Working Assumptions for the Claiming Our Roots Project*

Working Assumptions About History

1. All history, including feminist history, is first of all grounded in factual data.
2. History in all its forms is interpretive.
3. Constructing history cannot be confined to formal written expression but should also include the information and insights that come from oral, visual, and audio sources.
4. The construction of history can employ the educated guess and invention.
5. A hermeneutic of suspicion is essential to writing good history. The hermeneutic must be evenly applied to all elements of the task, i.e., to previously written accounts, to all sources old and new, to the authorities used to justify interpretations, and to the historian’s own biases. A critical perspective attempts to be loyal to the truth, not disloyal to the past.

Working Assumptions About Feminist History

6. Feminist history is an academically rooted school of history which takes as its focus the lives of women, reconstructing those lives where necessary, and giving particular attention to issues of gender in the shaping of women’s lives.
7. In practice, a range of feminist ideologies exist, but feminist approaches to history accept as a starting point that patriarchy exists in society and in its institutions, including the churches.
8. Feminist history is done in a socio-economic, political, cultural context.
9. Feminist history assumes that it is necessary to examine both the private and the public lives of women, and feminist history values the ordinary as well as the extraordinary.
10. Feminist history recognizes that women have oppressed other women.

Working Assumptions About the COR Process and Product

11. Believing that the way we do history is crucial to what we discover as our history, we will design a feminist process for the history project that includes active participation, collaboration, and consciousness of our own biases.
12. Applying the process named above, we will produce a collection of feminist historical essays.
13. Based on our experience in the task force and the needs of our project, we will recommend additional questions to be incorporated into the process of gathering the oral histories of the members of the Congregation.
14. Based on our experience in the task force and the needs of our project, we will recommend additional guidelines for adding historical materials to the Congregational archives.
15. We assume that we will meet for extended, concentrated, collaborative working sessions throughout the life of the project.
16. We assume that resources, while limited, will be available to the committee from the Congregation and from the committee to the Congregation.
17. We assume that the material(s) produced will be well-researched and communally critiqued.

*Claiming Our Roots (COR) task force document, April 1991; original in the COR Collection, Archives of the Sisters, Servants, of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, Monroe, MI. Published as "Appendix" in Building Sisterhood: A Feminist History of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (Monroe, Michigan) [Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1997], pp. 365-366. Used by permission.

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