ABSTRACT
It is now commonplace to note the optimistic premise of feminist oral history. Early formulations assumed that eliciting stories was a means of sharing authority between researcher and researched, that telling stories empowered narrators who might otherwise have few opportunities to tell their life story with an (implied) audience beyond their own social networks, and that both outcomes advanced feminist scholarship and politics. 1 For scholarship, feminist oral history promised to elicit broader and more contextualized and meaningful information about ordinary people. Politically, it offered a way to recover and center the experiences, thoughts, and histories of marginalized persons: women as well as the poor, racial, ethnic, and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, those with different abilities and disabilities, the “undocumented,” and many others. As part of this broader project, feminist oral historians recovered both private and public stories, including those of domestic violence, workplace harassment, neighborhood-based collective action, and non-commercial artistic endeavors. The scholarly and political promises of feminist oral history have been fulfilled in numerous studies that make visible the lives of women and marginalized men whose struggles for recognition and dignity would otherwise have been lost to history. Its mission was less clear, however, with respect to unsympathetic subjects, who lacked dignity, or did not give voice to socially valuable insights. It was especially murky when the narrators were actively engaged in efforts to harm or deny others social rights and resources.
