Before They Could Vote: American Women's Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919

Introduction: Living in Public

Introduction Living in Public Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson American women’s autobiographical writing of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, other than slave narratives, suffragist tracts, and Civil War diaries, has received relatively little attention from literary critics and cultural historians. For literary and cultural critics, autobiographical writing has often been seen as a poor relation to the novel and to poetry, the genres in which American women writers created substantial bodies of work and about which significant bodies of scholarship have emerged. For their part, scholars of American women’s history have read the autobiographical writings of nineteenth-century women primarily as documentary texts upon which to build careful descriptions of the nature of women’s everyday lives and the gendered discourses through which everyday life was organized. In the first case, scholars approach women’s autobiographical writing of the century as trivial or marginal to other literary forms. In the second case, scholars read women’s autobiographical texts as primarily evidentiary. Neither approach to this rich and diverse field of cultural production does justice to the energy of specific women’s texts and the complexity of diverse and changing practices of autobiographical writing in the nineteenth century. Assigning women’s autobiographical writing to the zone of merely personal writing or reading it solely for its informational 3 value skews our understanding of how widely women both wrote and read and how many imagined themselves as active agents within the context of public life. Even the field of autobiography studies has been inattentive to much of American women’s life writing.1 Before They Could Vote: American Women’s Autobiographical Writing, 1819–1919 attempts to redress this inattention by presenting a collection of twenty-four personal narratives written or told by American women, some complete and some excerpted from longer works.2 These women narrate lives of action, passion, and changing social relations throughout what we are calling the “forgotten” century in the United States, the decades between the early Federalist republic and the post–World War I inception of universal suffrage. We have selected writers from a broad range of regions , ages, ethnic backgrounds, and social and work locations in order to challenge outmoded notions about women’s personal writing in the nineteenth century: that there was a pervasive bifurcation of private and public spheres, a gendered world in which women were assigned to the home and imagined themselves through the affective prism of sentimentality and domestic femininity; and that women who went public with their personal stories were primarily white, middle-class women from the Northeast writing within and about their domestic domains. This introduction discusses several concepts and themes that inform our selections and the ways they might be read: approaches to reading autobiographical discourses, autobiographical genres in this period, public life and the woman writer, shifts in critical approaches to women’s writing, and classroom uses and research prospects for this collection. Reading the Autobiographical Let us begin with a few theoretical remarks about autobiographical acts before turning to a consideration of women’s participation in American autobiographical discourses. Assuming her experiential history as a reference base and point of departure, an autobiographer represents her life story in order to share it with others. Her “experience” and the “memory” through which it is routed are already interpreted phenomena and thus at least once removed from any pure facticity. After all, autobiographers sometimes take liberty with that most elementary fact, the date of birth, choosing 4 smith and watson for themselves a more propitious moment or purposefully confusing the date. And memory is selective and untrustworthy. What truth we come to know in reading autobiography derives not from the facts of a life truly remembered, though they may be of interest if we can find them, but from the meanings the autobiographer assigns to and extracts from the representation of her life. She reads meaningful reality into her life and we read her reading. Because of the interpretive nature of any autobiographical act, then, the distinction between autobiographical narrative and fiction remains elusive. Autobiography is always a story in time interweaving historical fact and fiction. The meanings the autobiographer reads into her life are historically and culturally contingent. Telling her story, she negotiates—sometimes with little, sometimes with discerning self-consciousness—the cultures of subjectivity available to her, the discourses of identity circulating around her, and the narrative frames commonly used to tell...