From the article:
The purpose of my memory work project and this article is to begin to create a “history of the present” (Dean, 1994) through collective remembering in Lipsitz’s (1988) sense of “shared experiences and perceptions about the past that legitimate action in the present” (p. 288). I adapt Nasstrom’s (1999) analysis of memory and narrative and women’s activism to the memory work with my WCTU family, friends and neighbours in the farming community in Ontario where I grew up. We “become historical actors who intervene between the past and the present, continually reframing the movement” (p. 134)