Let Women Speak for Themselves: War Through Their Eyes

Author: Li Xiaojiang
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-01-01
Features: "Let Women Speak for Themselves," telling women's historical feelings and recording their historical memories through women's voices; examining historical footprints from a female perspective. Through women's writings, retrieve women's history, making historical interpretation more comprehensive. "Let Women Speak for Themselves" is the basic principle of constructing women's history; giving voice to "women's voices" carries both political and academic missions in today's society. Retrieving and reconstructing women's history is not only a need for historiography but also a necessary cornerstone for women to rediscover themselves, establish autonomy, and build confident lives. In this regard, overseas feminist scholars have already produced a wealth of research. These studies advocate analyzing materials from a woman's perspective, "placing women at the center of historical research by reconstructing the voices and perspectives of women who have long been ignored, challenging the traditional, male-dominated historiography." Women's history and oral history share a natural alliance. Oral history methods are not unique to women's studies, and their adoption did not begin with women's history, but it has been particularly favored by female scholars and widely used by feminist historians. This is because oral history complements and corrects traditional historiography, uncovering the silenced groups (such as women, ethnic minorities, and the lower classes) and their unheard voices (about private emotions, life experiences, etc.), allowing history to more fully record the lives and histories of ordinary people. Women were once "unrecorded in history," and the historical "silence of women" in academia necessitated that women's history research begin with "breaking the silence" and "letting women speak." Almost simultaneously (in the mid-20th century), both movements advanced side by side, becoming comrades-in-arms in the modern historiographical reform movement. "Let Women Speak for Themselves" is the basic principle of constructing women's history; giving voice to "women's voices" carries both political and academic missions in today's society. Retrieving and reconstructing women's history is not only a need for historiography but also a necessary cornerstone for women to rediscover themselves, establish autonomy, and build confident lives. In this regard, overseas feminist scholars have already produced a wealth of research. These studies advocate analyzing materials from a woman's perspective, "placing women at the center of historical research by reconstructing the voices and perspectives of women who have long been ignored, challenging the traditional, male-dominated historiography." Conducting women's oral history on this land is because our society and our historiography face similar issues. For a long time, women have been perceived as a socially marginalized group, their discourse rights and abilities have been ignored, and their voices have rarely been attended to by academia, especially by historians. Therefore, in our context, uncovering and recording women's historical experiences and their voices have become an important part of constructing women's history. However, it must be noted: this "series" is not strictly a "women's history" in the conventional sense; it merely expresses women's historical memories and feelings through "women's voices," offering "women's interpretations" of historical events and cultural phenomena we already know, attempting to prove women's existence through their narratives and providing history with a new perspective, offering one or more additional ways of thinking. This series records women's experiences but is not entirely "feminist historiography." It does not aim to uncover women's special contributions or excessively emphasize their rights but seeks to extract women's experiences from the "grand historical narrative" and examine how women responded to issues such as nationality, class, politics, economics, and culture during significant historical changes. It cannot be denied that feminist historiography has posed a powerful challenge to the traditionally male-centered historiography, clearing the way for the construction of women's history and the reconstruction of historiography—but feminist historiography alone is not enough; it is insufficient to serve as the entire foundation for constructing "history," nor can it be the sole cornerstone for building women's history. Recognizing this clearly is very important for our "women's oral history" project. Participants in the "20th Century (Chinese) Women's Oral History" project largely share the consensus that the academic concerns of female scholars should not only be for women but also for history. For women who were once "unrecorded in history," retrieving women's history is both a responsibility and an obligation, but women have never existed in isolation. Women's suffering and women's liberation are merely parts of the "big history," and women's voices are echoes of the "history"—they cannot transcend their time and stand out on their own. Especially for Chinese women, in this land over a century, in addition to their suffering, there have indeed been heavy national and family hardships; above "women's rights," there are indeed class oppression issues related to national survival; within "gender equality," there are indeed the critical political democracy and economic poverty issues that affect the entire society. In this regard, Chinese women have made their own historical responses: they are very grand and expansive, far beyond feminist perspectives, no matter how you inspire or guide them; they are indeed more "national" and "social" than purely "feminist"—if we confine them within the framework of feminist understanding, we may also or misinterpret their voices.