Women’s Biography
From Woman Lawyer: The Trials of Clara Foltz -- Online Notes For The Book
Women’s Biographies
Feminism has revolutionized the genre of biography by bringing women into the forefront of history and highlighting gender as a central dimension of life experience. In a penetrating essay, Alice Kessler-Harris discusses the traditional historian’s view of biography as too limited and tied to the needs of narrative. She urges that an “individual life might help us to see not only into particular events but into the larger cultural and social and even political processes of a moment in time.” Kessler-Harris, Why Biography? AM. HIST. REV. 625, 626 (2009). An outstanding example of feminist biography writing is ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN, MATERNAL JUSTICE: MIRIAM VAN WATERS AND THE FEMALE REFORM TRADITION (1996). Van Waters was in Los Angeles in the early part of her career as a prison reformer and could have overlapped with Foltz in her concerns for juvenile justice. But she was in the mode of the college educated Progressive reformer, among whom Foltz had some friends and allies, but whose concerns were more for social than legal reform. Another important work of feminist biography is KATHRYN KISH SKLAR, FLORENCE KELLEY AND THE NATION'S WORK: THE RISE OF WOMEN'S POLITICAL CULTURE, 1830-1900 (1995). Though Kelley was a lawyer, this work does not cover the part of her life in which she practiced; a second volume is projected.
At the same time feminist biographers have enlivened and enriched the field, they have faced issues about the relationship between subject and author and the role of subjectivity in biographical writing. These have been fruitfully explored by some of the most prominent of the field’s practitioners. In THE CHALLENGE OF FEMINIST BIOGRAPHY: WRITING THE LIVES OF MODERN AMERICAN WOMEN (Sara Alpern, Joyce Antler, Elisabeth Israels Perry & Ingrid Winther Scobie eds., 1992) noted women biographers discuss how they negotiated methodological challenges in their craft—using sparse historical records, choosing subjects carefully, and keeping appropriate emotional distance. CAROLYN G. HEILBRUN, WRITING A WOMAN’S LIFE (1989) is a classic work on the suppression of women’s lives and experiences within the traditionally male-dominated genre of biography. Bell Gale Chevigny writes about the “feminist fallacy” that may result from too much projection of our own “actual, latent, or ideal experience onto the subject.” The essays in BETWEEN WOMEN: BIOGRAPHERS, NOVELISTS, CRITICS, TEACHERS AND ARTISTS WRITE ABOUT THEIR WORK ON WOMEN, 375-76 (Carol Ascher, Louise DeSalvo & Sara Ruddick eds., 1984) are very illuminating; see also Phyllis Rose, Introduction, in THE NORTON BOOK OF WOMEN’S LIVES (Phyllis Rose ed. 1993); LINDA WAGNER MARTIN, TELLING WOMEN’S LIVES: THE NEW BIOGRAPHY (1994); Nell Irvin Painter, Writing Biographies of Women, 2 J. WOMEN'S HIST. (1997); Diane Wood Middlebrook, Postmodernism and the Biographer, in REVEALING LIVES: AUTOBIOGRAPHY, BIOGRAPHY, AND GENDER (Susan G. Bell & Marilyn Yalom eds., 1990); Joyce Antler, Was She a Good Mother? Some Thoughts on a New Issue for Feminist Biography, in WOMEN AND THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIETY, 53, 65 (Barbara J. Harris & JoAnn K. McNamara eds., 1984); Jacqueline Dowd Hall, Second Thoughts: On Writing a Feminist Biography, 13 FEMINIST STUD. 19 (1987); Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich, Friendship Between Women: The Act of Feminist Biography, 11 FEMINIST STUD. 287 (1985) (on the “relationship between women writers and the women they study”); Kathleen Barry, The New Historical Syntheses: Women’s Biography, 1 J. WOMEN’S HIST. 75 (1990).
In the postscript to her biography of Susan B. Anthony in SUSAN B. ANTHONY: BIOGRAPHY OF A SINGULAR FEMINIST (1988), Barry writes of the revolutionary possibilities of women’s biography, “which can challenge the very structure and categories of the history men have jealously guarded as their own.”
There is a vast biographical literature on the major figures in the national suffrage movement, especially Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. On Anthony, see JUDITH E. HARPER, SUSAN B. ANTHONY: A BIOGRAPHICAL COMPANION (1998); LYNN SHERR, FAILURE IS IMPOSSIBLE: SUSAN B. ANTHONY IN HER OWN WORDS (1995); ALMA LUTZ, SUSAN B. ANTHONY: REBEL, CRUSADER, HUMANITARIAN (1959); IRIS NOBLE, SUSAN B. ANTHONY (J. Messner ed., 1975); KATHARINE ANTHONY, SUSAN B. ANTHONY: HER PERSONAL HISTORY AND HER ERA (1954); G. THOMAS EDWARDS, SOWING GOOD SEEDS: THE NORTHWEST SUFFRAGE CAMPAIGNS OF SUSAN B. ANTHONY (1990); GEOFFREY WARD, NOT FOR OURSELVES ALONE: THE STORY OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND SUSAN B ANTHONY (1999).
As this book went to press, there was a new short biography of Stanton, in which her thought and personality are in the forefront. LORI D. GINZBURG, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON: AN AMERICAN LIFE (2009). I used other biographies of Stanton, including: ALMA LUTZ, CREATED EQUAL: A BIOGRAPHY OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (1940); ELISABETH GRIFFITH, IN HER OWN RIGHT: THE LIFE OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (1984); SUE DAVIS, THE POLITICAL THOUGHT OF ELIZABETH CADY STANTON: WOMEN’S RIGHTS AND THE AMERICAN POLITICAL TRADITIONS (2008); KATHI KERN, MRS. STANTON'S BIBLE (2001); MARY ANN B. OAKLEY, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (1972); LOIS BANNER, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON: A RADICAL FOR WOMAN’S RIGHTS (1980); VIVIAN GORNICK, THE SOLITUDE OF SELF: THINKING ABOUT ELIZABETH CADY STANTON (2005). Finally, JEAN BAKER, SISTERS: THE LIVES OF AMERICA'S SUFFRAGISTS (2005), is an outstanding collective biography of Lucy Stone, Susan B Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Francis Willard, and Alice Paul.
