Learning to listen

Oral history interviews provide an invaluable means of generating new insights about women’s experiences of themselves in their worlds. The spontaneous exchange within an interview offers possibilities of freedom and flexibility for researchers and narrators alike. For the narrator, the interview provides the opportunity to tell her own story in her own terms. For researchers, taped interviews preserve a living interchange for present and future use; we can rummage through interviews as we do through an old attic-probing, comparing, checking insights, finding new treasures the third time through, then arranging and carefully documenting our results.