| Abstract | In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Emily Honig Emily Honig is professor of women's studies and history at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 (1986); Creating Chinese Ethnicity: Subei People in Shanghai (1992); and Personal Voices: Chinese Women in the 1980s (with Gail Hershatter [1988]). Notes 1. Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai, "Introduction," in Women's Words: The Feminist Practice of Oral History, ed. Sherna Gluck and Daphne Patai (New York: Routledge, 1991), 2. 2. Nancy Grey Osterud and Lu Ann Jones, "'If I must say so myself': Oral Histories of Rural Women," Oral History Review 17, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 1-2. 3. See, for example, Nancy Seifer, Nobody Speaks for Me: Self-Portraits of American Working-Class Women (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976); Sherna Gluck, From Parlor to Prison (New York: Vintage, 1976); Patricia Preciado Martin, Songs My Mother Sang to Me: An Oral History of Mexican-American Women (Tucson and London: The University of Arizona Press, 1992); Patricia Romero, ed., Life Histories of African Women (London: The Ashfield Press, 1988). 4. See, for example, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, James Leloudis, Robert Korstad, Mary Murphy, Lu Ann Jones, and Christopher Daly, Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Vick Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization, and the California Food Processing Industry, 1930-1950 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987); Emily Honig, Sisters and Strangers: Women Cotton Mill Workers in Shanghai, 1919-1949 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Luise White, "Prostitution, Identity and Class Consciousness in Nairobi during World War II," Signs 11, no. 2 (Winter 1986): 255-73. 5. See Susan Geiger, "What's So Feminist About Doing Women's Oral History?" in Expanding the Boundaries of Women's History, ed. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 305-18. Also see Sherna Gluck, "What's So Special About Women? Women's Oral History," Frontiers 2, no. 2 (1979): 3-11. 6. Gluck and Patai, 2. 7. Gluck and Patai, 3. For a discussion of interviews as performance, see Patricia Zavella, Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987), 25-26. 8. Devra Weber, "Raiz Fuerte: Oral History and Mexicana Farmworkers," Oral History Review 17, no. 2 (Fall 1989): 61. 9. Luisa Passerini, Fascism in Popular Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 10. Discussion of this issue is absent not only from feminist discussion of oral history, but of women's personal narratives more generally. See, for example, Bella Brodzki and Celeste Schenck, Life/Lines: Theorizing Women's Autobiography (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); and The Personal Narratives Group, Interpreting Women's Lives: Feminist Theory and Personal Narratives (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). 11. One of the early formulations of this view, was by E. H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961). 12. Erik H. Erikson, Life History and the Historical Moment (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc., 1975), 124. 13. This problematizing of oral history accounts is not dissimilar to the critical scrutiny of the invocation of "experience" by historians that Joan Scott discusses in her essay "Experience," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 22-40. 14. For a detailed account of the strike, see Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and Emily Honig, "Women at Farah: An Unfinished Story," Aztlan (Summer 1979). 15. Unless otherwise cited, all quotations are from the interviews conducted by Laurie Coyle, Gail Hershatter, and myself in El Paso in 1977 and 1978. 16. This quote is from an interview with Virgie Delgado published in Union Drive in the Southwest: Chicanos Strike at Farah, by The San Francisco Bay Area Farah Strike Support Committee (San Francisco: United Front Press, 1974), 6. 17. Patricia A. Cooper, Once a Cigar Maker: Men, Women, and Work Culture in American Cigar Factories, 1900-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), and Dorothy Sue Cobble, Dishing It Out: Waitresses and Their Unions in the Twentieth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991) provide...
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