Publication about Scottish Women's Oral History Project

The Scottish Women's Oral History Project was undertaken in Stirling, Scotland, between 1987 and 1990. The aim of project was to record the lives of women in Scotland in the first half of the 20th century, including a specific objective to record the experiences of working-class women.
The project was established in December 1986 by the Women’s Committee of Stirling District Council. The impetus for the project was part of a wider promotion of women's interests, as well as a need to address a perceived lack of women's voices in the historical record. Sponsored by the the Manpower Services Commission (MSC), the project set-out to record the personal testimonies of local women, living in the Stirlingshire area of Scotland, about their life in the decades before the Second World War. Based in Spittal Street, Stirling, the project was coordinated by Jayne Stephenson, who, with a team of fellow interviewers, interviewed around 80 local women, between 1987 and 1990.
The testimonies cover all aspects of women’s experiences, from childhood to adulthood, through to the Second World War. The interviews are loosely structured into sections covering childhood, leisure, work, marriage, children, community and social class (the interview questions are based on the model questionnaire devised by Paul Thompson (1978)). The project explicitly aimed to cover a representative sample of female occupations, and the material contains recollections of a wide variety of occupational experience - including textile workers, waitresses and hotel staff, domestic servants, factory workers, teachers, nurses.
The publication contains written transcripts of 77 interviews (anonymised), together with an index and an introduction by Callum Brown.
Temporally, the material relates to women born in Scotland between 1894 and 1926, and the interviews cover the period up to World War II.
Geographically, the material covers the Stirlingshire and 'central belt' area of lowland Scotland, including extensive material on life in Glasgow and Edinburgh.

The interviews are organised in chronological order, according to the birth year of the interviewee.

This publication is published here courtesy of the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum. Copyright in the publication and in the interviews is held by Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum.

Created by Andrew Kennedy, 23 October 2017. Revised by Victoria Peters, November 2017.

On completion of the Scottish Women's Oral History Project, the archive was stored in the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum for long-term preservation and public use.
In 2003, a digital version of the archive was created. This digitisation work was undertaken by Anne Bailey, a Friend of the Smith Museum, and Alison Giles from Information Services at the University of Stirling.
During the digitisation process, the scanned transcripts were concatenated into a single electronic document, and a copy of this digital document was subsequently made available to the Scottish Oral History Centre at the University of Strathclyde.
The full project archive - including all the audio materials - is still held by the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum .

The archive of the Scottish Women's Oral History Project, comprising the original audio recordings, the digitised versions and the transcripts are held at the Stirling Smith Art Gallery and Museum.

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