Heroes of Their Own Life Stories: Narrating the Female Self in the Feminist Age

This article proposes a triple legacy of the expressive culture of the 1960s and 70s. Late twentieth century feminism, discourses of gender equality and the advent of modern confessional culture liberated women’s women’s voices, producing self-realising narratives and a shift in women’s facility to produce authentic ‘reflexive projects of the self’. Drawing on oral history interviews with women born in the 1940s in the United Kingdom, Australia and North America, a new concept for a distinct genre of women’s oral history narrative is advanced– the feminography – in which we hear women owning their voices and the stories those voices tell.