Evidence, empathy and ethics: lessons from oral histories of the

Many contemporary oral histories are rooted in principles of progressive and feminist politics, particularly in a respect for the truth of each informant’s life experiences and a quest to preserve the memory of ordinary people’s lives. Feminist scholars have been in the forefront of efforts to elaborate these ideals as methodological principles, seeking ways to dissolve the traditional distinction between historian-as-authority and informantas-subject and to create what the sociologist Judith Stacey calls ‘an egalitarian research process characterized by authenticity, reciprocity, and intersubjectivity between the researcher and her “subjects”’.1