WUNRN
It is so very important for us as women to TELL OUR OWN STORIES, to share the legacy of our experiences, whether they seem mega as in this fascinating and successful project on Women’s Memory, multinational, that actually was “born” on the Beijing Conference Women’s Peace Train in 1995; AND there can be great value in a mico version of this project, where women in a family create a format for documenting their generational experiences to share, as grandmother – mother – daughter – granddaughter.
Women’s Memory is a
long-running international project initiated and co-ordinated by the Centre for
Gender Studies in Prague. This summary was given to WUNRN in 2004 by Jirina
Siklova, a Project Founder & Coordinator, of the Czech Republic Centre for
Gender Studies.
History of the
project
The idea of the
project originated in the first half of the 90th when the western
feminists were coming to the countries of the former eastern block, eager to
find out about the position of the emancipated women in socialist countries.
Some of them were coming full of admiration for the achievements which they
themselves had to fight hard for in the course of the 70th (social
status of women, access to education, economical independence, maternity leave,
pre-school facilities for children….), others again astonished with the low
level of the eastern women’s self-confidence, with the realisation that in
spite of the so proclaimed equality, the patriarchy is so strongly rooted
(first of all in the private sphere), and with the women’s willingness to be
overloaded.
Many of these
western feminists have, after a shorter or longer stays in the countries of the
eastern bloc, published various papers and books about the state of
emancipation of women in our countries. These materials were based on their
own, completely different cultural and social criteria and experience, and also
on quite different analytical discourses and paradigms, not always applicable
to our reality. This has caused a lot of misunderstanding; the women from
eastern and central Europe did not recognise themselves in these studies.
In a number of
discussions with our colleagues from women and gender centres, we agreed that it
is highly important that we evaluate our own history according to our own and
not any adopted criteria, and that it is equally important to embrace our
”otherness”, and thus to bring forward the issue of the identity of women
living in socialism.
In the
course of the long journey by train to the UNO conference on women in Beijing
(The Beijing Women’s Peace Train), when the women from the west and those from
the east had time more than enough to discuss different matters of interest,
this idea took the shape of the first proposal of an extensive international
project called Women’s Memory formulated by the Czech dissident sociologist
Jiřina Šiklová. About 50 organisations were interested to take part in that project
in that time … The project was from its very beginning to be intended as a
comparative international project. However, soon became evident that such a
project would require significant resources comparable to Spielberg’s project
on the Holocaust.
However, since we
were really possessed by the idea, we in Gender Studies Centre in Prague
started to realise the interviews on a shoestring budget in the autumn of 1996.
Points of departure
and aims of the project
The socialist model of the
emancipation of women has been the only systematic and complex concept of the
emancipation of women – or more accurately said – it was a theoretical
experiment. From this point of departure, we were interested in documenting
the experience of women of three generations (those born from the end of
the World War I to those born to 1960), it means the generations of women who
have for the most part of their active lives lived in the times of socialism.
We were interested in how they reflected on their life then, and how do they
reflect on it today. We wanted to try to uncover many myths connected with the
concept of ”a socialist women” through a microscope of individual
testimonies, through how the women lived, and what did they live by, how did
their life experience differ from that of their mothers and grandmothers.
The feminist sociology brought
not only new issues into the traditional masculine interpretation of the world,
but it also brought new methods of interpretation, more focused on stressing
the importance of personal experience, the self-reflection of the interviewer
and that of the person interviewed. Also the narrative and biographical method
is preferred nowadays. It is stressed that the history is not made up by a
sequence of events, but first of all by an interaction of individuals who
attach a certain importance and meaning to what is happening – a meaning which
- with a retroactive effect - is forming the reality. The way, we interpret the
events is not given by the facts only, but also by their evaluation. And the
way, we evaluate – our patterns of values – are not formed at schools only, but
they are passed over to us by past generations, based on their experience. It
is the parents, and first of all the mother, who decides what is to be passed
over to the next generation, and what should be considered the fundamental, and
that is why forming the attitudes of the next generations. And this selection
of the memory of a nation, the memory of the mankind, is influenced namely by
women.
In oral interpretation, namely
in family stories, is based the biographical method and oral history which we
have logically chosen for our project. We are interested in the lived reality
and not in an objective truth.
Autobiographical narration illustrates the skills of women to describe and
reflect on their personal experience, to verify and examine them, to keep
coming back in circles, no matter whether they talk about their life crises,
important decisions or whether they recollect their childhood, they always
weave the web of a genealogy of women in a way characterised by a Montenegro
writer Ljiljana Habjanovic-Djurovic in the motto to her novel The Women’s
Genealogy – ”Stringed as pearls on the same thread of the never ceasing women’s
genealogy”.
Woman’s genealogy is not only the finding of woman’s codes in the genealogical
woman’s line, but also forming a frame of a feminist epistemology, always
focused round woman’s of identification and women’s models of recognition.
We understand this project to be an open model of testing the feminist
methodology and of our – the participants – task in it. The feminist
methodology is at the same time both - a challenge and a process, and
since it is a dynamic process – it cannot be measured and compared in any
way. Which does not mean that it is not a subject to criticism – to the
contrary: critical research is not only an integral part of the process, but it
is also testing the role of each of the participants in the project. We
understand this project to be emancipatory, anti-ideological, feminist, and
first of all open. Its feminist character is determined first of all by our
attitude to the respondents: they are in no way understood as objects, but subjects
of the projects, they are both – the meaning and the aim of the project.
Based on the premise that ”personal is political”, the aims of the project
are not theoretical, but practical, if you want – they should serve ”the public
enlightenment”, broad public, civic society, oriented. Bringing together both
these criteria – the political, or towards the civic society oriented praxis,
and the academic, represents the major shape of the project. It is not
”product” or result-oriented, it is oriented towards the process itself.
A long time was devoted to the methodological process. It was gradually made
more and more precise in the course of more than a year during 5 international
workshops in which the project partners met… From the beginning, it was made
clear that we all understand that this is an open, learning project, developing
with each next interview, with each next reading, with each next international
meeting….
The interview is understood as a
process of interaction between the interviewer and the women interviewed based
on a mutual trust. If it were not for this trust, the project could not
be realised. Absolutely equal position between the interviewer and the women
interviewed is a key ethical issue of the project. The purpose is not only to
collect ”data”, but also to bring the women to a reflection on their own
identity. We have set up a raster of an interview, an outline serving as
a support which each of us – the interviewers keeps somewhere in her
head, in her memory. Even this raster is understood as auxiliary, since
the interview sometimes lasts for many hours, sometimes it has to be resumed
several times. Without a deep inner involvement of each of us it would not be
possible.
The selection of the women
interviewed – makes for the quality of an interview. Each life story is important, but
not everyone is able to reflect on it, and not everyone is keen to present it.
Of course, a full anonymity of the respondents is guaranteed, their family
names are given only in initials, the place need not be given, and even their
first name may be changed.
How do we find the women? In
various ways – we started searching for the women in our own circle, asking for
contacts. It is necessary to be recommended – you just cannot approach someone
and ask her to tell you her life story, to ask about intimate things as the
relationship between the partners, child birth, abortions, family planning,
contraceptives…. We mostly used the method of a snowball … we, categorically
refused to use the advertisements. The German colleagues, for instance,
contacted the women through the clubs of seniors – it turned out not to work in
our case. Now, working with the second generation of women we can ask our
respondents to recommend someone they know. Often, we stay in a long contact,
they write, phone, sometimes they visit the Gender Studies Centre. In Berlin, a
number of respondents actively took part in the Congress.
Transcription of the interview
is
not literal. We have reached a partial compromise between the accuracy of what
was being said and the readability, or comprehensibility of the text – all
interjections, unfinished words, are left out, so that the incomprehensibility
of the text does not discourage a reader not accustomed to read the pure phonetic
transcription from reading. However, the uniqueness of the speech of the
respondent has to be preserved.
It is important that the
individual teams are interdisciplinary: philosophers, linguists,
historians, ethnologists, psychologists, sociologists, publicists, writers … By
a repeated reading of the material from different points of view and consequent
discussions, common issues crystallize – first of all the identity, personal
development, power, women’s politics, values...
Product
Even though we keep
stressing the procedural character of the project, we must not forget to define
its products, its concrete aims. Here, we distinguish between two forms of the
”product”:
I.
Permanent, material, concrete product:
A/ It is the International
Archive and everything belonging to it – all the original materials,
transcriptions, cassettes, and supplementary materials.
By supplementary materials we
understand – the protocol of the interview, the bio gram of the person
interviewed, the résumé of the interview, and an auxiliary index of key words
of the interview for the future reference in the archive. All these materials
are translated to English and German.
The access to the
archive is based on the Czech law of the archives.
Individual national
archives will be located either in the centres themselves, or at the
universities (Bratislava, Beograd), open to the researchers. It is the students
who often participate in the project.
All the materials
collected in the course of the project should be in future open to experts from
different fields and to serve the future generations (students´ papers –
Olomouc, Beograd, Zagreb).
II.
Running product – which may be described as the impact
the project has on the women taking part in it – both, the interviewers and
the respondents.
- This process of the
awareness awakening starts already at the level of an interview itself. A
number of women were surprised, why should we be, in the first place,
interested in their life story; some of them were actually recapitulating and
taking stock of their lives for the first time, ever. The interview enables
them to take a different view of their own life and boosts their
self-confidence by the very fact of someone else being interested. Later, the
interviews are discussed in the family, in the circle of friends. This kind of
a follow-up effect must not be underestimated.
-The impact, the
project has on the interviewers and participants of the project not only during
the interview itself and its processing (transcription), but also in the
process of communal readings and assessing in the course of workshops. And this
holds true for the national as well as international level. It brings a
tremendous enrichment; it is a real source for self-education. For us, the
participants of the project, the project is an exercise in multiculturalism
– with all the clichés about the uniformly grey Eastern Europe rapidly
disappearing. The countries share many things in common, but many of
them are vastly different
What has been
accomplished?
After the first,
pilot, only national phase 1996-97, we offered our experience to our colleagues
from the former GDR, from Berlin, to our Polish colleagues from Krakow, and we
were working for about half of a year together on the methodology, constantly
verified in praxis, evaluating various ways of how to make an interview, how to
transcribe and process it. At the same time, we had parallel close contacts
with women from Yugoslavia and Croatia, and, of course, from Slovakia, so that
in the workshop in Brać in spring 1999 already women from 6 countries
participated. These 6 teams (Czech, German, Polish, Yugoslavian, Croatian, and
Slovak) form till present the hard core of the project.
The project is
co-ordinated form the Centre for Gender Studies in Prague where also the archive
of the project is in the process of setting up.
Each team is an
autonomous unit - each is also responsible for their financing (with the
exception of the German team which is subsidised by the state money through the
Ministry for the Family, Seniors, Women, and Youth). The continuation of the
project is year after year painfully secured by different grants – H. Boell
Stiftung, Open Society Fund, PHARE EU programme, and various others.
All the presently
participating teams have agreed to have at least 30 interviews with the women
of each generation finished by the end of 2002, supplemented – if their
financial situation allows – by all the relevant supplementary materials.
All the teams
closely co-operate, the highest organ being the meeting of national
co-ordinators. Common workshops are organised at least once a year. Till now we
have managed to meet even more often.
The languages of
communication are German or English.
Each team, upon
deciding to join the project (now it is the Monte Negro; also Bulgaria,
Macedonia, BaH, and Ukraine are interested), shall adopt our methodological
consensus and the rules of co-operation as binding.
A bit of
statistics:
Czech Republic – today, more
than 110 interviews, almost 4.000 pages of transcription. We are through with
the oldest generation; about finished with the second one, and we hope to have
finished also the interviews with the youngest generation of women by the end
of the next year.
A number of
interviews were translated into English and German; there are 2 small
publications in English and German. In the One Eye Open magazine there was
published an interview with three generations of women in Czech and English
(98) Two books of Všechny naše včerejšky (All our yesterdays) were
published in 1998. This was, perhaps, an early shot, but we did not want such a
highly interesting material to be just buried in the drawers, especially when
we had an opportunity to obtain a publication grant.
Based on the first
book of interviews, a diploma thesis was written by a student of the Department
of Sociology at the University in Olomouc.
Recently, the
interviews are conducted in a slightly different way; we step into the flow of
the speech of the respondent in far lesser instances. Publications to
come are intended to contain the interviews filed according to the generations
of the respondents.
The members of our
team act as multiplicators and trainees in a number of similar lesser projects.
Recently, it is the Memory of the Roma Women in co-operation with the
Museum of the Roma Culture in Brno.
Germany – 70
interviews, they are at the end with the second generation, they act as
multiplicators, lecturers.
Poland – 45
interviews. They stopped working this year, looking for new sources of
finances.
Croatia – 40
interviews, publishing Women’s Biographical Lexicon, planning a film project.
Yugoslavia – 40
interviews. They have 4 books published (3 individual interviews: with the
philosopher Svetlana Knjazev-Adamović, sociologist and politician Vesna Pešić,
anthropologist Zaga Golubović), a collection of interviews with the Danube
Germans. Their project is funded primarily by the publications for which they
get various grants. The project was not stopped even in the difficult situation
of bombs falling on Beograd (Epistolae).
There is a master’s
diploma work in the process of being written.
Slovakia – 25
interviews, 2 diploma works. The team joined only in the autumn of 1999.
The supplementary
materials from all the national teams keep continuously flowing to the Prague
archive. However, at present, there is no money to support the international
part of the project – translations, co-ordination, and the management of the
archive.
Step by step, the
interviews are completed by supplementary materials or studies illustrating the
historical context (historical raster), legislation referring to women
issues, relevant statistical and demographic data, historical discourse of the
women’s issues, profile of the most popular women’s magazine, and the image of
a woman presented in it.
Important for the
project was last year’s congress with the title The Women’s Memory – The
Future Needs Memories, which we organized last May in Berlin, and where the
scholars were presented with the first outcomes of the project. The congress
was accompanied by an exhibition of historical materials. Among other guests,
the congress attended Margarita Doer, a German historian, whose book on
National Socialism ”Wer die Zeit nicht miterlebt hat …” is based on similar
methodology. Her support of our project, together with the interest of the
scholars and lay people, meant a great encouragement for all of us.