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Challenging the imbalances of power in feminist oral history
0277-5395/93 $6.00 + .00 Copyright © 1993 Pergamon Press Ltd.
Women 's Studies Int . Forum, Vol. 16, No.6, pp. 639-645, 1993 Printed in the USA.
CHALLENGING THE IMBALANCES OF POWER IN FEMINIST ORAL HISTORY Developing a Take-and-Give Methodology JENNIFER SCANLON Women's Studies Program, Plattsburgh State University of New York, Plattsburgh, NY 12901 , USA
Synopsis-For decades, feminists have been arguing that oral histories of women are empowering for all those involved. They provide a voice for women whose stories would otherwise go unrecorded and offer readers personal stories of and insights about groups of women they might not otherwise meet. They provide feminist researchers with a way to uncover significant information about women and to further political causes by weaving women's stories into a narrative. Recently, however, practitioners have begun to question the ethics of oral history work. Arguably, researchers have far more to gain in this process than respondents do . This article explores several ethical issues and suggests that any oral history project should begin by asking what the researcher will do to compensate respondents for the information they provide, in an effort to acknowledge, address, and minimize the inherent imbalances of power and of benefits .
For over two decades, oral history has been a significant element of various feminist transformations of traditional history. Recording women's voices and then telling their stories has, arguably, been empowering for all involved, for the woman telling her own story, the woman recording and then retelling this story, and then the reader, who vicariously experiences it. Like many aspects of feminist thought or practice, however, oral history has not been free of internal debates over methodologies and ethics. In a recent and pioneering study, Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (Gluck & Patai, 1991), the editors caution against "the innocent assumptions that gender united women more powerfully than race and class divided them, and that the mere study of women fulfilled a commitment to do research "about" women" (p. 2). This work and others attest to the determination of many feminist scholars to examine carefully and critically both their own motivations in conducting oral histories and the notion of a smooth transference of information from speaker to recorder/writer to reader. The growing field of feminist participatory research, of which oral history research is one part, provides as many questions as it does answers about methods of research that
are by nature less exploitative. The work of Reinharz (1992), Lather (1991), Maguire (1987), Bowles and Duelli Klein (1983), and Shields and Dervin (1993), among others, share at least the notion that research must produce emancipatory knowledge. As Maguire argues, participatory research can potentially raise the critical consciousness of the researcher and the subject, improve the lives of those involved in the project, and begin to transform societal structures (pp. 3536). These are lofty and at times intimidating goals, but they should be no less intimidating than the traditional idea that research will provide us with the one objective truth. Reinharz describes the debate that ensued in the 1980s when feminists in the academy argued that new research methods were needed "as an antidote to the erroneous studies based on men's assumptions about women" (Reinharz, 1992, p. 424). This debate, coupled with growing dissatisfaction with positivist ideas about truth, touched all of the social sciencesand resulted in the articulation of new research methods:
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. . . doing research with people rather than on them; having women do research; doing research in ways that empower people; valuing experiential knowledge;
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honoring female intelligence; and seeking the causes of oppression (Reinharz, 1992, p.426). The purpose of this essay is to engage in some of the feminist debates about conducting and using oral histories in academic work and to offer specific suggestions in one area not generally considered in these debates: how one can and should give something in return for the oral histories one receives. Many would argue that academics do not "pay" for research: the research itself is an adequate, if indirect, compensation for information provided by research subjects. That certainly has been the traditional approach to research. Other practitioners, however, will recognize that reciprocity is a necessary part of any collaboration, all the more necessary when, as is the case with most oral histories, privilege in many of its forms lies with the person conducting the interviews and not with the person providing the oral history. Daphne Patai argues that it is not possible "to write about the oppressed without becoming one of the oppressors" (Patai, 1991, p. 139). Although she states that white, middle-class researchers cannot do unproblematic research with nonwhite and/or poor women, Patai counsels her peers not to abandon their research but to look for just research methods. My contribution to this debate is to argue that oral historians must recognize the imbalance of power between researcher and subject and then give something back - something more direct and measurable than "scholarship" - to the people they interview. Researchers must develop a take-and-give methodology in which they pay, with money, time, or resources, for the information they gather. The location of my home in Plattsburgh, New York, just 20 miles below the Canadian border crossing nearest to Montreal, Quebec, has provided me with a unique opportunity to do oral history work. Our small city of roughly 30,000 hosts about 1,000 political refugees each year. The refugees come from nations as diverse as Sri Lanka and Zaire, Guatemala and Lebanon; they come from as many as 50 different countries, but the majority are from Central America and Africa. Once they travel to the border and register their intent to apply for political asylum in
Canada, they are given a date for an interview and sent back to the United States until that interview, which is from 1 to 2!t2 months later. Plattsburgh, the closest city, becomes a temporary home for many of these people. Humanitarian relief efforts around the world are often as political as the situations which cause the crises, and the combined effort of various social service agencies in Plattsburgh is no exception. The refugees are assisted by the CEF/Crisis Center, which provides housing and paralegal assistance; the Department of Social Services, which provides health care and nutritional support for pregnant women and young children; and Catholic Charities, which provides food and transportation. Each agency must be careful to demonstrate that it offers these services without taking away from the needy in Clinton County, who are numerous. This makes helping the refugees difficult, since raising some people's awareness and sympathy to the plight of refugees by discussing it publicly means raising other people's ire and ethnocentrism. Although there is a debate among those who work with the refugees about the local people's ability to rise above a kneejerk reaction and support refugee services, the overall practice has been to keep the refugee relief effort as much out of the public eye as possible. For this and other reasons, then, the effort remains quiet, local, and immediate. It has been accurately described as the equivalent of an emergency relief plan: We act as though a flood has hit Plattsburgh. We provide food, clothing, shelter, and medical services, and behave as though the problem will soon disappear (Haight, 1992, p. 10). The individuals we assist are in fact here temporarily, but the refugee problem is a permanent part of our global economy. It is not going away. Lucy Bonnerjea makes this clear: While the post-war period has been, for the affluent North, the most prolonged period of peace this century, not a day has passed without a war raging somewhere in the South. Many of these wars have been a product, direct or indirect, of the post-war geopolitics which divided the world into spheres of influence of the superpowers. (Bonnerjea, 1985, p. 5)
Imbalances of Power in Feminist Oral History
And whilethe Cold War is officially over, the scramble for resources and power-and the good graces of the resourceful and powerful- continues unabated. The result is that, worldwide, there are more than 15 million refugees (McCallin, 1991, p. 30), and 80070 of them are women and children (Gillespie, 1992, p. 18). Most of the refugees who pass through Plattsburgh are doing so not because they do not wish to live in the United States but because they are ineligible to apply for refugee status here. The United States does accept certain people as refugees; in fact, over 2 million asylum seekers have been granted refugee status over the past 3 decades (Loescher, 1991, pp. 29-31). The vast majority of the successful applicants, however, are Cubans, Indo-Chinese, Soviets, and East Europeans. People from the Middle East, Central America, and Africa are unlikely to receive refugee status in the United States. The North/South dichotomy of privilege and oppression carries through in U.S. immigration policy. Most refugees from the southern hemisphere are deemed economic rather than political refugees - a false dichotomy that obscures the very real connections between international economic and political crises. Incidentally, more than 90% of the people automatically deemed ineligible in the United States were deemed credible at their initial hearings with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada during 1991 (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 1991, p. 1). The Statue of Liberty may still beckon to the "huddled masses, yearning to breathe free," but people of color are clearly far less welcome in the United States today than are those of European ancestry, and people whose governments are supported by the United States are far less likely to be considered credible when telling stories of government repression. The majority of people who pass through Plattsburgh are from Central America, specifically EI Salvador and Guatemala, and Africa, specifically Somalia and Zaire. Their eligibility as political refugees in the United States is denied for political reasons and despite overwhelming evidence. During the decade of the 1980s, for example, there were 70,000 deaths and 6,000 "disappe arances" in
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EI Salvador, and one-third of the country's entire population was displaced. Roughly I million Salvadorans fled to the United States, where only 2% of applicants from EI Salvador receive political asylum (Hogeland & Rosen, 1991, p, 5). At roughly the same time, from 1979to 1988, United States military aid totalled well over 7 billion dollars to Central America, despite the obvious and well-documented massive human rights violations (Moreno, 1991). And although the crisis in Somalia has been declared the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by the United Nations, Somalis continue to arrive in evergreater numbers, only to be told that they, fleeing a civil war, are economic rather than political refugees. All of this happens in the face of the U.S. government's own definition, established in 1980, of a political refugee: (A) any person who is outside any country of such person's nationality, or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion , or (B) in such special circumstances as the President after appropriate consultation (as defined in section 207(e) of this Act) may specify any person who is within the country of such person's nationality (Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Committee, 1989, p. 13). For the past 25 years, the United States has been liberally interpreting its own refugee definitions, allowing certain groups a "lower threshold of proof," (Loescher, 1991, p. 30), and demanding that others meet impossible criteria. The most recent case, with Haiti, exposes the arbitrary nature of the process. The U. S. government, in this case deciding unilaterally that all Haitian refugees are economic rather than political refugees, intercepted and sent back boatloads of people without benefit of the hearing to which they are entitled (Gillespie, 1992, p. 19).
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The same racism and ethnocentrism that allows our government to deny these people refugee status also renders them virtually invisible while they are in the United States. The governor of New York State as well as a high-ranking United Nations official visited Plattsburgh to observe the community's efforts when the refugee crisis first occurred in 1987, but their visits were apparently little more than photo opportunities. Little real help arrived, and 5 years have passed without any significant increases in funding or changes in government policy (Haight, 1992, p . 6). For the past year, I have conducted oral interviews with Central American women refugees traveling alone or with children. My particular interest is in the ways in which these women have transcended much of their socialization in making life decisions and in making the journey north. Their stories tell of women who have been victimized rather than of women who are victims; their words document the ways in which they have, as Helene Moussa argued about refugee women, "challenged state power, violence, and persecution, in their decisions to flee their homes and country" (Moussa, 1991, pp. 12-14). I am also interested in the hardships they experience as women traveling alone, and I hope to use the oral histories to advocate for further changes in refugee policies, especially those geared toward women. The Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States reported a "dramatic rise" in the number of women apprehended at the U .Sv/ Mexico border between 1984 and 1986; 1986 figures demonstrated a 40% increase in 2 years (Hogeland & Rosen, 1991, p. 4). Although recent developments in El Salvador have reduced the number of refugees entering the United States illegally, refugees from this region continue to tell stories of political repression, torture, and murder (Scanlon, 1992). The refugees' problems do not end, however, once they arrive at the border. In one study, 36% of the women experienced some form of abuse in crossing the U .S v/Mexico border; the abuses ranged from robbery to assault to sexual abuse (Hogeland & Rosen, 1991, p. 9). As Gillespie (1992) argues, "When individuals, families, or groups are targeted, women's bodies become the battleground" (p. 19). Some women reported
taking birth control pills to avoid pregnancy if they were raped en route, and one of the women I interviewed spoke anxiously about the baby she had as a result of rape by a "coyote," a man paid to help people cross the border: "He wasn't made with love at all" (Scanlon, Interview, 1991). Women refugees of all ages, reports Gillespie (1992), "are preyed upon by guards at borders and at refugee camps, armed men in and out of uniform , officials, pirates, male refugees" (p. 19). Although the life histories of these women are both moving and compelling, I am committing an abuse if I only take their words and use them, as I just did, to illustrate a point I want to make and to embellish a story I want to publish. Participatory research encourages me to question my motives as well as my method . Would there be any use of these women's words that is not "out of context"? Probably not. In planning my research, I gradually felt that it was my responsibility to do more with the project than use the women's words in thi s way. As a result , I began my research proposal with more methodology than interview questions. One of the first steps I took in my research process was to write an application to a campus committee, the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. Part of the application requested a discussion of what the respondents would get out of their participation in the project. My responses fell flat , if not for the members of the committee, at least for myself. The respondents would have the opportunity, I argued, to engage in discussion with someone interested in their lives. They would have the opportunity to provide information that could be used to educate people in the United States about the consequences of United States foreign policy. They would have a voice, and feminist politics, after all, which forms the basis for much of my work, is about providing women with a voice. While I wrote the application, and then while I began to conduct the interviews, I had second thoughts about the merits of the project for the respondents versus the merits of the project for me. What do I get out of th is project? Clearly I have much to gain: a trip to a national conference to discuss "my" work and, most likely, one or two publications in scholarly journals that will enhance
Imbalances of Power in Feminist Oral History
the likelihood of my getting tenure where I teach. I have much to gain, much more in the short and probably the long term, than the respondents . Doing oral history work almost inevitably sets up a political relationship between interviewer and respondent and creates such an imbalance of benefits. Researchers take, but what do they give back, really? Anthropologists and oral historians alike have to face this issue. Feminist theory encourages participation in the community outside the university, but this participation cannot simply be limited to recording the successes and/or woes of others. Any oral history project should have as one component what the interviewer will give back to the persons or group being interviewed. Howard Adelman, Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, argues that "Commitment without scholarship is blind; scholarship insensitive to suffering is deaf' (Adelman, 1991, p. 1). The following examples relate how I am trying to achieve a balance: to practice good scholarship and to remain both sensitive and directly responsive to the needs of the people I interview. I have, in the most basic terms, attempted to pay, in ways that at times include monetary compensation, for the interviews I have conducted. I should say at the outset that the payments most often have not been made to the individuals being interviewed but rather to the larger group of refugees living in my community . Some might argue that payment of some kind should be made to each individual I interview. I found that to be too difficult to institute, for when I tried, I made some promises I could not keep. For example, I promised to keep in touch with respondents when they left Plattsburgh. That is a large promise. For me, visiting someone in town is easier than writing a letter, so now I am clear not to make promises that go beyond the physical boundaries of Plattsburgh or of our time together. I also promised to visit several people in Montreal, and again, it is rare that I can do this, regardless of my good intentions or genuine feelings of friendship for an individual or group of people I have come to know briefly. I can or will, realistically, write to or visit few of these people in their new homes, but I can do something to help the next set of people arriving. Being
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clear about one's own limitations, then, is important in maintaining integrity in any oral history project. I am more careful in my project now, knowing both my desire to maintain friendships and my limitations in following through. I write out, in an explicit rather than implicit fashion , guidelines for myself in this regard . The examples here, of course, will not apply to all oral history projects, but the principle often applies, especially when, as is the case in much feminist work, advocacy for the group of respondents is part of a researcher's motivation in doing the work. The most consistent effort I make for the refugees is to volunteer one morning each week at the Crisis Center, which provides services to the refugees. None of the employees of the Crisis Center speak Spanish fluently, and I do, so that is a major help, especially since a majority of the refugees are Spanishspeaking . I translate for them, help with arrangements for food and housing, and, most importantly, assist them with their paperwork . The forms they have to fill out, written either in French or English, are extremely important. These forms are long and require specific information about education, work, family members, and military service, among other things, but the most important question asks the individuals to record the story of their fear of or experience of persecution in their countries. This story stays with them for years as they make their way through the legal and political process in Canada. We provide them copies of the questions in Spanish, and I go over the questions one by one. I cannot overstate the importance of this document to each person's case, so it is a necessary service to review it with them. In this case, the Spanish speakers are the fortunate ones. The Crisis Center also has volunteers who speak French and , occasionally, from the local Air Force Base, volunteers for other languages. There is, of course, no small measure of irony that armed services personnel, who may have participated directly or indirectly in U.S. governmental assaults against these refugees in their homelands or en route, provide voluntary help to them in Plattsburgh. There are those refugees, however, for whom we cannot provide translations; they must rely on one another to piece together the information they need. Clearly,
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we are not meeting the needs of all the refugees we serve. Many of the Central American women refugees are either pregnant or traveling with small children. Because pregnant women and children may be eligible to receive food from WIC, the governmental nutritional assistance program for women, infants. and children, I often accompany women to Social Services so they can complete the paperwork there and receive food vouchers for the supermarket. The language barrier is a tremendous one, and with so much uncertainty in their lives, burdensome paperwork is one hassle these women do not need. Some are illiterate, so this process brings out other issues in their lives as well. Several women have learned they are pregnant while in Plattsburgh; others have given birth; others have had miscarriages. I often accompany pregnant women to doctors' offices, because there are no Spanish-speaking doctors in Plattsburgh, or at least none who will treat the refugees. I have learned many medical terms in Spanish that I never had the opportunity or need to learn before. I think that the articles I write about certain women's stories will be all the more rich because I did something for the others. My writing will be affected by the fact that I have become more intimate with many of the refugees, but although some would argue that this lack of objectivity is bad, I would agree with anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown. who states that "more extended, intimate, and committed contact between researcher and subject can undercut the colonial mindset" of much academic writing (1992, p. A56). Life in Plattsburgh is extremely boring for the refugees . Many are housed at a motel outside of town , and they are essentially stuck there for I or 2 months. They appreciate a visit to play cards or talk, and making their lives just a bit easier while they are here is part of my oral history project. Although I only occasionally give the refugees cash, I regularly buy groceries for them and often invite people for a meal or coffee and a snack. I also invite interested refugees to events on campus. I solicit contributions of children's clothing from friends. This summer I rounded up a few old television sets that I could lend to refugees to help pass the time. There is another way I can be sensitive to
the needs of the refugees and educate others at the same time, and that is by encouraging students to become involved with the refugee relief effort. One student completed an internship at the Crisis Center, where he provided some measure of relief for the overburdened and underpaid workers there. Another student did her senior sociology thesis on how the community works together to help the refugees. She interviewed many religious leaders in Plattsburgh who were prompted to rethink their commitment, or lack of commitment, to the refugees. Another student , who had helped conduct several interviews, became so interested in the women's livesthat she traveled to Mexico and Guatemala to visit refugee camps and conduct interviews with women there. She subsequently wrote about women's empowerment in the refugee camps and the differences between women who travel alone and those who have the opportunity to work together to change their situations (Light. 1992).The transfer student club is currently planning fundraisers for the refugee relief effort, and the head of a sorority organized a campus-wide food drive. Faculty should not forget the tremendous resources they have in students. Many faculty on our campus, including myself, have philosophical differences with the fraternities and sororities, but these groups are often on the lookout for community service projects. A project such as this one can be a valuable and challenging educational experience for the sorority or fraternity members. I do not mean to overstate the significance of what I see as giving back to those who give to me. I do help them meet their immediate needs, but this assistance does nothing to challenge the governmental policies that prevent them from living in the United States legally or that help to create the various national crises in the first place. In fact , one could argue that my assistance precludes governmental attention: If the people are not on the streets, the state and federal governments can turn their attention elsewhere. If we in Plattsburgh take care of the refugees on our own, Governor Cuomo and the United Nations can worry about other things. I have not as yet come to terms with this aspect of my work. I find myself feeling more and more sympathy with the social service workers around the United States who daily
Imbalances of Power in Feminist Oral History
put bandaids on huge wounds. We cannot abandon our small-scale projects in the name of larger-scale change. Another part of my payment, however, ought to be advocacy work on a larger scale. Perhaps my writing can help on that level; perhaps my educational efforts will payoff locally and more people will become interested in working together for change on a national level. For now, I provide conversation, hospitality, and humane treatment to a group of people who know that many people in the United States at best fail to appreciate their presence and at worst victimize them physically and/or financially. During their time in Plattsburgh the refugees can rest a bit, get a little medical attention, and gather some strength for the new difficulties that await them in Canada. Feminist theory encourages us to listen to women's voices, to provide opportunities for women to have a voice. I do believe that my oral history project does this, by recording women's complaints and joys, dreams and experiences. I also believe, though, that their voices are not just global but personal, not just about lifetime needs but about everyday needs, not just about the future but about now. "We must keep people and politics at the center of our research," writes Rina Benmayor about the El Barrio Popular Education Program, a model for community-based research (Benmayor, in Gluck & Patai, 1991). Incorporating activities into my oral history project that give as well as take - that directly help the refugees while they are here-is one way for me to produce scholarship that, in some seen and many unseen ways, explores the meaning of commitment and "good" work.
REFERENCES Adelman, Howard. (1991). Pamphlet. York University: Centre for Refugee Studies. Benmayor, Rina, (1991). Testimony, action research, and empowerment. In Sherna Berger Gluck & Daphne Patai (Eds .), Women's words (pp . 159-174) . New York: Routledge. Bonnerjea, Lucy . (1985). Shaming the world: The needs
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of women refugees. London: Change International
Reports. Bowles, Gloria, & Duelli Klein , Renate. (1983). Theories of Women's Studies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Brown, Karen McCarthy. (1992). Writing about the other. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 38, A56. Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Committee. (1989). Church World Service report on Central American refugees. Elkhart, IN: Church World Service. Gillespie , Marcia Ann. (1992) . No woman's land. Ms., 3(3), 18-22. Gluck, Sherna Berger, & Patai, Daphne. (1991). Wom-
en's words: The feminist practice of oral history . New York : Routledge. Haight, Geri. (1992). Refugees in Plattsburgh: Community response to a global problem. Unpublished paper, SUNY Plattsburgh. Hogeland, Chris, & Rosen, Karen. (1991). Dreams lost,
dreams found: Undocumented women in the land of opportunity. San Francisco: Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. (1991). News release. Toronto: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. Lather, Patti. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Light, Debbie. (1992). Healing their wounds: Guatemalan refugee women as political activists. Women and
Therapy: A Feminist Quarterly, 13,297-308. Loescher, Gil. (1991). Inside the golden door. Refugees, 82,29-31. Maguire, Patricia. (1987). Doing participatory research: A feminist approach. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press . McCailin, John. (1991). USA for UNHCR. Refugees, 82,30. Moreno, David. (1991). Thunder on the left: Radical critiques of U.S. Central American policy. Latin American Research Review, 26, 226. Moussa, Helene. (1991). Women refugees: Empowerment and vulnerability. Refugee, 10(4), 12-14. Patai, Daphne. (1991). U.S. academics and third world women: Is ethical research possible? In Sherna Berger Gluck & Daphne Patai (Eds.), Women's words (pp. 137-153). New York: Routledge. Reinharz, Shulamit. (1992). The principles of feminist research: a matter of debate. In Cheris Kramarae & Dale Spender (Eds .), The knowledge explosion: Generations offeminist scholarship (pp. 423-437). New York : Teachers College Pres s. Scanlon, Jennifer. (1991, 1992). Interviews. Shields, Vickie Rutledge, & Dervin, Brenda. (1993). Sensemaking in feminist social science research : A call to enlarge the methodological options of feminist studies. Women's Studies International Forum, 16, 65-81.
Women 's Studies Int . Forum, Vol. 16, No.6, pp. 639-645, 1993 Printed in the USA.
CHALLENGING THE IMBALANCES OF POWER IN FEMINIST ORAL HISTORY Developing a Take-and-Give Methodology JENNIFER SCANLON Women's Studies Program, Plattsburgh State University of New York, Plattsburgh, NY 12901 , USA
Synopsis-For decades, feminists have been arguing that oral histories of women are empowering for all those involved. They provide a voice for women whose stories would otherwise go unrecorded and offer readers personal stories of and insights about groups of women they might not otherwise meet. They provide feminist researchers with a way to uncover significant information about women and to further political causes by weaving women's stories into a narrative. Recently, however, practitioners have begun to question the ethics of oral history work. Arguably, researchers have far more to gain in this process than respondents do . This article explores several ethical issues and suggests that any oral history project should begin by asking what the researcher will do to compensate respondents for the information they provide, in an effort to acknowledge, address, and minimize the inherent imbalances of power and of benefits .
For over two decades, oral history has been a significant element of various feminist transformations of traditional history. Recording women's voices and then telling their stories has, arguably, been empowering for all involved, for the woman telling her own story, the woman recording and then retelling this story, and then the reader, who vicariously experiences it. Like many aspects of feminist thought or practice, however, oral history has not been free of internal debates over methodologies and ethics. In a recent and pioneering study, Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History (Gluck & Patai, 1991), the editors caution against "the innocent assumptions that gender united women more powerfully than race and class divided them, and that the mere study of women fulfilled a commitment to do research "about" women" (p. 2). This work and others attest to the determination of many feminist scholars to examine carefully and critically both their own motivations in conducting oral histories and the notion of a smooth transference of information from speaker to recorder/writer to reader. The growing field of feminist participatory research, of which oral history research is one part, provides as many questions as it does answers about methods of research that
are by nature less exploitative. The work of Reinharz (1992), Lather (1991), Maguire (1987), Bowles and Duelli Klein (1983), and Shields and Dervin (1993), among others, share at least the notion that research must produce emancipatory knowledge. As Maguire argues, participatory research can potentially raise the critical consciousness of the researcher and the subject, improve the lives of those involved in the project, and begin to transform societal structures (pp. 3536). These are lofty and at times intimidating goals, but they should be no less intimidating than the traditional idea that research will provide us with the one objective truth. Reinharz describes the debate that ensued in the 1980s when feminists in the academy argued that new research methods were needed "as an antidote to the erroneous studies based on men's assumptions about women" (Reinharz, 1992, p. 424). This debate, coupled with growing dissatisfaction with positivist ideas about truth, touched all of the social sciencesand resulted in the articulation of new research methods:
639
. . . doing research with people rather than on them; having women do research; doing research in ways that empower people; valuing experiential knowledge;
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JENNIFER SCANLON
honoring female intelligence; and seeking the causes of oppression (Reinharz, 1992, p.426). The purpose of this essay is to engage in some of the feminist debates about conducting and using oral histories in academic work and to offer specific suggestions in one area not generally considered in these debates: how one can and should give something in return for the oral histories one receives. Many would argue that academics do not "pay" for research: the research itself is an adequate, if indirect, compensation for information provided by research subjects. That certainly has been the traditional approach to research. Other practitioners, however, will recognize that reciprocity is a necessary part of any collaboration, all the more necessary when, as is the case with most oral histories, privilege in many of its forms lies with the person conducting the interviews and not with the person providing the oral history. Daphne Patai argues that it is not possible "to write about the oppressed without becoming one of the oppressors" (Patai, 1991, p. 139). Although she states that white, middle-class researchers cannot do unproblematic research with nonwhite and/or poor women, Patai counsels her peers not to abandon their research but to look for just research methods. My contribution to this debate is to argue that oral historians must recognize the imbalance of power between researcher and subject and then give something back - something more direct and measurable than "scholarship" - to the people they interview. Researchers must develop a take-and-give methodology in which they pay, with money, time, or resources, for the information they gather. The location of my home in Plattsburgh, New York, just 20 miles below the Canadian border crossing nearest to Montreal, Quebec, has provided me with a unique opportunity to do oral history work. Our small city of roughly 30,000 hosts about 1,000 political refugees each year. The refugees come from nations as diverse as Sri Lanka and Zaire, Guatemala and Lebanon; they come from as many as 50 different countries, but the majority are from Central America and Africa. Once they travel to the border and register their intent to apply for political asylum in
Canada, they are given a date for an interview and sent back to the United States until that interview, which is from 1 to 2!t2 months later. Plattsburgh, the closest city, becomes a temporary home for many of these people. Humanitarian relief efforts around the world are often as political as the situations which cause the crises, and the combined effort of various social service agencies in Plattsburgh is no exception. The refugees are assisted by the CEF/Crisis Center, which provides housing and paralegal assistance; the Department of Social Services, which provides health care and nutritional support for pregnant women and young children; and Catholic Charities, which provides food and transportation. Each agency must be careful to demonstrate that it offers these services without taking away from the needy in Clinton County, who are numerous. This makes helping the refugees difficult, since raising some people's awareness and sympathy to the plight of refugees by discussing it publicly means raising other people's ire and ethnocentrism. Although there is a debate among those who work with the refugees about the local people's ability to rise above a kneejerk reaction and support refugee services, the overall practice has been to keep the refugee relief effort as much out of the public eye as possible. For this and other reasons, then, the effort remains quiet, local, and immediate. It has been accurately described as the equivalent of an emergency relief plan: We act as though a flood has hit Plattsburgh. We provide food, clothing, shelter, and medical services, and behave as though the problem will soon disappear (Haight, 1992, p. 10). The individuals we assist are in fact here temporarily, but the refugee problem is a permanent part of our global economy. It is not going away. Lucy Bonnerjea makes this clear: While the post-war period has been, for the affluent North, the most prolonged period of peace this century, not a day has passed without a war raging somewhere in the South. Many of these wars have been a product, direct or indirect, of the post-war geopolitics which divided the world into spheres of influence of the superpowers. (Bonnerjea, 1985, p. 5)
Imbalances of Power in Feminist Oral History
And whilethe Cold War is officially over, the scramble for resources and power-and the good graces of the resourceful and powerful- continues unabated. The result is that, worldwide, there are more than 15 million refugees (McCallin, 1991, p. 30), and 80070 of them are women and children (Gillespie, 1992, p. 18). Most of the refugees who pass through Plattsburgh are doing so not because they do not wish to live in the United States but because they are ineligible to apply for refugee status here. The United States does accept certain people as refugees; in fact, over 2 million asylum seekers have been granted refugee status over the past 3 decades (Loescher, 1991, pp. 29-31). The vast majority of the successful applicants, however, are Cubans, Indo-Chinese, Soviets, and East Europeans. People from the Middle East, Central America, and Africa are unlikely to receive refugee status in the United States. The North/South dichotomy of privilege and oppression carries through in U.S. immigration policy. Most refugees from the southern hemisphere are deemed economic rather than political refugees - a false dichotomy that obscures the very real connections between international economic and political crises. Incidentally, more than 90% of the people automatically deemed ineligible in the United States were deemed credible at their initial hearings with the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada during 1991 (Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, 1991, p. 1). The Statue of Liberty may still beckon to the "huddled masses, yearning to breathe free," but people of color are clearly far less welcome in the United States today than are those of European ancestry, and people whose governments are supported by the United States are far less likely to be considered credible when telling stories of government repression. The majority of people who pass through Plattsburgh are from Central America, specifically EI Salvador and Guatemala, and Africa, specifically Somalia and Zaire. Their eligibility as political refugees in the United States is denied for political reasons and despite overwhelming evidence. During the decade of the 1980s, for example, there were 70,000 deaths and 6,000 "disappe arances" in
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EI Salvador, and one-third of the country's entire population was displaced. Roughly I million Salvadorans fled to the United States, where only 2% of applicants from EI Salvador receive political asylum (Hogeland & Rosen, 1991, p, 5). At roughly the same time, from 1979to 1988, United States military aid totalled well over 7 billion dollars to Central America, despite the obvious and well-documented massive human rights violations (Moreno, 1991). And although the crisis in Somalia has been declared the worst humanitarian crisis in the world by the United Nations, Somalis continue to arrive in evergreater numbers, only to be told that they, fleeing a civil war, are economic rather than political refugees. All of this happens in the face of the U.S. government's own definition, established in 1980, of a political refugee: (A) any person who is outside any country of such person's nationality, or, in the case of a person having no nationality, is outside any country in which such person last habitually resided, and who is unable to avail himself or herself of the protection of that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion , or (B) in such special circumstances as the President after appropriate consultation (as defined in section 207(e) of this Act) may specify any person who is within the country of such person's nationality (Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Committee, 1989, p. 13). For the past 25 years, the United States has been liberally interpreting its own refugee definitions, allowing certain groups a "lower threshold of proof," (Loescher, 1991, p. 30), and demanding that others meet impossible criteria. The most recent case, with Haiti, exposes the arbitrary nature of the process. The U. S. government, in this case deciding unilaterally that all Haitian refugees are economic rather than political refugees, intercepted and sent back boatloads of people without benefit of the hearing to which they are entitled (Gillespie, 1992, p. 19).
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The same racism and ethnocentrism that allows our government to deny these people refugee status also renders them virtually invisible while they are in the United States. The governor of New York State as well as a high-ranking United Nations official visited Plattsburgh to observe the community's efforts when the refugee crisis first occurred in 1987, but their visits were apparently little more than photo opportunities. Little real help arrived, and 5 years have passed without any significant increases in funding or changes in government policy (Haight, 1992, p . 6). For the past year, I have conducted oral interviews with Central American women refugees traveling alone or with children. My particular interest is in the ways in which these women have transcended much of their socialization in making life decisions and in making the journey north. Their stories tell of women who have been victimized rather than of women who are victims; their words document the ways in which they have, as Helene Moussa argued about refugee women, "challenged state power, violence, and persecution, in their decisions to flee their homes and country" (Moussa, 1991, pp. 12-14). I am also interested in the hardships they experience as women traveling alone, and I hope to use the oral histories to advocate for further changes in refugee policies, especially those geared toward women. The Immigration and Naturalization Service of the United States reported a "dramatic rise" in the number of women apprehended at the U .Sv/ Mexico border between 1984 and 1986; 1986 figures demonstrated a 40% increase in 2 years (Hogeland & Rosen, 1991, p. 4). Although recent developments in El Salvador have reduced the number of refugees entering the United States illegally, refugees from this region continue to tell stories of political repression, torture, and murder (Scanlon, 1992). The refugees' problems do not end, however, once they arrive at the border. In one study, 36% of the women experienced some form of abuse in crossing the U .S v/Mexico border; the abuses ranged from robbery to assault to sexual abuse (Hogeland & Rosen, 1991, p. 9). As Gillespie (1992) argues, "When individuals, families, or groups are targeted, women's bodies become the battleground" (p. 19). Some women reported
taking birth control pills to avoid pregnancy if they were raped en route, and one of the women I interviewed spoke anxiously about the baby she had as a result of rape by a "coyote," a man paid to help people cross the border: "He wasn't made with love at all" (Scanlon, Interview, 1991). Women refugees of all ages, reports Gillespie (1992), "are preyed upon by guards at borders and at refugee camps, armed men in and out of uniform , officials, pirates, male refugees" (p. 19). Although the life histories of these women are both moving and compelling, I am committing an abuse if I only take their words and use them, as I just did, to illustrate a point I want to make and to embellish a story I want to publish. Participatory research encourages me to question my motives as well as my method . Would there be any use of these women's words that is not "out of context"? Probably not. In planning my research, I gradually felt that it was my responsibility to do more with the project than use the women's words in thi s way. As a result , I began my research proposal with more methodology than interview questions. One of the first steps I took in my research process was to write an application to a campus committee, the Committee for the Protection of Human Subjects. Part of the application requested a discussion of what the respondents would get out of their participation in the project. My responses fell flat , if not for the members of the committee, at least for myself. The respondents would have the opportunity, I argued, to engage in discussion with someone interested in their lives. They would have the opportunity to provide information that could be used to educate people in the United States about the consequences of United States foreign policy. They would have a voice, and feminist politics, after all, which forms the basis for much of my work, is about providing women with a voice. While I wrote the application, and then while I began to conduct the interviews, I had second thoughts about the merits of the project for the respondents versus the merits of the project for me. What do I get out of th is project? Clearly I have much to gain: a trip to a national conference to discuss "my" work and, most likely, one or two publications in scholarly journals that will enhance
Imbalances of Power in Feminist Oral History
the likelihood of my getting tenure where I teach. I have much to gain, much more in the short and probably the long term, than the respondents . Doing oral history work almost inevitably sets up a political relationship between interviewer and respondent and creates such an imbalance of benefits. Researchers take, but what do they give back, really? Anthropologists and oral historians alike have to face this issue. Feminist theory encourages participation in the community outside the university, but this participation cannot simply be limited to recording the successes and/or woes of others. Any oral history project should have as one component what the interviewer will give back to the persons or group being interviewed. Howard Adelman, Director of the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, argues that "Commitment without scholarship is blind; scholarship insensitive to suffering is deaf' (Adelman, 1991, p. 1). The following examples relate how I am trying to achieve a balance: to practice good scholarship and to remain both sensitive and directly responsive to the needs of the people I interview. I have, in the most basic terms, attempted to pay, in ways that at times include monetary compensation, for the interviews I have conducted. I should say at the outset that the payments most often have not been made to the individuals being interviewed but rather to the larger group of refugees living in my community . Some might argue that payment of some kind should be made to each individual I interview. I found that to be too difficult to institute, for when I tried, I made some promises I could not keep. For example, I promised to keep in touch with respondents when they left Plattsburgh. That is a large promise. For me, visiting someone in town is easier than writing a letter, so now I am clear not to make promises that go beyond the physical boundaries of Plattsburgh or of our time together. I also promised to visit several people in Montreal, and again, it is rare that I can do this, regardless of my good intentions or genuine feelings of friendship for an individual or group of people I have come to know briefly. I can or will, realistically, write to or visit few of these people in their new homes, but I can do something to help the next set of people arriving. Being
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clear about one's own limitations, then, is important in maintaining integrity in any oral history project. I am more careful in my project now, knowing both my desire to maintain friendships and my limitations in following through. I write out, in an explicit rather than implicit fashion , guidelines for myself in this regard . The examples here, of course, will not apply to all oral history projects, but the principle often applies, especially when, as is the case in much feminist work, advocacy for the group of respondents is part of a researcher's motivation in doing the work. The most consistent effort I make for the refugees is to volunteer one morning each week at the Crisis Center, which provides services to the refugees. None of the employees of the Crisis Center speak Spanish fluently, and I do, so that is a major help, especially since a majority of the refugees are Spanishspeaking . I translate for them, help with arrangements for food and housing, and, most importantly, assist them with their paperwork . The forms they have to fill out, written either in French or English, are extremely important. These forms are long and require specific information about education, work, family members, and military service, among other things, but the most important question asks the individuals to record the story of their fear of or experience of persecution in their countries. This story stays with them for years as they make their way through the legal and political process in Canada. We provide them copies of the questions in Spanish, and I go over the questions one by one. I cannot overstate the importance of this document to each person's case, so it is a necessary service to review it with them. In this case, the Spanish speakers are the fortunate ones. The Crisis Center also has volunteers who speak French and , occasionally, from the local Air Force Base, volunteers for other languages. There is, of course, no small measure of irony that armed services personnel, who may have participated directly or indirectly in U.S. governmental assaults against these refugees in their homelands or en route, provide voluntary help to them in Plattsburgh. There are those refugees, however, for whom we cannot provide translations; they must rely on one another to piece together the information they need. Clearly,
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we are not meeting the needs of all the refugees we serve. Many of the Central American women refugees are either pregnant or traveling with small children. Because pregnant women and children may be eligible to receive food from WIC, the governmental nutritional assistance program for women, infants. and children, I often accompany women to Social Services so they can complete the paperwork there and receive food vouchers for the supermarket. The language barrier is a tremendous one, and with so much uncertainty in their lives, burdensome paperwork is one hassle these women do not need. Some are illiterate, so this process brings out other issues in their lives as well. Several women have learned they are pregnant while in Plattsburgh; others have given birth; others have had miscarriages. I often accompany pregnant women to doctors' offices, because there are no Spanish-speaking doctors in Plattsburgh, or at least none who will treat the refugees. I have learned many medical terms in Spanish that I never had the opportunity or need to learn before. I think that the articles I write about certain women's stories will be all the more rich because I did something for the others. My writing will be affected by the fact that I have become more intimate with many of the refugees, but although some would argue that this lack of objectivity is bad, I would agree with anthropologist Karen McCarthy Brown. who states that "more extended, intimate, and committed contact between researcher and subject can undercut the colonial mindset" of much academic writing (1992, p. A56). Life in Plattsburgh is extremely boring for the refugees . Many are housed at a motel outside of town , and they are essentially stuck there for I or 2 months. They appreciate a visit to play cards or talk, and making their lives just a bit easier while they are here is part of my oral history project. Although I only occasionally give the refugees cash, I regularly buy groceries for them and often invite people for a meal or coffee and a snack. I also invite interested refugees to events on campus. I solicit contributions of children's clothing from friends. This summer I rounded up a few old television sets that I could lend to refugees to help pass the time. There is another way I can be sensitive to
the needs of the refugees and educate others at the same time, and that is by encouraging students to become involved with the refugee relief effort. One student completed an internship at the Crisis Center, where he provided some measure of relief for the overburdened and underpaid workers there. Another student did her senior sociology thesis on how the community works together to help the refugees. She interviewed many religious leaders in Plattsburgh who were prompted to rethink their commitment, or lack of commitment, to the refugees. Another student , who had helped conduct several interviews, became so interested in the women's livesthat she traveled to Mexico and Guatemala to visit refugee camps and conduct interviews with women there. She subsequently wrote about women's empowerment in the refugee camps and the differences between women who travel alone and those who have the opportunity to work together to change their situations (Light. 1992).The transfer student club is currently planning fundraisers for the refugee relief effort, and the head of a sorority organized a campus-wide food drive. Faculty should not forget the tremendous resources they have in students. Many faculty on our campus, including myself, have philosophical differences with the fraternities and sororities, but these groups are often on the lookout for community service projects. A project such as this one can be a valuable and challenging educational experience for the sorority or fraternity members. I do not mean to overstate the significance of what I see as giving back to those who give to me. I do help them meet their immediate needs, but this assistance does nothing to challenge the governmental policies that prevent them from living in the United States legally or that help to create the various national crises in the first place. In fact , one could argue that my assistance precludes governmental attention: If the people are not on the streets, the state and federal governments can turn their attention elsewhere. If we in Plattsburgh take care of the refugees on our own, Governor Cuomo and the United Nations can worry about other things. I have not as yet come to terms with this aspect of my work. I find myself feeling more and more sympathy with the social service workers around the United States who daily
Imbalances of Power in Feminist Oral History
put bandaids on huge wounds. We cannot abandon our small-scale projects in the name of larger-scale change. Another part of my payment, however, ought to be advocacy work on a larger scale. Perhaps my writing can help on that level; perhaps my educational efforts will payoff locally and more people will become interested in working together for change on a national level. For now, I provide conversation, hospitality, and humane treatment to a group of people who know that many people in the United States at best fail to appreciate their presence and at worst victimize them physically and/or financially. During their time in Plattsburgh the refugees can rest a bit, get a little medical attention, and gather some strength for the new difficulties that await them in Canada. Feminist theory encourages us to listen to women's voices, to provide opportunities for women to have a voice. I do believe that my oral history project does this, by recording women's complaints and joys, dreams and experiences. I also believe, though, that their voices are not just global but personal, not just about lifetime needs but about everyday needs, not just about the future but about now. "We must keep people and politics at the center of our research," writes Rina Benmayor about the El Barrio Popular Education Program, a model for community-based research (Benmayor, in Gluck & Patai, 1991). Incorporating activities into my oral history project that give as well as take - that directly help the refugees while they are here-is one way for me to produce scholarship that, in some seen and many unseen ways, explores the meaning of commitment and "good" work.
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of women refugees. London: Change International
Reports. Bowles, Gloria, & Duelli Klein , Renate. (1983). Theories of Women's Studies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Brown, Karen McCarthy. (1992). Writing about the other. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 38, A56. Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Committee. (1989). Church World Service report on Central American refugees. Elkhart, IN: Church World Service. Gillespie , Marcia Ann. (1992) . No woman's land. Ms., 3(3), 18-22. Gluck, Sherna Berger, & Patai, Daphne. (1991). Wom-
en's words: The feminist practice of oral history . New York : Routledge. Haight, Geri. (1992). Refugees in Plattsburgh: Community response to a global problem. Unpublished paper, SUNY Plattsburgh. Hogeland, Chris, & Rosen, Karen. (1991). Dreams lost,
dreams found: Undocumented women in the land of opportunity. San Francisco: Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Services. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. (1991). News release. Toronto: Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. Lather, Patti. (1991). Getting smart: Feminist research and pedagogy with/in the postmodern. New York: Routledge. Light, Debbie. (1992). Healing their wounds: Guatemalan refugee women as political activists. Women and
Therapy: A Feminist Quarterly, 13,297-308. Loescher, Gil. (1991). Inside the golden door. Refugees, 82,29-31. Maguire, Patricia. (1987). Doing participatory research: A feminist approach. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press . McCailin, John. (1991). USA for UNHCR. Refugees, 82,30. Moreno, David. (1991). Thunder on the left: Radical critiques of U.S. Central American policy. Latin American Research Review, 26, 226. Moussa, Helene. (1991). Women refugees: Empowerment and vulnerability. Refugee, 10(4), 12-14. Patai, Daphne. (1991). U.S. academics and third world women: Is ethical research possible? In Sherna Berger Gluck & Daphne Patai (Eds.), Women's words (pp. 137-153). New York: Routledge. Reinharz, Shulamit. (1992). The principles of feminist research: a matter of debate. In Cheris Kramarae & Dale Spender (Eds .), The knowledge explosion: Generations offeminist scholarship (pp. 423-437). New York : Teachers College Pres s. Scanlon, Jennifer. (1991, 1992). Interviews. Shields, Vickie Rutledge, & Dervin, Brenda. (1993). Sensemaking in feminist social science research : A call to enlarge the methodological options of feminist studies. Women's Studies International Forum, 16, 65-81.