THE HISTORY OF THE ORAL HISTORY PROJECT

Opening remarks by Susan Carini
Chair of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women
March 26, 2008

An insatiable love of storytelling can lead to many predicaments in life. It can lead to reading under the covers in the dark, which in turn leads to a lifetime of balancing window panes on one’s nose. It can lead to incurable shyness and a weakening of the tongue, as the eyes and ears quickly predominate. It can lead to books spreading like kudzu in one’s home, eventually leaving the owner and her sweet dog no place to lay their heads.

All this and worse have befallen the teller of this story. My fortunes changed utterly, though, the day I had the crazy notion to pull together an oral history project. Let me say, for the record, that I am not an expert in oral history. For those who are, who may be seated in the audience, I welcome your input and potentially your challenge to what we have done and how we have done it. As I confessed at the outset, I am a bespectacled writer and introvert with a house made messy by books who was lucky enough to realize the richness of an oral history project for Emory’s women and blessed enough by a talented staff to see the project through to fruition.

I will recount the history of the history project briefly. At the 2005 summer orientation for the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, I had the idea of doing an oral history for women that would be truly University-wide. Other accomplished oral histories had been under way in various quarters of the University, but ours would be the first to look across Emory. The president generously gave us $30,000, and I set the egg timer for two years. We wanted the project to roll out in time for the thirtieth anniversary of the commission and the fifteenth and twentieth anniversaries, respectively, of the Center for Women and Women’s Studies. I suggested a handful of questions for my writers to ask the women, but the rest was left to the creativity of my staff and to the chemistry that arose between them and the extraordinary women they interviewed.

As this project developed, I thought often of Scheherezade and of the former necessity of casting stories told by women to be heard by men. As critic Karen Rowe, writing about the Arabian Nights, notes: “In Scheherazade’s case, we must be mindful of the horrendous constraints imposed on these female powers of influence—for example, the lethal consequences of the heroine’s failure to please.” As Rowe goes on to say: “When women achieve new freedoms, female storytelling changes as a result. When women are the rapt audience of female storytellers, the gender dynamics of recollections must be understood in terms of the mesmerizing aspects of familiarity and commonality as opposed to the voyeuristic appeal of otherness and difference.”

In the midst of writing these remarks yesterday, I heard a knock at my door at around 4:00; it was a colleague offering me a ticket to the Alice Walker event. On a Tuesday, in the midst of the usual workaday drought, the ticket fell onto my desk and made a sound like literary rain. For an editor so often bound by rules, I was surprised to hear a voice like mine saying, “Thank you. Why not?” I then ran to catch a story that I knew would not be told again in the same way.

Which is exactly what, in the plural, this growing archive represents. And I can report that my journey was a happy and instructive detour, that the heroine did not “fail to please.” For Walker helped me understand the “why” behind these two years of inconveniencing busy women and putting my staff through so many paces. There is a freedom in women telling women stories. Rowe is right in uttering the seeming paradox that “familiarity” and “commonality” are “mesmerizing.”

But back to Walker. She talked about a field of blue flowers outside her country house and how she praised and praised them. They thrived, she claimed, and went to say: “It became ridiculous how they grew. I was almost afraid I would have to stop praising them.” In the case of the Oral History Project, I and others have chosen to praise Emory women. As the project continues, we intend to do so right up to and beyond the point that it becomes, as Walker said to laughter last night in Glenn Memorial, “ridiculous.”

I want now to introduce the person who has been, according to these terms, the principal voice of praise. Mary Loftus, the associate editor of Emory Magazine, appeared to be a convert to this cause before I could shake a finger in the pulpit. Throughout a notable career in journalism, she has thought provocatively about the psychology of interviewing and about the ineffable exchanges that are made—only some of which, despite our talents as interviewers, make their way into the final text. Mary, I am going to turn it over to you with thanks not only for all you have given to the project already but for your time, and that of everyone else, on the panel today.