Oral History Transcripts

Because of the difficulty transcribing the tapes (bad recording equipment, several people talking at once), the tapes got put aside and were eventually misplaced.  When they turned up 15 years later, Pat Davitt and Anne Roberts decided it would be a good retirement project to get the work done.  They met on many Sunday mornings for nearly a year in 2013 to complete the work.

After the tapes were transcribed (transcript of tape 1; transcript of tape 2), the original group (minus Andrea, who died in 2011, and Ellen, who decided she was too busy to continue working on the project) began to meet monthly in 2014 to talk about what, if anything, to do with the material.  Joined by Liz Briemberg, the group decided the following priorities, depending on what energies and interest they have to follow through:

  1. The transcripts and tapes would be donated to the Women’s Caucus collection in the SFU archives;
  2. The transcripts would be circulated to other women who had been Caucus members with requests for feedback (reactions, corrections, arguments) and for additional material to fill in the gaps (in written form or in an interview format);
  3. Oral histories would be collected as much as possible from the women involved in the various workshops or subcommittees, such as the working women’s group, The Pedestal, the Indo-Chinese Women’s Conference and the education committee.  (We decided that the abortion campaign was already well-documented.)
  4. To make all this material widely available to the public, a website would be created where we could also post pictures, leaflets, posters, articles, podcasts, songs and links to other historical documents, books, such as Ann Thompson’s book on the abortion battle in Canada, etc.

When contacting other members, the group has been asking them to write down their own memories and analyses – when and how they got involved, what happened and why, and what they did after Women’s Caucus.  The idea is to make all this material available on a website somewhat like Wikipedia in that everyone would have a chance to post what they want and no editorial board would exercise control of the content (except in the unlikely event of libel, racism, sexism, etc.)  The group has been soliciting everyone to get out those old boxes stored in attics and help them obtain any leaflets, articles, posters, pictures, etc. to compile a complete record as possible.

The VWC History Project hopes that the material on this website will be useful to future researchers and to other women, particularly young women who are unaware of the battles women fought in the past for the gains enjoyed today. Without that knowledge and historical perspective, the group believes that those hard-won rights could be too easily taken away.

Women’s Caucus History transcript of tape recorded March 9 1997

Women’s Caucus History transcript of tape recorded April 5 1997