Feminist Biography Research Articles

Intersectional Feminist Biography as Method

The genre of biography, typically associate with elite individuals, may seem like an unlikely approach for writing feminist history. And yet, in writing about exceptional women, many of them women of color, I have found that their lives reveal how structures of power functioned and how the marginalized responded. This essay is part of a PHR forum on the theme of “Personal Reflections on Feminist Historical Methods,” with additional essays by Y. Yvon Wang, Natalie Marine-Street, and Natalia Mehlman Petrzela. The forum is part of a larger PHR special issue, Feminist Histories.

Spades and Gravers: Clare Leighton, Victor Gollancz and the Radical Countryside

Socialist artist, wood engraver, and writer Clare Leighton transformed the interwar wood engraving revival from a niche movement within fine book publishing into an everyday art for the people when in 1935 she brought out with leftist publisher Victor Gollancz her authored and illustrated Four Hedges: A Gardener's Chronicle. Read alongside Country Matters (1937), a second illustrated countryside book that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton, Four Hedges becomes a key 1930s text because it realigns modernist values associated with the wood engraved productions of small presses with the more democratic values of mass-reproduced trade books. Combining feminist biography, close reading, and modernist and middlebrow book history, this article argues that the wood engraved books that Gollancz commissioned from Leighton contribute to rather than resist or exist outside of the radical 1930s once they are located within Leighton's rural arts practice and Gollancz's publishing ventures, including his publication of George Orwell's legendary urban documentary, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937).

Review: Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration, by Rachel Schreiber

Review: <i>Elaine Black Yoneda: Jewish Immigration, Labor Activism, and Japanese American Exclusion and Incarceration</i>, by Rachel Schreiber

Musical Virtue, Professional Fortune, and Private Trauma in Eighteenth-Century Britain: A Feminist Biography of Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730–65)

ABSTRACT The composer Elisabetta de Gambarini (1730–65) led a life of public and private contradictions. Publicly, she was renowned as both a professional performer and one of the first female composers to publish in Britain. Recently discovered documents at the British National Archives show, however, that her final year of life was marked by violence and physical abuse at the hands of her husband, Stephen Chazell. A feminist biography of Gambarini should not ignore or downplay her survivorhood, but should stress how she harnessed her virtue as a means of promoting herself as a female performer and composer whose entrepreneurial and publishing activities emulated those of male musicians. The documents themselves help us to understand how, despite her stature as a virtuous woman and a prominent public figure, she was erased from the narrative of her own abuse. In the age of #MeToo, Elisabetta’s biography provides an opportunity to reflect on how surviving trauma does not define a woman’s core identity; at the same time, it shows that ignoring assault and trauma in historical biography suppresses important lessons about believing women—lessons that are now more important than ever.

A century of Grace; restorative spatial justice, pedagogy, and beloved community in twenty-first century Detroit

This article poses feminist biographical investigation as a dialectical approach to situated knowledge, and as a potential avenue for a feminist theorization of space and place. By exploring biography as a departure from canonical epistemological structures, the attempt here is to credit, contextualize and identify key places and people of origin in the evolution and production of theory and knowledge without such heavy dependency on the usual resources that legitimize theoretical and pedagogical contributions; such as academic publications, teaching contributions and references. The biographical focus of this article is the life and work of Grace Lee Boggs, an important contributor to urban studies whose theoretical and pedagogical contributions have gone largely unacknowledged by geographers and spatial thinkers. What can a biographical investigation teach us about feminist knowledge production relating to the production of space? What does feminist biography offer epistemologically to our understandings of space? These questions are examined here through the theoretical contributions of Grace Lee Boggs, a long-time resident of Detroit, second generation Chinese American, civil rights and feminist activist and working class philosopher, as a means of exploring biography as a feminist research methodology.

A Much-Fathered Nation: Feminist Biography and Confederation Politics

Although many Confederation biographies were written before the gender turn, even recent studies often neglect gender as a category of analysis. This neglect implies that thinking about gender would, at best, add to the story of Confederation but could not change it. It also leaves men's experience of gender unexamined, perpetuating the idea that men's monopoly over politics in this era was simply a fact – perhaps regrettable, but indisputable, and therefore unworthy of study. This article considers how dividing political (men's) history and gender (women's) history into separate domains has affected how biographers have written about Confederation. It also proposes that critical feminist biography can help historians re-entangle politics and gender and, thereby, re-evaluate what was at stake in the Confederation negotiations and on what bases support for this ongoing political project was won, lost, regained, and reconfigured.

The Challenges of Retranslating The Great Gatsby into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

The Challenges of Retranslating <i>The Great Gatsby</i> into Hungarian With a Focus on Metaphors of Emotion and Embodiment

Guest Editorial Note: Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East

Guest Editorial NoteWomen’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East Marilyn Booth (bio) In her article for this special issue on “Women’s Autobiography in South Asia and the Middle East,” historian Anshu Malhotra listens closely to a poetic work by the nineteenth-century north Indian prostitute turned spiritual novitiate Piro. Malhotra’s analysis of Piro’s poetic voice explores the microcosmic interstices of female agency as Piro’s world was entering the era of late colonial modernity. Women’s and gender history as a trans-cultural and by now global enterprise is built on such moments of listening to subjects in history, as it also attends to the macrocosmic conditions and shifts that have enabled and constrained such voices. Autobiographical writing, a mode of expression that has often made historians nervous, offers a rich if elusive archive for historical analysis, just as feminist biography as an analytic framework has been recognized, in the Journal of Women’s History and elsewhere, as a dynamic and generative zone of historical work. To consider autobiography through gendered lenses, as we do here, is to think through issues that face historians of women and gender constantly: not only agency and voice, but also self-definition, relationality, and the individual’s connections to specificities of time and place. The study of autobiography and gender has proliferated in the academy. It is a constellation that brings together issues of identity and performativity, the narrating I and the evasiveness of the gendered self, genre, and canonicity, and the intersectionality of gender, place, ethnicity, class, and embodiment in rhetorics of individualism and community. Thus, autobiographical writing and the analysis of it have become highly visible artifacts of and for cultural activism, political action, and scholarly endeavor. Globalization, translation, migrations, and localness as processes of worldly cultural circulation and as nodes of, or metaphors for, theoretical inquiry have focused attention on how individuals—and sometimes collective subjects—write “themselves” into histories of past and present. From memoirs that highlight and embed “Muslim woman-ness” to manifestoes that track sexed embodiment as blueprints for activism; and from the popularity of celebrity autobiographies in the transnational book market to performance art that foregrounds the elusive and ever-shifting contours and boundaries of embodied selves, autobiography has constituted a range of practices that fascinates as it confronts the reader, listener, or viewer with her own networks and aporias of identification. Whether the consumer is positioned as fan or as scholar (or perhaps most productively, as both), autobiography’s allure is nicely captured by the sociologist Mary Evans’s rubric for it: “missing persons.”1 Autobiography is a search for a moving [End Page 7] target, a movement among narrator, author, and reader within the semiotic webs through which all performances—and therefore formations—of self-hood take place. When art tries to capture lived moments through writing the self, and when self-understanding is engendered, complicated, and undermined by the acts of writing and reading about it, the reflexivity of autobiography creates connections and identifications. But autobiography also confronts the reader with the responsibility to listen differently: to respect otherness in its many varieties, to query identification constantly even as one also works toward it, to recognize that reading across human socialities in history and their particularities of self-making requires profound deference and humility. In this special issue, we explore questions of genre and “truth-effect,” asking in what ways can autobiography account for a lived life (or not) and still be considered as autobiography, and as history? What are its markers and boundaries? Is it infinitely expansive? How does autobiographical writing both incorporate and distance conventional and received models of selfhood in a given historical context, through models imagined, and genres constructed, in narration? How might “the self” look different not only across distinctions of gender identity and over time but also when we read from other places—and depending on where we stand as we listen? Ranging from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, from India to Iran (and its North American diaspora), Egypt, Ottoman Turkey, and Algeria, and then east again to Pakistan and Egypt in our three Roundtable essays, our contributions elicit...

The Book I Couldn’t Write: Alice Paul and the Challenge of Feminist Biography

One hallmark of recent feminist biography has been its focus on the interplay between the personal and the political in constructing the narratives of individual women’s lives. The case of Alice Paul suggests that not all subjects are amenable to such an approach. Paul so defined her life by devotion to the cause of feminism, first woman suffrage and then decades of advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, that she had no personal life to speak of. When the personal is so completely subsumed to the political, it poses a huge hurdle for the feminist biographer.

‘This woman is not for burning’: performing the biography and memory of Cissie Gool

Between 1935 and 1963, Zainunnessa ‘Cissie’ Gool was probably the most politically powerful woman of colour in Cape Town, yet her history has remained largely undocumented and unknown even in her own city. This article traces a skeleton of the biography of Gool and offers a few reflections on the process of making two theatre pieces, Cissie (2008) and This Woman is Not for Burning (2011). Both works were oriented around Gool’s life and the world of her constituency, District Six. Like the two plays it focuses on, this article is concerned with the efficacy and limitations of restorative archiving and historiography through performance and the potential seductions of hagiography. I suggest that both plays were acts of feminist biography, governed, in part, by the (often silent, sometimes unacknowledged) narrative of auto/biography. The article is also an attempt to forge a critical and creative cohesion between the multiple forms of inquiry (imaginative, anecdotal and theoretical) that underpinned both works.

Lies, Secrets, and Silences: Writing African American Women’s Biography

scendents. Many of the relevant records burned in the 1906 blaze that engulfed San Francisco. And although she helped to finance one of the most significant rebellions in U.S. history—John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry— few historians had ever heard of her. Some existing records, cited in footnotes, were privately owned and could not or would not be shared. 1 What could I possibly “know” about her given the sources to which I had access? What would a feminist biography of a woman accused of voodoo, inside trading, and murder look like? These questions haunted me and shaped my study of the nineteenth-century African American entrepreneur and abolitionist Mary Ellen Pleasant (1814–1904). My journey of discovery took me to expected sites: archives, public libraries, microfilm reading rooms, and the like. But I also learned about her from audience members at book signings, bed and breakfast owners, and the men and women who collected pieces of California’s African American history. I quickly discovered that the public investment in Pleasant’s past far exceeded the interest of academics. From the minute she landed in gold rush San Francisco, Pleasant created a sensation; the story goes that men in the city crowded the dock to bid top dollar for her services as a cook. To unravel her history, I encountered a different but no less determined crowd that gathered around her memory. Their interest in preserving her legacy as a feminist foremother, a voodoo queen, or a freedom fighter forced me to confront the differences between hagiography and critical feminist biography. The history of an African American woman who amassed fortunes in the post–gold rush West is a story ripe for drama of all sorts. During her lifetime, the press had a field day writing fantastic headlines about her use of love potions and her intimate relationships with white men and women. Before the dust had settled over these highly public interracial relationships—for decades she lived with a wealthy banker and his wife posing as their maid—her history became fodder for a Broadway play in the 1920s that Hollywood remade as a “thriller” called The Cat and Canary. Pleasant was depicted as a classic mammy in blackface in the play and film, which further obscured her history as a leader of the Underground Railroad and an early civil rights activist. Capitalism and abolitionism may, to some, make strange bedfellows. A black feminist foremother masquerading as a mammy figure also disrupts our accepted narrative of women’s history. This project required a frame

Life’s Illusions: The “Art” of Critical Biography

Life’s Illusions: The “Art” of Critical Biography Penny Russell (bio) “I do not disparage archives,” wrote Leon Edel, “I simply groan when I see one.”1 It was a groan that resounded through his generation. The accidental accumulations of a life left an “imperfect paper trail,” all “gaps and gabble,” wrote Paul Murray Kendall; Justin Kaplan noted that they were also “loaded with duplicities and evasions.”2 For Paul Mariani, what lay in the archives was only “words transcribed, written, uttered, words, words, and more words, which the biographer must shape and select and reorder, until a figure begins again to live in our imagination.”3 These biographers, men recreating the lives of men, rejected the certainties of positivism. Biography was more literary than empirical—not in thrall to the archive but transcending it. The biographer’s mission was to lift his subject from the cluttering detritus of his surroundings, to reach towards new levels of psychological understanding and find the “life-myth” that gave him meaning,4 to mimic the “sequential heart-beat of a life,”5 to spin the “illusion of a life,”6 or at least to offer “a plausible, inevitably idiosyncratic reconstruction.”7 Conscious that their elusive, mysterious goal, the “essence of a man,” lay beyond their reach, biographers regarded the archives with resignation or disdain, as intractable raw material to be pressed into the service of art. If the “gabble” of the archive must be suppressed in their narratives, so, too, must the chaotic tangle of daily life itself be ruthlessly pruned and strategically re-ordered. The biographer should certainly, wrote Kendall, “thrust into his reader’s ears the noisy crosscurrents of man’s passage through time, wet his tongue with the salty murk of reality.” But he should make that “passage through time” intelligible by grouping scattered happenings and building them into a coherent narrative of unfolding events. Thematic groupings were vital to the intelligibility of a life, yet on no account should they “block or deform the sweep of chronology.” In particular, Kendall decreed that thematic groupings could not be “deployed like the topics of an expository essay—exposition is the enemy of biography, dead tissue cumbering a living organism.” Though biography was produced out of engagement between the “brute materials” and the biographer’s “shaping intelligence,” any tendency towards lecturing, speculation, and overt comment should be ruthlessly excised.8 To make the reflective processes of the biographer visible would destroy the art of biography. Analysis must proceed, as Peter Cochrane has more recently expressed it, “by stealth”: structured into the narrative itself.9 It is [End Page 152] a strategy that serves the creator as much as the subject. If the biographer’s transcendent understandings are to carry conviction, their intellectual underpinnings may not be exposed to critical review. Concealment of analytic and empirical labor placed these biographers in a position of magisterial, mysterious omnipotence—an illusion of which they were utterly aware and in which they were utterly complicit. I do not share their quest, but I envy their assurance. Critical feminist biography pursues different paths and not only because the object of the quest is rarely a “man.” Following the linguistic turn and the “death of the subject,” few of us would so readily dismiss the fragments that lie in the archive, what historian Inga Clendinnen has termed the “gnomic, refractory remnants of past sensibilities,” as “gaps and gabble” which the biographer must exploit, transcend, and suppress so as to create the “illusion” of a life and self.10 They are, rather, the object of enquiry, the site of self-representation and evidence of the cultural narratives amongst which a sense of self may be forged. We will not readily forgive—let alone claim—the artistic license that extols an “illusion” of identity, encouraging the erasure of evidence of its constitution. Through such erasures, patriarchal hegemonies have been sustained. Critical discourse deconstructs, rendering the labor of creation visible and therefore open to critique—and, perhaps, to change. Yet as Sheila Kineke has observed, feminist biographers have found it difficult to slough off the convention of silencing the biographer’s process while preserving a semblance of “truth.” Though feminist biographers...

Trauma and Testimony in Black Women's Civil Rights Memoirs: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It, Warriors Don't Cry, and From the Mississippi Delta

This article focuses on three memoirs of the civil rights movement published roughly thirty years after the events described. Unlike feminist biography, on the one hand, and oral history, on the other hand, self-initiated accounts allow us to examine the range of narrative strategies chosen by black, female participant-witnesses to describe traumatic aspects of a movement that exposed them to varying degrees of physical, psychological, and sexual violence. I argue that memoirs by Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, Melba Pattillo Beals, and Endesha Ida Mae Holland are significant not only because they situate familiar movement milestones within the intimate context of "ordinary" women's lives, but also because they challenge the disembodied and triumphal story of the civil rights movement that has dominated American popular memory. As rich repositories of source material and as histories in their own right, these memoirs and others like them deserve considerably more scholarly attention.

Feminist Biography: A Contradiction in Terms?

This essay describes the contradictions posed for biographers by the imperatives of the feminist historical enterprise: to chronicle the lives of all women, not just the exceptional; to treat all texts critically; to acknowledge personal biases. A number of feminist biographies serve as examples of possible responses to these inherent challenges.

Henry Roe Cloud: A Granddaughter’s Native Feminist Biographical Account

Henry Roe CloudA Granddaughter’s Native Feminist Biographical Account Renya K. Ramirez (bio) Henry Roe Cloud (c. 1884–1950), a Winnebago Indian, was my grandfather. The following essay is my attempt to help to fill a gap in history. Even though he has been hailed as the most important Native American policy-maker of the early part of the twentieth century, only one article has been published and one book is soon to be published about him.1 First, I will discuss a Native feminist approach to biography, which includes highlighting Native agency and perspectives, placing tribal sovereignty and interlocking oppressions at the center of one’s analysis, respecting a Native family’s right to privacy, and putting one’s reflections as both an academic and a descendant in the text, linking together biography and ethnography. Second, I will analyze my grandfather’s life and contributions as an intellectual, a policy-maker, and an educator using a Native and gendered lens. A Native Feminist Biography My experience researching and writing about my grandfather has taught me some important methodological lessons about biography from a Native and gendered perspective. The first lesson I learned was that archival material related to Native families can include information not appropriate for public consumption.2 Indeed, individuals can choose to place material in archives that Native family members wish [End Page 77] were not in the public domain. For example, upon a person’s death, they often donate letters to archives without reading them or discussing with other family members their decision to give the letters away. After my father’s death, for example, his second wife (not my mother) donated to Yale University the letters of my mother’s parents. She did this without consulting my siblings or me. We would have appreciated her discussing this matter with us before choosing to donate the letters. Because archival information can contain material that is sensitive, it is essential to consult with the family and determine what information can be written about. Respecting a Native family’s wishes is fundamental to protecting their right to privacy. This respect is a crucial ethical principle to follow, and, consequently, a Native methodological concern.3 Indeed, rather than viewing Native peoples’ lives as “data” to be used to produce theory by outside researchers, we as indigenous peoples are demanding that our own needs, insights, and research agendas be incorporated into the development and publication of any study, including Native biography.4 I occupy a complicated position as both an “insider” and an “outsider,” since I am an academic and Henry Roe Cloud’s granddaughter.5 My dual social position encourages me to weave my reflections throughout the text from these two distinct points of view. In this way, I bring together biography and ethnography. Another methodological lesson I learned was the value of using intersectional analysis when analyzing the primary and secondary documents. Discussing the linkage between various oppressions, such as race, class, gender, sexuality, and colonialism, encourages us not to make the mistake of emphasizing one kind of exclusion over another. Placing these intersecting oppressions and tribal sovereignty at the center of one’s analysis is a move toward developing a Native feminist awareness.6 Certainly, the first step toward decolonizing our ancestral histories is naming experiences as colonial.7 A final methodological lesson was the significance of highlighting our Native ancestors’ agency as well as perspectives and positions. These indigenous perspectives of the past can help us reconstruct a Native-centric history as well as empower us as a people.8 All of these methodological concerns explain why I chose to call my biographical account of a Native man, my grandfather, a Native feminist approach. In the following, I used these methodological approaches to construct a biographical account of my grandfather’s life and contributions. Henry Roe Cloud’s Life and Contributions Henry Roe Cloud was a pivotal activist, policy-maker, and intellectual in the early twentieth century. A major intellectual contribution was his argument that Native Americans should attend college. As a result, he founded and ran the very first college preparatory school for Indian [End Page 78] youth, a revolutionary educational approach, since during...

The Pleasures (and Dangers) Of Biography

The Pleasures (and Dangers) Of Biography Lori D. Ginzberg (bio) Alison Booth . How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. xvi + 423 pp.; ill.; tables. ISBN 0-226-06546-4 (pb). Sally Mitchell . Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, Reformer. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004. xiii + 463 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8139-2271-2 (cl). John G. Reid . Viola Florence Barnes, 1885–1979: A Historian's Biography. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xxiv + 228 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8020-8017-0 (cl). First, if I may, a confession. I do not like, and until recently rarely read, biographies. It is not that I doubt that there are good ones, or that I think biography is a lesser genre than narrative history writing, or that I dismiss the importance of individual women in making history. Mostly I find books that focus on the individual life too exclusive, too self-absorbed, and too packed with dinner parties; surely more tiresome than attending most parties is reading about them. And then, too many biographers fall in love with their subject and so, it seems to me, lose their balance. (Here I recommend Jill Lepore's article "Historians Who Love Too Much: Reflections on Microhistory and Biography," whose self-deprecatory description of stroking "a lock of [Noah Webster's] hair in a tender embrace" in the archives made me laugh out loud.1 ) I learn too little actual history from most biographies—and too little about what the individual life really means in its time and place. I have heard the basic story (birth, the struggles of girlhood, the passions and limits of adulthood, death) before. I would certainly be far more bored reading about my own life than I am living it. I know many historians who share my puzzlement that people actually read biographies; more, that they love them. Indeed, as a child, I enjoyed the little blue biographies about explorers and thinkers and people who performed a creative act that changed the world (though I admit I skipped the warriors and never found sea-stories much fun). Something about the biographical narrative—about living in another's skin, about identifying with a person from another time, another world, about imagining oneself in a heroic moment—draws people as few nonfiction genres do. I do not really get it. [End Page 205] But I am researching and writing a biography, and so have embarked on reading dozens of them with an entirely new attitude. Certain preferences have inevitably emerged: I vastly prefer those whose authors do not love, or forgive, their subjects (Dan Carter's biography of George Wallace comes to mind2 ); I impatiently skim the ones with too many "important" guest appearances. Reminded of what historian Barbara Caine once called the "deep gulf between the biographical study of prominent feminists on the one hand, and the writing of the history of feminism and of women's movements on the other," I have been aware of navigating waters that are, at best, unfamiliar and, at worst, uncrossable.3 Feminist biography, Caine continues, while it tries to understand women in their place and time, necessarily focuses on people who transcended those constraints, who were exceptions or rebels or heroines. She points to collective biographies as a means of transforming the uses we can make of life histories. Alison Booth's How to Make It as a Woman contributes to this endeavor in important ways, both by exploring and explaining the pleasures people gain from reading women's lives and by illuminating the very act of compiling and honoring particular women's stories. Not itself a biography, it is a study of collective biographies (prosopographies) of women—those compendia of women's lives that sprung up regularly among the reading classes in part to celebrate, but as much to educate about, what women had, and therefore could, become. Booth's work teaches us not so much why people love biography, but what they are expected to learn, and teach, from the numerous individual stories gathered between a set of covers—or, in Booth's wonderful phrase, how "a...

Goethes Mutter: Eine Biographie (review)

Dagmar von Gersdorff, Goethes Mutter Eine Biographie. Frankfurt/Main: Insel, 2001.463pp. What did a woman's life look like in the eighteenth century? And when that woman was Goethe's mother? Where would you look to find out? Women's writing: literature, to the extent that women were allowed to write and publish; letters-fewer than one would think, since Goethe, in a preventative strike, burnt his mother's letters in 1792, with only three or four escaping by accident (letters after 1792 remain largely existent in the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv; Gersdorff designates them Dokumente von unvergleichlichem literarischem, kulturalem und menschlichem Wert [327]). Sociological studies from feminist, historical, and archival perspectives with more than a trace of theory and ideology. For women around Goethe, you might turn to the speculative biographies of Sigricl Damm, where you would find in the case of Goethe's sister, Cornelia Goethe Schlosser, an interior life accessed by a remarkable act of empathy, with hints of pathography; in the case of Goethe's erstwhile partner and eventual wife, Christiane Vulpius Goethe, where for my money Damm is less successful: Here, there is less access to an interior life and less empathy, Goethe's wife reduced to the role of yet another factotum, no more important than his servant-scribe Philip Seidel or an Eckermann, haunted by and in the shadow of Goethe. In a situation like this one, what would happen if you turned to a conventional biography in the old style, that meticulously researched documents and artifacts and refused to stray beyond their surface, to spy on any private life? If for no other reason, to escape Damm's relentless monomaniacal style of feminist biography. And what would happen if in that biography, an attempt was made to give Goethe's mother, Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe, a life in her own right? You might find it dry, you might find it unspectacular, you might not find it sexy-although Goethe's mother led a sexier life than the tradition would lead us to believe. You might find a woman who began her early life surrounded by men-father, husband, son-yet who spent most of her life on her own, a widow, perhaps even a happy one with houses and rooms of her own. In Dagmar Gersdorff's biography, for example, you will no doubt learn that Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe led a life of self-reliance that would surprise you.You will also learn, despite the distance he put between them, how dependent Goethe remained on his mother throughout his life, both financially and in terms of his own self-image. I will not argue that behind every successful man stands a willful and persistent mother, but I will argue that there are many ways to write biography and that the facts, mam, just the facts, as a methodology often get us further than we might have otherwise suspected. Dagmar von Gersdorff relies on account books, Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe's husband's Liber Domesticus, which she continued after his death-and her own Ausgaben-, Wirtschafls-, Spiel-, Wasch- und Cassabucher (30 handwritten volumes).That Goethe saved such archival materials, as opposed to letters, is a profound commentary on the differences between public and private spheres, between intimate and legal documents, in the eighteenth century. From these materials, Gersdorff reconstructs a life. She largely lets Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe speak from these materials (and others epistolary and biographical available to her) in her own voice as far as possible with few interventions and with virtually no attempts to interpolate, much less to psychoanalyze. It should be noted: Gersdorff reads account books as well as any scholar I know, W. Daniel Wilson included. Only once does she breathe the question: Kann man einem Haushaltsbuch Gefuhle lesen? (279)-her answer throughout remains ambivalent. Goethe's father married up and young: he was 38, Catherine Elisabeth Textor Goethe 17 upon the occasion of their arranged marriage in 1748. …

She seems to have composed her own life: thinking about Catherine Martin1

Catherine Martin was born Catherine Mackay, the daughter of a crofter family on the Isle of Skye in about 1847 and grew up in the South East of South Australia and the Western Districts of the neig...

The "Suppression" of Fanny Mendelssohn: Rethinking Feminist Biography

The idea that Felix Mendelssohn prevented his sister, Fanny Hensel, from publishing her compositions is central to biographical representations of her, including Françoise Tillard's Fanny Mendelssohn (1992) and Gloria Kamen's Hidden Music (1996). This story can be traced to nineteenth-century publications by male members of the Mendelssohn family and their desire to portray both siblings according to socially acceptable gender roles. Such origins challenge the assumption that the story of Fanny Hensel's "suppression" represents a modern feminist reinterpretation of her life. Instead, current treatment of Hensel relies on common biographical models for male composers; in her lack of a public career, she fits the Romantic stereotype of the neglected, suffering genius. The retelling of the "suppression" of Fanny Hensel represents a "story" in itself - a rescue plot in which modern women rediscover Hensel and somehow "save" her from historical neglect. This feminist recovery relies on the assumption that Hensel was forgotten, overlooking the numerous publications between 1830 and 1920 in which she appears. Centering Hensel's biography on her brother's influence rather than on her eventual publication of her music oversimplifies the larger historical situation for women composers, replacing the manifold issues surrounding gender and class with a single male villain. The difficulties encountered in telling the story of Hensel's life reveal a need for a feminist biography that balances an understanding of larger cultural constraints with recognition of individual female agency.

Mothering feminism/mothering feminists: ray strachey and the cause

The framework of motherhood raises interesting and important questions for feminist biography and for the history of feminism. Representations of motherhood have played an important part in defining particular kinds of feminism. But while images of sisterhood and close female friendship are integral to many recent discussions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism, cross-generational relationships between feminists and their mothers are only just beginning to be explored. In this article the author seeks to deal with both of these issues in a specific case study of Ray Strachey, exploring her feminist commitment and activity in terms of her relationship with her own mother, and with the other maternal figures to whom she was close. It is also argued that her complex negotiations with maternal figures affected the way in which she established a feminist tradition, and indeed depicted the whole history of British feminism in her major book, The Cause