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binary norms and realise‘ multiple truths into the scholarly environment.’ 32 This research’ s capacity to articulate unheard voices is inevitably limited in some ways. It necessarily privileges the experiences of these twelve women, and a very particular type of middle class, English speaking, urban, left wing voice. Other women’ s voices remain unheard. Although we cannot generalise about women’ s Emergency engagements from these individual narratives, their very individuality and personalised nature is actually crucial. These narratives do not simply allow us to hear women’ s voices and add these to existing knowledge about the Emergency period. They offer a platform from which we might reinterpret this knowledge by recentring its focus entirely, positioning subjective experiences and private spaces at the fore. Thus, these narratives call on us to fundamentally alter our understandings about Emergency experiences and resistance, offering interpretations that assert multiple truths and challenge existing, androcentric accounts.
32 Susan Geiger,“ What’ s so Feminist about doing Women’ s Oral History?” in Expanding the
Boundaries of Women’ s History: Essays on Women in the Third World, ed. Cheryl Johnson-Odim and Margaret Strober( Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992)