Feminist Engagements’, Feminist Theory,

vol 8, no 3, 2007, p 345.50. Segal’s phrase, p 89.51. Sara Ruddick, Maternal Thinking: Towarda Politics of Peace, Boston: Beacon Press,1989 [1995]. See in particular the newPreface to the 1995 edition, p xx.52. Marilyn Lake’s entry in Barbara Caine,Australian Feminism: a Companion,Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1998, p 133.53. See Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: TheHistory of Australian Feminism, Sydney: Allen &Unwin, 1999.54. Ruddick, p xxi.55. Ruddick, pp 127-139.56. See for useful definitions of maternalismSeth Koven and Sonya Michel, Mothers of aNew World: Maternalist Politics and theOrigins of Welfare States, New York:Routledge, 1993, pp 4-5.57. For a discussion of a related culturalforgetting of the nurturing mother, see JulieStephens, ‘Cultural Memory, Feminism andMotherhood’, Arena Journal, no 24, 2005, pp 69-83.58. Phyllis Johnson interviewed by Ann Turner,National Library of Australia Oral HistoryCollection, 1995, ORAL TRC 3304.59. See for a contrast the language of SuellenMurray, More Than Refuge: ChangingResponses to Domestic Violence, Perth: Universityof Western Australia Press, 2002, p 48.60. Phyllis Johnson interview, 1995.61. Biff Ward interview, 1998. 62. Julia Ryan interview 1990. 63. Sara Dowse interview, 1998.64. For example, Ann Turner’s interviewwith Meredith Burgmann political activist andthen President, NSW Legislative Council,National Library of Australia, 2001, ORALTRC 4656.65. Green, ‘Individual Memory andCollective Memory’, pp 35-45.

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Our remembered selves: oral history and feminist memory

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