A major objective in Women’s Studies is to collect information on the work women have done in our society and its importance to their (and our) lives. Women work for different reasons and with different goals. This assignment asks you to interview a woman about her work life and, on the basis of this interview, write up an analysis of her work history. (Remember, women work both in and outside the home, contributing paid and unpaid labor to our GNP. This assignment wants you to find out about all these sorts of labor: work in the home, work for pay, volunteer work.)

There are two objectives to this assignment:

• To collect oral information about one woman’s work experience—to construct her work history. (Try to find a woman at least 20 years older than you—your mother’s generation or older. You may interview relatives or friends or a person on campus whose life or career you are interested in, etc.)
• The second objective is to introduce you to this important method in Women’s Studies scholarship, the oral history interview. This is a critically vital way of collecting information about women’s everyday lives—information that has not been recorded and has not ordinarily received academic attention.

The oral interview should begin with the collection of background information. This not only breaks the ice, but will collect the information that will allow you to analyze the interview later. Next you’ll want to begin asking the narrator about her work history—be sure she is aware that you are asking about both paid and unpaid activities. As a class, we will develop a series of questions you can ask (next class period). What is most important, though, is that you try to get a sense of your narrator’s work history and her aspirations, expectations, disappointments, and gratifications—both at home and on the job. As we learned when reading about feminism, women of previous generations often could not "have it all"—what sacrifices did your narrator make for her life choices?

The best interview allows for the flow of material in a natural manner, within the narrator’s own framework. The questions we devise as a class will be just a guide, to help you structure your interview. But you do not (and probably should not) follow it verbatim. You need to decide, as the interview proceeds, that you want to follow one particular angle, such as managing the demands of home and work, or dealing with a promotion, and so on

You should be keyed in to the narrator for hints about which topic to pursue, about which topics seem of greatest concern to her. For example, you might hear her say several times that her schedule at work was keyed into her children’s schedule. This would be important to pursue, because it would appear that being available for her children was of primary important, and her work was a job, not a career. You may also decide you are interested in a certain issue—equal pay on the job, harassment, or union membership. The key is to find the major issues for your narrator in terms of explaining her work life and pursue those.

Some interview tips: (More included at the end of this packet)

• Explain to the narrator what you are doing—that this will be written up and turned in to your teacher. Let her know you can give her a fictitious name if she would prefer.
• Often feminist scholars offer their subjects the opportunity to co-write—that is, to read and remark on the paper before it is turned in (or published). Your narrator could then respond to your conclusions (agreeing or disagreeing) and you could make her response part of the paper, or incorporate them into the paper.
• It is usually most helpful to tape record the interview and to go back to that for info as you write. (You may even want to transcribe the interview.) It works well to be able to quote her words directly and accurately in the write up.
• A detailed interview will take 1-2 hours.

1.Subjective account of your attitudes toward the narrator. An important insight in Women’s Studies scholarship is that no scholar is objective. Every scholar brings a set of beliefs, expectations, and experiences to the interview situation. Furthermore, who the scholar is (what she looks like, how she behaves, what she represents to the subject) will affect what happens in the interview situation. As far as feminist scholarship is concerned, objective scholarship is an illusion—and therefore none of this is a hardship, just something we must account for in describing the ways in which we as scholars make meaning in and of the world. This is called a politics of location, and feminist scholarship attempts to foreground a politics of location. So before you begin to tell your reader what you know about your subject, you need to tell about yourself. Answering the following questions and writing up an introduction locating you in the interview helps your reader interpret your interview:

• Who are you? (Race, gender, social class, religion, ethnicity, sexual orientation, age, etc.) How are these the same or different from your narrator?
• How would you describe your attitude toward the narrator? (distant, polite, admiring, pitying, sympathetic, hostile, curious, etc.)
• How do you think she feels or is likely to feel about you?
• What did you think she would reveal about her work history (what were you expecting)?
• How do you think your own life prospects compare with hers? Are there aspects of her life you would want for yourself?

The answers to these questions constitute some of your beliefs about the interview situation. You’ll want to be sure your reader is aware of these (and of changes in them after the interview).

2.An objective section: This portion of the paper sketches out the facts of the narrator’s work history—where she worked, for how long, her family, economic, and educational circumstances. (The demographic info you collected.)

3.The narrator’s experiences. This portion of the paper articulates the narrator’s experience of her own work history (the story from her perspective). Thee following questions may help you organize this information:

• What did working mean to the narrator?
• To what extent does the narrator feel as if she had choices in her work life?
• What, if any, tensions defined her work life?
• Have her work aspirations been fulfilled?

4.Theoretical analysis: This is the most important section of the paper where you as the researcher put the author’s story into the context of the larger world issues you are coming to understand through this women’s studies course—the place where the personal story is understood and explained as political and social. The following questions may help you organize this section:

• How do the narrator’s demographic characteristics (social class, race, gender, education, marital and family status) help explain her work history and aspirations? How did these characteristics enable or constrain her abilities to meet her work goals?
• How does her specific historical context help explain her work history? (What was going on in the world that had an impact on her life and work history?)
• How might the narrator’s work life be explained by some of the books or articles you have read for this course?

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