The Maine Feminist Oral History Project
**download
our script, "The 'Somebody Else' was Us (PDF) "**
The Maine Feminist
Oral History Project (FOHP) at the University
of Maine was organized in 1992 to collect and preserve
the histories of feminists of the 1960s and 1970s and of
the organizations they founded to effect social change.
FOHP concerns itself with local small-town or rural activism
at the grassroots level, rather than with the urban or
national organizations that have received scholarly attention
elsewhere.
Operating as a
collective under the aegis of the Women
in the Curriculum and Women's Studies Program at the
University of Maine, FOHP includes among its members faculty,
staff, and students of the University of Maine and of other
neighboring institutions of higher education, as well as
other members of the local community.
The Maine Feminist
Oral History Project received training, consultation, and
technical assistance from the Notheast Archives of Folklore
and Oral History of the Maine
Folklife Center, where recordings and transcripts of
its oral histories will be deposited.
Since mid-1992
FOHP has devoted most of its attention to the history of
the Spruce Run Association, one of the nation's oldest
organizations founded to advocate for battered women and
to combat domestic violence.
With support from
the Maine Humanities
Council, FOHP collected the oral histories of over thirty founders and others intimately connected with the
early years of Spruce Run, then created the script of
a readers theater, "The 'Somebody Else' was Us" with
excerpts from these histories.
This
script is now available to the public, and it is
finding use throughout the country both in Women's
Studies courses and in volunteer training for domestic
violence workers. For this "notable contribution toward ending
domestic violence" FOHP was honored by the governor
of the State of Maine in 1994.
An article on Spruce Run, written by two members of the FOHP, was featured in the 1998 newsletter of the NCADVoice, on the front page of an issue dedicated to the history of the movement.
