Histories of the Self: Personal Narratives and Historical Practice

203 Pages·2018·2.843 MB·English

by  Penny Summerfield

HISTORIES OF THE SELF
Histories of the Self interrogates historians’ work with personal narratives. It intro-
duces students and researchers toscholarlyapproaches todiaries,letters, oralhistory
and memoirs as sources that give access to intimate aspects of the past.
Historians are interested as never before in how people thought and felt about
their lives. This turn to the personal has focused attention on the capacity of sub-
jective records to illuminate both individual experiences and the wider world
withinwhichnarratorslived.However,sourcessuchasletters,diaries,memoirsand
oral history have been the subject of intense debate over the last forty years, con-
cerning both their value and the uses to which they can be put. This book traces
the engagement of historians of the personal with notions of historical reliability,
and with the issue of representativeness, and it explores the ways in which they
have overcome the scepticism of earlier practitioners. It celebrates their adventures
with the meanings of the past buried in personal narratives and applauds their
transformation of historical practice.
Supported by case studies from across the globe and spanning the fifteenth to
twenty-first centuries, Histories of the Self is essential reading for students and
researchers interested in the ways personal testimony has been and can be used by
historians.
Penny Summerfield is Professor Emerita of Modern History at the University of
Manchester. She is the author of numerous publications using a range of genres of
personal narrative, notably Reconstructing Women’s Wartime Lives: Discourse and Sub-
jectivityin Oral Histories of the Second World War (1998) and Contesting Home Defence:
Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (2007).
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HISTORIES OF THE SELF
Personal Narratives and Historical
Practice
Penny Summerfield
Firstpublished2019
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements viii
1 Introduction 1
2 Historians’ uses of letters 22
3 Historians and the diary 50
4 Autobiography, memoir and the historian 78
5 Oral history and historical practice 106
6 Representativeness 135
7 Conclusion 167
Index 187
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I should like to thank the students who took my module on ‘Personal Testimony
and Historical Research’ over the years, as well as my PhD students, for their
engagement with the issues discussed in this book, and for their courage and crea-
tivity in using personal narratives in their projects and dissertations.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the many colleagues and friends at
my own and other universities who have taken an interest in this project. Those at
Université de Toulouse-Jean Jaurès, where I was Visiting Professor in 2015,
deserve a special mention. Discussions in the corridors, in seminars, and at con-
ferences have beeninvaluable,and have opened upto me awealth of research that
uses personal narratives in fields far from my own.
In particular, I owe a great debt to the following readers of chapters at various
stages of development. I am immensely grateful for the time and trouble they took
incommentingonmydrafts,andIcanonlyapologiseifIdidn’tmanagetoaddress
all their suggestions. They are Lynn Abrams, Hannah Barker, Deborah Bernstein,
Joy Damousi, Emma Griffin, Leif Jerram, Aaron Moore, Frank Mort and Julie-
Marie Strange. I also want to thank Laura Doan for some lively conversations and
especially for help with the title, Sarah Patterson of the Imperial War Museum for
tracking down the cover photograph, and Eve Setch at Routledge for her con-
fidence in the project from the start.
Above all, heartfelt thanks are due to my partner, Oliver Fulton, for his con-
structive criticisms, patience, companionship and inspiration. It is to Oliver that I
dedicate this book.
1
INTRODUCTION
‘Things happen in your life, you see, you never know what is going
to happen’1
Estelle Armitage was born into a business family in Kingston, Jamaica, in 1921. In
an oral history interview in 1994 she spoke of a relatively privileged upbringing,
with servants in the house and a boarding school education. She also described the
complications of colour in her mixed race family: both grandfathers were white,
and her father, whom she depicted as ‘slightly coloured … lighter than I’ would
not let her walk down the street with a ‘black’ school friend. Estelle’s ambition to
becomeanursewasputonholdinSeptember 1939,whentheBritishgovernment
declared war on Germany, and she trained as a shorthand typist and book-keeper
instead. The arrival of a British Army unit at Up Park Camp in Kingston offered
her the chance to become a member of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the
women’s branch of the British Army) with a job as a wages clerk, and then to go
to Britain. Succeeding in the selection process, Estelle braved the enemy sub-
marines in the Caribbean in August 1943 with a dual purpose in mind: ‘England
was your mother country, that sort of feeling … Rule Britannia and all this busi-
ness … and I could do my nursing after if I survived.’
This combination of patriotism and desire for self-improvement spurred Estelle
on. In the ATS she trained first as a wireless operator and then learned to use a
teleprinter, working in code. As the end of the war approached she was given a
choice: to go home or to undertake training in the UK. Estelle seized the moment
to embark on a three-year course in nursing, followed by midwifery: ‘it was
wonderful, that was my goal’. Once she had qualified, with a job as a ‘staff mid-
wife’ at Lewisham Hospital in London, she had, by law, to be repatriated, and
spent eight months back in Jamaica, but she was determined to return, telling her
family, ‘I haven’t got any friends here, they are all in London.’ In particular, Cyril