This article asks how to listen for meaning in women’s life stories when those stories are relayed to us by men. On 1 February 1951 Kent Geiger, a US graduate student, aged twenty-eight, sat down to interview ‘Olga Ivanova’, a forty-four-year-old Russian seamstress and displaced person who had left the USSR in 1943. Over two days, four sessions and eleven hours of interviewing, the pair spoke about Ivanova’s life under Stalin and her hopes for the future. The conversation was part of the Harvard Project on the Soviet Social System, a post Second-World-War interviewing project co-ordinated by Harvard University’s then Russian Research Centre. Between 1949 and 1951, with the aim of capturing a portrait of Soviet society, Harvard Project researchers carried out 329 extended life-history interviews and 435 shorter ‘special topic’ interviews with Soviet émigrés and refugees, most of whom were living in West Germany. In order to secure the anonymity of respondents like Ivanova, the interviews – which were conducted in Russian or Ukrainian – were never audio-recorded. Instead, interviewers took detailed notes throughout the conversations and later typed their notes into Englishlanguage transcripts. The only way to access Ivanova’s story is to read Geiger’s account of the interview. So far as we can tell from the transcript, Geiger and Ivanova’s interview process was for the most part amiable. Ivanova arrived punctually and, in Geiger’s words, was a likable, serious interviewee who seemed ‘at ease and self-possessed’. Geiger’s only frustration was that Ivanova refused to tell him why she had never married. At the end of their first session, he wrote a summary of a brief conversation that he considered external to the main interview:

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在哈佛项目档案馆中聆听女性叙事

本文提出了当男人将这些故事传递给我们时，如何聆听女性生活故事中的含义的问题。1951年2月1日，年仅28岁的美国研究生肯特·盖格（Kent Geiger）坐下来采访了“奥尔加·伊凡诺娃”（Olga Ivanova），他是一位四十四岁的俄罗斯裁缝和流离失所者，他于1943年离开苏联。在四堂课和十一个小时的采访中，两人谈到了伊万诺娃在斯大林的生活以及她对未来的希望。这次谈话是哈佛大学关于苏联社会制度的项目的一部分，该项目是第二次世界大战后由哈佛大学当时的俄罗斯研究中心协调进行的采访项目。在1949年到1951年之间，为了捕捉苏联社会的肖像，哈佛项目的研究人员对苏联移民和难民进行了329次长期生活史访谈和435次较短的“特殊话题”访谈，其中大多数人居住在西德。为了确保像伊凡诺娃这样的受访者的匿名性，从未以音频或乌克兰语进行采访。取而代之的是，访调员在整个对话中记下了详细的笔记，然后将其笔记打入英语成绩单。访问伊凡诺娃故事的唯一方法是阅读盖格的采访记录。据笔录显示，盖格和伊凡诺娃的采访过程在大多数情况下都是和可亲的。伊万诺娃准时到达，用盖格的话说，他是一位讨人喜欢，认真认真的受访者，看上去“轻松自在”。盖格唯一的沮丧是伊万诺娃拒绝告诉他为什么她从未结婚。在他们的第一次会议结束时，他写了一个简短对话的摘要，他认为这是在主要访谈之外的：