ABSTRACT
When asked in the 1970s about their feminism, two trade unionists active in the 1910s and 1920s gave strikingly different answers. While one boldly stated “I was probably a born feminist,” the other distanced herself on the grounds that “We weren’t interested in sex. We weren’t interested in brassieres.” 1 These contrasting responses illustrate feminism’s complex history and the potential archived oral sources hold for writing that history. 2 They open up new lines of enquiry around contested language and evolving meanings within women’s struggles for equality, emotional responses to feminist language, generational shifts, and an interviewer’s or a project’s own positionality and biases.
