Feminist Ethics and Issues in the Production and Use of Life History Research

Abstract

Much of the literature on the subject of feminist research has focused on the search for appropriate research methods and the methodologies that underpin these. But it is only recently that feminists have begun to engage with the actual experience of doing research (Roberts, 1981; Maynard and Purvis, 1994). In this chapter, we would like to raise questions about what it means to see oneself as a feminist researcher. Ann Phoenix has argued that ‘“race” and “gender” positions, and hence the power positions they entail, enter into the interview situation but that they do not do so in any unitary oressential way’ (Phoenix, 1994: 49); Diane Reay argues similarly for class positions (Reay, 1996). We, too, subscribe to the idea that the researcher and the researched bring diverse and shifting identities to the interviewing situation; but our discussion takes this a step further, and argues that the consequence of attempts by the researcher to maintain a coherent feminist identity might be to deny or invalidate the research subjects’ understanding of their own experience. We both conducted our research in the 1980s as part of our wider auto/biographies: we were ‘mature’ students, anxious not only to acquire the necessary, as we perceived them at that time, academic qualifications, but also to authenticate our feminist identities within the new (to us) social worlds we had entered. In the mid-1980s, the concept of feminisms was still relatively undeveloped — there was FEMINISM, and we wanted to belong!

An ‘ethic’ is a framework of thought concerned with morality and with moral choices between things and actions seen as good or bad. Our feminist fractured foundationalist epistemology specifies morally adequate means of knowing and understanding women’s experiences, particularly through insisting that feminist theory should at some level be consonant with experience. (Stanley, 1993: 200; our emphasis)