The oral history project I chose to explore for my review is a collection of stories about lives of women who are lesbians. These women experienced different trials and tribulations as they grew up in different time periods. They relate what their daily lives were like and the things they experienced growing up in often conservative communities. I picked this one because I thought it would be interesting to hear accounts of lives that do not get regular attention in the mainstream history books.
The archive is housed at Simon Fraser University in Canada. It is maintained by their library’s special collections archive and is funded by grants from the Canadian Government. They have recently begun exploring digital media options for making their archive more participatory. The website has a huge collection of stories collected over many years from many different decades. This gives interested people a chance to hear about what life was life for these women in the 1930s and 40s and not just the post 70s era. Some of the stories were in an audio only format and some were recorded as audio and video. Both formats were of great quality and I had no trouble understanding the story teller in either format. The archive is well organized and has well documented metadata to aid research. There are labels for topics, places, and time periods. The researcher can click on a decade mentioned in the talk, or they could click on a place that is talked about in that segment. Different topics are also tagged in the metadata. There are labels for things like work, Sex and relationships, coming out, first kiss, and discrimination just to name a few.
I looked over several different files before I found one that I listened to at length. The different stories that I randomly clicked on were all over an hour and they all had multiple parts on file. Some of the recordings ran for a little more than an hour while others had over five hours of recordings archived. The stories were very detailed. The speakers went over what their lives were live from very young ages. I listened to a lady’s account about how she grew up in Utah in the 1940s. She shared details about how she was different from all the other kids she played with. Little things, like how she wanted an erector set for Christmas but her parents bought her dolls instead and how when playing house she didn’t mother her dolls but instead pretended to be the leader of a pioneer family fighting the wilderness for survival. She shared some very personal details about the girl she had her first sexual experimentation with as she was growing up. Her account of her marriage and the loneliness of being a housewife who did not relate well with the other wives in the neighborhood. The other stories I briefly previewed followed this pattern.
The stories I listened to were not heavily edited, although it could have used some touching up of some background noise. There was no conversation with the interviewer, it was just the speaker recounting her story. The only prompting from the interviewer was an occasional reminder after a break. It worked rather well considering the lack of dressing up. The stories were interesting and it was a great look into history from a different perspective.
