Writing History
As I have discussed in previous posts, one of my personal projects in Cape Town was to learn as much as I could about the life and work of activist Ray Alexander. Specifically, I wished to find out more about her interest in women’s rights and to compare her life to that of civil rights activist Anne Braden. As part of my research process, I was able to speak to two women who knew Alexander well: her daughter Tanya Barben and her friend Amy Thrornton. While these women taught me a great deal about Alexander, they also demonstrated the great power involved in using particular sources to write about history.
One of the main points of comparison that interested me between Alexander and Braden’s lives was their relationship with their husbands. Anne and Carl Braden were well regarded as a powerful activist couple, and I wanted to know if there was a similar dynamic between Alexander and her husband, Jack. According to Thornton, while Alexander and Simons were both influential activists and Communist Party members, many people who knew them were unaware that they were married. In fact, some young women would speak appreciatively to Alexander about Simons, never knowing that the two were a pair. Additionally, Alexander never changed her last name to match her husband’s, which was quite uncommon during the time they were married. After talking to Thornton, I got the feeling that Alexander and Simons supported and loved each other but were not seen as the sort of power couple that Carl and Anne Braden were. It seemed that they were more independent in their work lives and were not typically viewed as a couple.
After speaking to Barben, however, I got a much different picture of Alexander and Simons. Barben spoke of her parents as very reliant on each other. She spoke particularly of the importance of her father in her whole family’s life and his influence on her mother. When I asked if people were aware that her parents were a couple, she answered emphatically that of course people were aware. Additionally, when I asked about why her mother never changed her last name, which would have been common practice, Barben seemed to shrug off the question.
The difference between these two pictures of Alexander and Simons speaks to the power of human narrative when conceptualizing the past. If I were to write an oral history about Alexander using just one of these sources, it would look very different from an oral history based on the other source. This does not mean that one of the sources is inaccurate but that writing about history is incredibly subjective, and the sources one chooses to use are never neutral. When one “writes history,” one is not writing about a singular unchanging past but carefully and selectively using sources that have been shaped by their own culture and political climate to create a particular version of history. Given this more malleable view of history, I believe that it is extremely important to question what has been written about the past and why and to understand sources like Amy Thornton or Tanya Barben as the complex, justifiably subjective human histories that they are.
-Lauren