By Jody Mason, with Franny Nudelman and Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande
A fifth-year doctoral candidate in English, Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande researches the relationship between militant protest tactics and the radical media, broadly defined, throughout the U.S. War in Vietnam. She reads activist performances, such as Alice Herz’s 1965 act of self-immolation, as expressions of political knowledge premised on activists’ refusal to engage with state-sanctioned codes of public discourse. Anti-war protest actions such as Herz’s repudiated biopower’s right “to make live and to let die.”
While completing her Ph.D., Meghan has also worked as storyteller-in-residence at the University of Ottawa Women’s Archives, which holds unpublished material relevant to the history of the women’s movement in Canada, with particular emphasis on the feminist movement since the 1960s. The storyteller-in-residence is an initiative that links researchers with original and often unpublished materials on the history of the women’s movement in Canada.
Hoping to understand Meghan’s conception of the relation between her research and her work at the University of Ottawa Women’s Archives, Meghan’s doctoral supervisor, Prof. Franny Nudelman, asked her the following questions.
Could you describe what you do as storyteller-in-residence at the University of Ottawa Women's Archives?
I initially began working at the Archives as an assistant archivist but transitioned into the role of storyteller-in-residence this past summer. My work involves publicizing the collections held at the Archive to the broader community; essentially, I attach stories to the materials to help bring them to life.
To that end, I write blog posts, make digital and physical exhibitions, and compile oral histories about lesser-known events or moments in Canadian feminist history. Occasionally, I’m assigned to bigger projects working with organizations that have an interest in our holdings. For example, The Women in STEM Oral History Project (2023-2024) that I worked on was supported by the Canadian Institute of Women in Engineering and Sciences (CIWES) and the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC).
My particular interest is in militant action. People don’t often think of militant or radical action as an aspect of second-wave feminism, but it was! I’m also aware that critiques of second-wave feminism run the risk of erasing the work of Black, Indigenous, and racialized women who were implicated in the movement. I’m always looking in the archival holdings for evidence that disrupts common assumptions about second-wave feminism.
When you conduct oral histories for the Women’s Archives you make history through conversation. How cool! What makes for a good interview and what have your interview subjects taught you about narrating radical history?
An interview works best when I have a good rapport with the person I’m talking to, and I also find that it’s most productive when I’m talking to someone who is no longer actively implicated in the work they’re talking to me about. I find that these women speak more freely and feel less constrained.
Women tend to downplay their contributions to movements. Movements are complex organisms. I’ve learned that it’s often difficult for an individual who experienced this thing we call a “movement” to narrate their place in it.
Many of the topics I’m broaching in my interviews are uncomfortable or bring up troubling memories. For instance, I interviewed a female engineer who was working at the University of Ottawa when the École Polytechnique massacre happened (in 1989). She recalled in our interview that she changed the layout of her office in the wake of the mass shooting to prevent intrusion. When I interviewed Dr. Nikki Colodny—an abortion activist who provided abortions in Canada before they were legal––she told me about the great personal cost of her work. She was pursued to her home; people who objected to her work showed up at her son’s birthday party. In such interview contexts, I negotiate difficult terrain: I’m aware that I’m asking people to relive unpleasant moments in their lives. I’ve learned to listen carefully. I’ve learned to limit my assumptions about people’s experiences.
I suppose I’ve also learned that people who were and are implicated in feminist movements want to tell their stories. I’ve only been refused an interview request once.
How has your work in the Women’s Archives influenced the way you teach—both the ideas and the materials that you use in the classroom? Similarly, how has this work influenced your dissertation research and writing?
I taught my first university course in the fall of 2023. I drew on my experiences at the Archives to create the course (a third-year introduction to Cultural Studies that I taught as “Exploring Countercultural Archives”). I really wanted to teach students to work with archival material, so I had them go to the Women’s Archives to write a report about something they found in the collections. I also brought archival images into the classroom. I was trying to encourage students to use these not just as illustrations of a topic but as sources of evidence, as forms of representation. I also invited Dr. Nikki Colodny to come to the class as a guest and recorded our conversation with her. The recording will eventually be accessible from the Women’s Archives website. I think this is important: it’s a record of how students in the present engage with the history of the pro-choice movement.
My doctoral research focuses on the context of the late twentieth-century United States, but my work in the Archives has expanded my expertise, so that I’m now much more comfortable with the broader North American history of late twentieth-century radical activism.
Conversely, I’d say that my research interests also shape my work for the Women’s Archives. Because I’m interested in protest tactics and the anti-Vietnam War movement, that influences what I see in the holdings. I’m very aware of the longer genealogy of the strategies, symbols, and slogans that showed up in the movements of second-wave feminism.
What has working at the Women’s Archives taught you about the history of social movements? And do you consider building and shaping an archive to be a form of activism?
We’re still doing all the same things! Though feminist movements in the present have a healthy critique of second wave feminism, its iconography, tactics, and slogans are still important to many feminists. Maybe we don’t give enough credit to the women of this movement for the work they did. I tend to be sympathetic to the subjects I’m studying, whether I’m thinking about the Weather Underground or the women who occupied Nellie’s Hostel; everyone in a moment of crisis will make mistakes.
I get paid for the work I do at the Archives, so I don’t consider it activism per se (I benefit more from this work than anyone else does). However, the collection itself is an activist project. It came to the University of Ottawa as a donation from women activists involved in many of the second-wave organizations that are documented in the fonds. The donation was made on the condition that the University Library would continue to build the collection. The dissemination work I’m doing has important social role, yes, but it’s the women who built this fonds who should be described as the activists.
Women Against Imperialism: Exploring Feminist Resistance to War, Occupation and Apartheid is open in Archives and Special Collections throughout the Fall semester (Morrissett Library Room 039). It is available both online and in person.