What if the still living wish to remain (historical) ghosts

 Recently at a presentation, as well as on Twitter, discussion about the ethics of doing feminist historical research digitally has come up. As someone who started working in women’s history on feminist activism because of a commitment to feminism, I’ve always taken my cues from what I understood to be the ethos of the feminist movement. Sometimes though, every woman as an expert on her own life runs afoul of writing history.

When I worked as an oral historian, lines were clearer. Subjects signed long legal consent forms. Even then though, there was the issue of quoting from completely open transcripts. I generally still ran quotes by subjects feeling that their words, their lives should be under their control. Imagine my surprise when I saw that the repository where I’d put the tapes has put them up online! I know that the consent people signed included all “future” forms, but still I also know that no one ever contemplated the internet when I conducted those interviews. Should interviews be digitized and made available on the internet?

As I moved into more “meta” approaches to the movement, and then into the digital, I sighed with relief. I’m working now with thousands of articles, all published by their authors. No worries right? Turns out that was some short-lived relief. The issues I write about are still controversial. What people did or wrote or said decades ago, they may or may not wish to have written about, especially now that the internet makes everything easily searchable.

My current project explores, from the relative safety of an extremely common name, exactly what can and cannot be found via the internet-as-archive about one woman who participated in events of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Yesterday I got into a fascinating twitter discussion with the fabulous Julie Enzer, a researcher whose work I much admire. I storified our tweets, but it is clear that Julie takes a different approach than I have been of late.

A few years ago  I got embroiled in conflicting accounts of history. I kept rewriting the article until it seemed to satisfy everyone in it, but later realized that was not the case anymore. I also realized how very very badly things could go from a professional standpoint. At that point I was untenured and frankly needed this article for my publication record. I was faced with the very real possibility I might be asked not to publish it. Thankfully I didn’t face a situation where I was asked to change significantly the account of what I’d written before publishing, but I could definitely foresee that situation ensuing as well.

The figures I write about were often “public” which is to say about women who published, took part in events, did something that left a record of their name behind (and unlike sociologists historians do not generally anonymize their subjects). Although they were "public" at the time, they may or may not have gone on to keep a public profile.  I think of my projects as an intellectual history from the bottom up.  I believe that digital history has the promise to fulfill the still unfulfilled promise of social history, but as Julie asked, at what point does “public” in the women’s movement become “public” in general? Publishing in The Lesbian Tide isn’t precisely analogous to writing for the New York Times. In the U.K. digitization of Spare Rib cannot proceed until contributors individually consent. This process involves quite literally thousands of people. As a historian, concerned that digital history is too focused on wars and presidents (the stuff that no one really argues isn’t public and can’t be made available digitally) I would hate to see the women’s movement left behind.

Julie’s tweets prompted me to query, on twitter and facebook, my fellow researchers, and to start a google poll. If you write about the living, do you contact them? Who controls the interpretation of a person’s life? Should a researcher at least attempt to track down individuals before beginning to write in order to secure blessings?