I Love Lucy! (but not her interviewer…)

This week, I checked out an interview with Lucy Belanger, which was a part of the Shoe Workers Oral History Project in Lewiston-Auburn, Maine, highlighted on the historic Maine Mill’s website. I listened to the interview prior to reading the transcript, a conscious choice so that I could first consider the tone of the interviewee. (As Louis Starr wrote in “Oral History”: “Nuances of voice…must be heard rather than left to the reader to infer from a transcript, which cannot accurately convey accent, inflection, emphasis, or manner”).¹ Before I dive into interpreting the tone and content of the interview, I’ll set up some background context. 

The Maine Mill site features oral histories as part of its collection, which began in 2004 to document the labor of mill workers. Oral Historian Andrea L’Hommedieu conducted forty five interviews that year, which comprised the original collection. Bates College students later conducted another 150 interviews, while the University of New Hampshire contributed to digitizing these histories. Though initiated by a professional, the collection has been continuously maintained and furthered by students as a learning exercise. In an effort to make the collection as easily searchable as possible, Maine Mill allows you to search by industry, gender, nationality, labor themes, and social themes.² 

The interview that I listened to was Lucy Belanger’s, conducted in her home on October 10, 2008, by Andrea L’Hommedieu (who now serves as the Head of Oral History at the University of South Carolina).³ I primarily take issue with L’Hommedieu’s style of questioning; she focuses more on questions with set, specific answers. She frequently asks Lucy what we would now consider to be leading questions, questions that require a yes/no answer, or a short answer. She prefers to ask a lot of “Where did … work?” or “How old were you when … ?” questions, shying away from digging deeper into lived experience. Due to this style of questioning, it was likely that her goal was to create a wide spectrum of comprehensive interviews gathering baseline information from as many interviewees as she could, without truly delving deeply into their stories. In listening to this style of questioning, it made me realize that I prefer deeper life history interviews in regards to labor history, as the interviewee’s whole life truly impacts their labor experience. 

It was also interesting to see how the heavy, emotional side of interviewing was handled here, and to consider what ethical issues might accompany it. Due to working as one of the only female machinists at the factory, Lucy Belanger often faced harassment from the male staff, a point which Lucy seems comfortable discussing and L’Hommedieu seems uncomfortable discussing, and quickly brushes over. Similarly, at the end of the interview, Belanger discusses her mother and her father, and her voice chokes with emotion: “I think of that sometimes, and tears in my eyes, because I miss my mom.”⁴ Then, abruptly, after L’Hommedieu acknowledges her mother’s impact on her life, the interview ends. This sudden end to the interview while the interviewee was clearly emotional and reminiscing over a loved one struck me as a possible ethical issue, and something that I would want to avoid in my own work by addressing heavy emotions as they surfaced and comforting interviewees professionally where appropriate. 

Again, I’m sure the abruptness here has to do with L’Hommedieu’s goals for the project; I surmised her goal to be creating many, shorter interviews with basic information from the style of interview she conducted. However, it would have been much more useful to have a goal clearly stated at the beginning of the interview — a note which I will carry into my own work. Though I found myself hoping for more of Lucy’s sarcastic quips and personal stories by the end of the interview, this was still a valuable exercise in addressing what frustrates me when listening to oral histories: lack of clear goals, not holding emotional space, and not asking broad questions. I read Selma Thomas’s “Private Memory in a Public Space: Oral History and Museums” this week, and one of the conclusions in the piece stuck with me: “If I represent the public, do I have the right to press when I sense an emotional reticence?”⁵ Moving forward, I am interested in thinking about that question in respect to the emotional weight of oral histories. I’d love to land somewhere delicately on the spectrum in between ending an interview when the interviewee begins to cry, and pressing to the point that it makes them uncomfortable …! 

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1. Starr, Louis. “Oral History.” Oral History: An Interdisciplinary Anthology, edited by David K. Dunaway and Willa K. Baum, Altamira Press, 1996, pp. 42.
2. “Oral Histories.” Maine Mill. 2025. https://mainemill.org/collection-exhibits/oral-histories/.
3. “Andrea L’Hommedieu.” University of South Carolina. September 16, 2025. https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/university_libraries/about/contact/faculty-staff/lhommedieu_andrea.php.
4. “Lucy Belanger.” Maine Mill. 2008. https://mainemill.org/audio-history/lucy-belanger/.
5. Thomas, Selma. “Private Memory in a Public Space: Oral History and Museums.” Oral History and Public Memories, edited by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes, Temple University Press, pp. 99.