ABSTRACT
This introduction explains the impetus behind the interviews with over 20 Tibetan women who appear in this book. It covers the academic backgrounds of the author and the interviewer and the process by which they chose the women to be interviewed, the geographic regions in which the Tibetan women lived and worked, and the topics they hoped to cover. It emphasises the urgency of the project—it was undertaken in the 1990s—given the age of several of the interviewees: the oldest was born in 1876 and had already died and several of them were born in the 1920s and 1930s. It also states that the interviewers made every effort to minimise political content and maintain as neutral a stance as possible, allowing the Tibetan women to describe their own experiences and feelings about how their lives had turned out.
