WUNRN
http://storycenter.org/blog/writing-women-into-history
Writing Women
into History – By Kayann Short
Kayann’s
great-grandmother, Flora Hunsley Smith, and family, from Kayann’s digital
story, “Seeds of Never-Seen Dreams."
“Where are the
women?” is the question behind Women’s History Month each March. The absence of
women from much of recorded history and scholarship has left gaps that
undermine women’s progress toward equality. While the conditions under which
women’s history has been lost, erased, and suppressed may be familiar—prejudice
of all sorts; sexual violence; second class status; lack of time and
resources—such conditions continue to impact the inclusion of women in private
and public discourse today.
Women’s History Month
was established to bring the stories of women’s experiences into view by
uncovering, discovering, and recovering women’s lives throughout history. Many
of these women were famous in their time; others led quieter lives that,
nevertheless, shaped families, communities, and movements. Collectively, the
retrieval and celebration of their stories has led to new understandings of
history as small steps in time, as well as the cataclysm of big events.
Digital storytelling
is the perfect vehicle for recording women’s stories in ways that honor both
women’s individual lives and larger collective experiences. A wonderful example
of this synthesis is found in the digital story “Right into
History: The Dinner Party as Catalyst for Social Activism” by Dr.
Anne Marie Pois. This piece was made for the Activist Archive,
the service learning project in which my University of Colorado students
facilitated digital storytelling by elder activists in our community.
Pois’s story shares
her experience working on “The Dinner
Party,” a feminist art installation directed by artist Judy Chicago
in 1976. “The Dinner Party” featured a banquet table with 39 place settings for
innovative women throughout history, with another 999 names inscribed in the
floor beneath the table. 129 volunteers produced the installation, from
historical research to identify the women commemorated, to the ceramic and
textile creation of each intricate place setting.
Pois became one of
the volunteers on this project when she answered a bulletin board call for
participants. Her digital story details her involvement with the project, at
the same time that it portrays her growing interest in women’s history. Her
work on “The Dinner Party” inspired her to pursue a Ph.D. and teach women’s
history at the University of Colorado.
Pois’s story shows
how individual women’s lives contribute to larger collective movements. Her
personal story inspires us to follow our dreams; her story of “The Dinner
Party” portrays the evolution of second wave feminist activism. “Right into
History” exemplifies how by paying attention to the particulars of women’s
lives, we not only learn about women’s history, but about the larger sweeps of
history itself.
Many of the
StoryCenter participants with whom I have worked are interested in making
digital stories about the women in their families, from mothers, grandmothers,
and great-grandmothers, to unmet female ancestors who left traces of their
lives in photographs, books, and commonplace objects like sewing baskets and
jewelry boxes. Beyond preserving the stories behind these artifacts and
memories, the participants are interested in relating how these women’s lives
have shaped their own. Each time I watch one of these stories, I imagine
another piece of the women’s history puzzle snapping into place.
I call this type of
story an “I-in-Relation” story because it explores the influence of a
relationship on the storyteller’s life. As I wrote in a previous
StoryCenter blog post about this concept, “Although these stories
may ostensibly seem to focus on another person’s life, they express the
identity, values, or truths of the storymaker’s life as well.” This dual
focus—honor and remembrance of another juxtaposed with examination and
disclosure of the self—generates a complex story in polyvocal, multi-layered
modes.
Women’s History Month
works that way, too. We not only celebrate the women who are finally taking
their places in history books or who have gained fame or celebrity through
radical words or deeds. We also admire the women with whom we interact every
day. While we’re inspired by the greatness of women who have come before us,
it’s our own lives as women we’re inventing—our own stories we’re writing, our
own experiences we’re living. Most of us don’t act in the big ways that
conventionally count as “history,” but Women’s History Month directs us to view
everyday actions as history, too. As we look to women’s history for models of
women’s strength, creativity, innovation, and courage, we also create new
models for the next generations to follow. Anne Marie Pois’s story ends with a
photograph of her baby daughter Emily, named after Emily Dickinson, one of the
women honored at “The Dinner Party’s” table. Pois’s story, in turn, becomes her
legacy to her granddaughter.
I like to imagine
that a hundred years from now, my young great-great-great-granddaughter will
come across the digital stories I’ve made
about my female family members, ancestors, friends, and community members. I
hope the stories help her fill in the blanks of her own history as she makes
her way into the world. These stories are my legacy to her, but they’re also my
answer to the question, “Where are the women?” We’re here, they say, writing
our way into history.
Kayann Short, Ph.D.,
is the author of A Bushel’s Worth: An
Ecobiography, a memoir of reunion with a family’s farming past
through community supported agriculture and a call for local farmland
preservation today. With Allison Myers, Kayann facilitated a StoryCenter
workshop on food preservation stories at her farm in Colorado on September 18
and 19, 2014.