Służba i milczenie

A translated chapter of Carolyn Steedman’s book Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age. This text reconstructs the experience of a 18th-century servant, Phoebe Beatson, on the basis of a diary of John Murgatroyd, her employer. Confronting this testimony with other documents of social life, Steedman constructs a history of a class overlooked by traditional Marxist historiography – female domestic servants.Tekst jest wstępnym rozdziałem z książki Carolyn Steedman „Służąca i jej pan. Miłość i praca w Anglii wieku industrialnego” (Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age). Tytułowa służąca to Phoebe Beatson, której losy Steedman rekonstruuje na podstawie dziennika jej pracodawcy – pastora Johna Murgatroyda. Zestawiając to świadectwo z innymi dokumentami życia społecznego epoki, Steedman pisze historię klasy pominiętą w tradycyjnych marksistowskich historiografiach – historię kobiecej służby domowej

Ante-Autobiography and the Archive of Childhood

This essay examines the concept of children’s autobiography via several autobiographical extracts written by the author as a child. Although only a small proportion of people will compose and publish a full-length autobiography, almost everyone will, inadvertently, produce an archive of the self, made from public records and private documents. Here, such works are seen as providing access to writing both about and by children. The essay explores the ethics and poetics of children’s writing via the key debates in life writing; in particular, the dynamic relationship between adults and children, both as distinct stages of life and dual parts of one autobiographical identity. The term “ante-autobiography” is coined to refer to these texts which come before or instead of a full-length narrative. They are not read as less than or inadequate versions of autobiography, but rather as transgressive and challenging to chronological notions of the genre

Ethical bearings in an Inter-generational Auto/biography: writing in my mother's voice.

"Beatrice Speaking" is an account of three years of my mother’s life (from 1945 to 1948). The narrative is written in the first-person voice of Beatrice, my mother (not, of course, her real name), and is framed by a prologue and epilogue in the first-person voice of one of her children (myself) in the present. I have struggled to find a name for the hybrid offspring that I have produced; intergenerational auto/biography is much closer than any of the alternatives. I want to explain the reason for my difficult decision to tell this story in the first-person narrating voice of Beatrice. To write in my mother’s voice raises ethical problems about appropriation and authenticity; more immediately, for years this was simply an impossibly presumptuous thing for me to do. Using the third-person ‘she’ was the only way to balance my role as writer and creator of the character Beatrice against my sense of intrusion into my mother’s private life. All the writing I did about her earlier life ("Inventing Beatrice") was done in this third-person voice. But when I came to the 1945–1948 period, I became stuck. I had writer’s block. During six months I slowly realised that I had only two choices: I could either use Beatrice’s own first-person voice (being honest and faithful to her letters) or else I would fall silent altogether. I chose the first option, to let Beatrice speak for herself, and started writing again. The biggest leap that this entailed was putting myself into her (Beatrice’s/my mother’s) moral space, living within it and accepting it at the same time as I profoundly rejected at least some of it for myself

Broad Down, Devon: archaeological and other stories

publication-status: PublishedThis is a post-print, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication Journal of Material Culture, 2010, Vol. 15, Issue 3, pp. 345 - 367. Copyright © 2010 SAGE Publications. The definitive publisher-authenticated version is available online at http://mcu.sagepub.com/content/15/3/345.shortThis article explores the knowledge construction process of an archaeological site in East Devon, UK. Bouncing off an oral historical account of the site that seems to run against scientific truth claims, the author investigates the story of how knowledge of the site has developed over the last two centuries. Building on previous work that explores the history and practice of archaeology, the article opens up questions of what counts as evidence. Then, taking a cue from more recent work that suggests a more dynamic and open-ended engagement with the landscape, the article turns to examine how the meaning of a site can be made and remade. As part of this endeavour, questions of what as well as who can ‘speak’ are examined and some space is opened up for the agency of ‘minor figures’, both human and non-human

La théorie qui n'en est pas une, or, why Clio doesn't care

This article considers the practice of women's history in Britain over the last quarter century in relation to general historical practice in the society, to the teaching and learning of history at all educational levels, and to recent theoretical developments within feminism, particularly those developments framed by postmodernist thought. It makes suggestions about the common processes of imagining--or figuring--the past, and advances the view that because of shared cultural assumptions and shared educational experience, women's history in Britain has constituted a politics rather than a theoretical construct. The use of historical information by literary critics and theorists is discussed as forming a series of historical stereotypes of women that then, in their turn, shape historical investigation. The written history (specifically, women's history) is discussed as genre, and the author uses her recently published work on Margaret McMillan and late nineteenth-century British socialism to explore the narrative conventions governing the writing of autobiography, biography, and history, the differences among them, and the cognitive effects of employing them, as writer or as reader. A consideration of the sources used for the writing of McMillan's life highlights the particular constraints presented by women's history and the biography of women on the historian who wishes to discuss a woman who lived a public and political (rather than an interior or private) life