FEATURE: RETHINKING THE ARCHIVE Listening for Women’s Narratives in the Harvard Project Archive by Sam Prendergast This article asks how to listen for meaning in women’s life stories when those stories are relayed to us by men. On 1 February 1951 Kent Geiger, a US graduate student, aged twenty-eight, sat down to interview ‘Olga Ivanova’, a forty-four-year-old Russian seamstress and displaced person who had left the USSR in 1943. 1 Over two days, four sessions and eleven hours of inter- viewing, the pair spoke about Ivanova’s life under Stalin and her hopes for the future. The conversation was part of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, a post Second-World-War interviewing project co-ordinated by Harvard University’s then Russian Research Centre. 2 Between 1949 and 1951, with the aim of capturing a portrait of Soviet society, Harvard Project researchers carried out 329 extended life-history interviews and 435 shorter ‘special topic’ interviews with Soviet e´migre´s and refugees, most of whom were living in West Germany. 3 In order to secure the anonymity of respond- ents like Ivanova, the interviews – which were conducted in Russian or Ukrainian – were never audio-recorded. Instead, interviewers took detailed notes throughout the conversations and later typed their notes into English- language transcripts. 4 The only way to access Ivanova’s story is to read Geiger’s account of the interview. So far as we can tell from the transcript, Geiger and Ivanova’s interview process was for the most part amiable. Ivanova arrived punctually and, in Geiger’s words, was a likable, serious interviewee who seemed ‘at ease and self-possessed’. 5 Geiger’s only frustration was that Ivanova refused to tell him why she had never married. 6 At the end of their first session, he wrote a summary of a brief conversation that he considered external to the main interview: As the session ended I asked her if she were married in the Soviet Union. She said no. I said this is a pity because I had wanted to talk with her about family life, whereupon the respondent replied that she could answer all questions anyway since she knew a lot about family life. I asked her if she had had children. She said no. Then I asked her if she had lived with men outside of marriage. She smiled and shook her head, New York University sam.prendergast@nyu.edu History Workshop Journal doi:10.1093/hwj/dby026 ß The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/hwj/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/hwj/dby026/5055871 by guest on 19 July 2018