ABSTRACT
This chapter uses women principals’ stories to explore the phenomenon of ‘memory’. The work presented in this chapter was not originally located within memory work, as such, but memory was clearly a powerful tool that shaped meaning for women principals’ life stories and childhood experiences. This chapter uses selected extracts from interviews that I conducted with women principals on their career paths as part of a study completed in 2006 (Moorosi, 2006). During these interviews, participants1 relied on their memory to narrate their life stories from childhood through their journeys to become school principals. What stood out in these women’s narratives was how they remembered unique experiences in their childhoods that later appeared, in some direct and indirect ways, to have been a source of strength and inspiration-experiences that, arguably, refl ected early signs of strong leadership skills. As they narrated their life stories on their career paths, these women refl ected on their childhood experiences and how those experiences motivated them to work harder and aspire to better things in life, which in this case was the top position within one of the two professions available for them at the time: teaching and nursing. Women principals’ constructions of their childhood memories enabled links to their current leadership status in ways that are explored later in the discussion. The chapter addresses three main questions: How often did these women speak about their childhood experiences, if at all? What impact did talking about these experiences have on the research-research that had not set out to explore memories of childhood experiences? And what can we draw from this analysis that can contribute to the use of memory studies in addressing leadership agency and social transformation?
