Redemptive Memory: Women Activists and the Search for Justice

This powerful last work by pioneering oral historian Fran Leeper Buss examines how painful memories of traumatic experiences can be transformed into positive action for social good. In her more than 40 years gathering the life stories of working-class women, Buss found commonalities in the ways in which her subjects faced structural inequalities of race, class, and gender, as well as sufferings caused by poverty, child abuse, gun violence and war. Some of these women subsequently went on to become participants and leaders in a variety of movements for social change. In this wide-ranging book, Buss shows how her subjects employed storytelling, art, spirituality and other methods to create sense and meaning from traumatic memories and then make positive contributions to movements for labor rights, sanctuary for Central American refugees, gun violence prevention, peace, and other causes. Buss also relates her own story of medical malpractice and disability and discusses the work of historical and contemporary thinkers on the concepts underlying her ideas. She provides unique and original insights into how women who have endured great trauma are able to redeem their memories through communal action for a better world.

Fran Leeper Buss, Ph.D. (1942-2022), was an oral historian, educator, and author of Memory, Meaning and Resistance: Reflecting on Oral History and Women at the Margins.

Miriam Davidson is a journalist, author and editor whose works include Convictions of the Heart: Jim Corbett and the Sanctuary Movement (1988), Lives on the Line: Dispatches from the U.S.-Mexico Border (2000), and The Beloved Border: Humanity and Hope in a Contested Land (2021).