in choosing a husband;²⁵ and iii) opportunities for women's employment outside the home.²⁶ Together with the generational comparisons, this selectivity makes the recent period of Palestinian history appear as one of progressive change. The paradigm of modernization has been adopted without questioning. For example Gorkin attributes the rise in women's employment outside the home to "the forces of industrialization and modernization (that) have transformed the Palestinian traditional agricultural economy" whereas a truer explanation is that Israeli expropriation of Palestinian land and resulting Palestinian poverty have forced women into the labour market. The concepts of 'modernization' and 'industrialization' work here as a screen that conceals the Palestinian people's experiences of displacement.

The generational contrasts between the speakers of Three Mothers, Three Daughters of course fits this paradigm of modernization since each daughter's life, when measured in terms of educational level, employment opportunities and choice in marriage, appears to register 'progress' when compared with their mothers. Excluded from this balance sheet are the basic features of Palestinian history since 1917: marginalization under the British Mandate as 'nonJews', displacement, deprivation of land and national rights, statelessness, military occupation. In a period when other Arab peoples have attained independence and statehood, Palestinians are divided between exile in an increasingly insecure diaspora, second-class citizenship in a 'state for Jews', and military occupation in the West Bank, Gaza and Jerusalem. Gorkin's book made me angry, and I began to think of the necessity of an archive that would record for the future Palestinian women's experiences of displacement.

Why women? The Shateela speakers' life stories were so rich and varied, so thematically interesting, that they made a strong argument for recording with more Palestinian women in other areas, for comparative as well as national reasons. Many observers have noted that women have been a basic element in the Palestinian capacity to survive poverty,

oppression, exile. Historians neglect women because they have failed to understand connections between the 'public' and the 'domestic'. Historians of national movements and 'new nations' tend to fall into the same trap of neglecting women unless they happen to be 'outstanding' or 'militants'. The rules of history-writing, as they evolved through European practice, placed a high value on written documents, thought to contain verifiable 'facts'; consequently training and methodology in history were based on documents rather than on the experiences of ordinary people. Social groups without literacy - peasants, most women - were thus doubly excluded from history, as decisive agents and as witnesses. When subordinate collectivities such as workers began to organize in modern times, a third reason was added to women's exclusion from history, their lateness in forming organizations of their own, and the marginality of their organizations once formed. It was not until historian Joan Scott theorized the links between gender hierarchy and social structure that women's actions could be categorized as 'political', part of the public domain, whether supporting, contesting, or reforming it, whether organized or not. Any national archive or historical account without women's voices must be counted as lacking an essential element.

As others have written - notably Luisa Passerini and the 'Popular Memory Group' -- history is not exclusively composed of 'facts' or 'events', it should also record the atmosphere of particular times, how people felt, why they acted in specific ways, how they bore exceptional hardships or revolted against them. Let me leave the final word to the French historian Henri Laurens:

"The interest of testimonies for the historian is that they present themselves as an individual or collective step of revelation, one that proclaims a history or a hidden truth. Whether written or oral, the testimonial gives access to a dimension that often escapes the historian, the interiority of emotions, of joy or suffering, and is, through its claims to disclosure, an affirmation of authenticity".²⁷

- Rosemary Sayigh