Listening for Women's Narratives in the Harvard Project Archive

This article asks how to listen for meaning in women’s life stories when those stories are relayed to us by men. On 1 February 1951 Kent Geiger, a US graduate student, aged twenty-eight, sat down to interview ‘Olga Ivanova’, a forty-four-year-old Russian seamstress and displaced person who had left the USSR in 1943.1 Over two days, four sessions and eleven hours of interviewing, the pair spoke about Ivanova’s life under Stalin and her hopes for the future. The conversation was part of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, a post Second-World-War interviewing project co-ordinated by Harvard University’s then Russian Research Centre.2 Between 1949 and 1951, with the aim of capturing a portrait of Soviet society, Harvard Project researchers carried out 329 extended life-history interviews and 435 shorter ‘special topic’ interviews with Soviet émigrés and refugees, most of whom were living in West Germany.3 In order to secure the anonymity of respondents like Ivanova, the interviews – which were conducted in Russian or Ukrainian – were never audio-recorded. Instead, interviewers took detailed notes throughout the conversations and later typed their notes into English-language transcripts.4 The only way to access Ivanova’s story is to read Geiger’s account of the interview.

Active listening · Art · Art history · Conversation · Émigré · Interview · Literature · Meaning (existential) · Media studies · Narrative · Oral history · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Refugee · Sociology · Ukrainian · Anthropology · Canadian Identity and History · Data Analysis and Archiving · Gender Studies · History · Law · Oral History, Memory, Narrative Analysis · Psychology

• Waltz of the Oil Field

  Daryl Meador•Feminist Media Histories•2020

  Incluir item

• A shared authority

  Michael H Frisch•A shared authority•1990

  Incluir item

• ‘The thing that made me hesitate …’

  Open Access•Juliette Pattinson•Women s History Review•2011

  Incluir item

• Bodies of Evidence

  CAROL MARTIN•TDR/The Drama Review•2006

  Incluir item

• Culture and Composure

  Penny Summerfield•Cultural and Social History•2004

  Incluir item

• Interviewing men

  Open Access•Deborah Lee•Women s Studies International Forum•1997

  Incluir item

• Beginning Where We Are

  Kathryn Anderson, Susan Armitage et al.•The Oral History Review•1987

  Incluir item

• Reflecting on the Quantum Leap

  Sherna Berger Gluck•The Oral History Review•2014

  Incluir item

• Revisiting the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System

  Sam Iti Prendergast, Sam Prendergast•The Oral History Review•2017

  Incluir item

• Women’s History and Oral History

  Joanna Bornat, Hanna Diamond•Women s History Review•2007

  Incluir item

• The Affective Power of Sound

  Open Access•Susan Mchugh, Siobhàn McHugh•The Oral History Review•2012

  Incluir item

• Women in the Modern World

  J Bernard, Mirra Komarovsky•American Sociological Review•1953

  Incluir item

• The Soviet Citizen

  N S Timasheff, Alex Inkele et al.•American Sociological Review•1960

  Incluir item

• The Peculiarities of Oral History

  Alessandro Portelli•History Workshop Journal•1981

  Incluir item

• The Family in Soviet Russia

  Olga Crisp, H Kent Geiger•Man•1969

  Incluir item

• Researching the researcher-as-instrument

  Open Access•Anne E Pezalla, Jonathan Pettigrew et al.•Qualitative Research•2012

  Incluir item