Pathology of Women's Oral History in Holy Defense

The arenas of Islamic revolution and Holy Defense have been filled with the presence and role-playing of women who, along with men, have made a great contribution to the sacrifice and preservation of this land. In the eight years of the Holy Defense (1359-1367), women entered the battle scene together with men and in various fields of support, care and nursing of the wounded, management and development of resistance movements, persuasion and encouragement of men by accepting responsibility and performing duties instead of men and providing the ground for the presence of men to play an active and continuous role in the war, taking care of children and maintaining the warm heart of the family and other things played a very important role in the war. Oral history, by mentioning the various angles of women`s presence and the issues facing them, is one of the tools that can portray the role of women in the holy defense in a wider way. The process of collecting and compiling women's oral history is facing obstacles, some of which are common between men's and women's oral history, and some of them are different from men's oral history in terms of the type of preparation and compilation. These barriers are either social or include things that are influenced by the form and structural elements of oral history. This article attempts to examine the effect of a set of women's obstacles in the Holy Defense by adopting the views of experts, researchers, and the authors' empirical views during several years of activity in this field, which causes damages in the final output. These obstacles include the restrictions on interviewing women due to various cultural, and ethnic reasons, or the fact that the interviewer should preferably be a woman and familiar with the subject of conversation and have common cultural and ethnic roots, the emotional nature of most women, and in some cases the feeling overpowering the narrative and how to control these cases, the preoccupations of housework and raising women's children, and considering these cases in determining the time, duration, and place of interviews. In addition to the mentioned cases, the common obstacles to men's and women's oral history include the passage of time, not being seen, lack of attention to the correct selection of the narrator, the weakness in the interview process, the weakness in the oral expression of events, the unwanted distortion of facts, the unavailability of documents, the effects of custodian organizations and institutions, and various approaches in the way of compilation and presentation of oral history. The goal is to increase the quality of preparation and compilation of oral history by recognizing the obstacles affecting the process of women's oral history in Holy Defense and solving them by using appropriate solutions according to the conditions so that the final product is more consistent with scientific and technical standards.