Editors’ Note

Critical Feminist Biography II

Between composing the introduction to our first special issue on “Critical Feminist Biography” and writing this to accompany Part Two, the American Historical Review’s June 2009 issue was mailed out to its subscribers with a hundred-pages-plus roundtable on “History and Biography.” Contributors anointed biography as an appropriate methodology for the historian (one in which the individual life becomes “‘a fact’—though a complicated one”¹) even as they both resisted and articulated the blend of suspicion and defensiveness toward the genre—or the methodology—that roundtable editor David Nasaw acknowledged as ever-resonant among historians, the profession’s academic journals, and other institutional apparatuses. If biography has arrived as a legitimate form of doing history, it continues to require elaborate rationales for its legitimacy as historical method.

Contributors to “History and Biography” embraced the contemporary emphasis among theoreticians of auto/biography on the contingent and the fragmentary; on questioning the nature of archives for historical writing; and on the (historically discrete and specific) processes of selving, of identity formation and shifting individual allegiances, to which the biographer must attend. A repeated emphasis was the particular and allegedly more sustained attention that historian-biographers give to “context” and “linkage,” to assessing the life’s significance in explaining “larger” historical forces: indeed, to the life as a historian’s “fact.” As has often been the case in the last quarter of a century, with the arrival of “new” subjects to the sightline of history—women, workers, people of color, and children—claims about their capacity to do more than simply illuminate their own lives continues to exert a defining influence on what counts as History (capital H).

One might ask whether this insistence on individuals’ life histories as emblematic of broader connections is either specific to historians or necessarily to the benefit of biography as a genre. In any case, it is indisputable that the notion of a life as enmeshed in, and as in a sense organizing, a network of circuits and connections is one that has been salient to feminist biographers as long as the practice of something that could be called feminist biography has been around. In her contribution to our Roundtable on writing feminist biography, Penny Russell takes up this emphasis on the connection between biography and history, the individual and the “context,” but rather than stressing the fit between the two, she notes their tension, one that the biographer—like all good historians, one might say—must respect and use.

Foregrounding the collective and aggregative aspect of women’s lives, as feminists using life stories as the basis of their scholarly work have done, has tracked the contours of feminine existence in many times and places while also resisting the tendency of biography—at least traditionally and in Euro/American literary traditions—to highlight the single (and male) hero. And in addition to emphasizing the thickly peopled lives of individual women, collective biography in a gendered framework—by which we mean, collected life histories around shared identity rubrics (occupation, geography, etc.) or repeated tropes (such as achievement and “worth,” however measured)—has remained indispensable to the writing of women’s history and perhaps particularly to the popularization of women’s history. This is attested to by the number of volumes of collected female lives that the JWH book reviews editor receives with regularity, not to mention the many volumes produced in other places and many languages.² The recuperative and role-modeling “moment” of feminism seems never to be over.

But as several of our contributors suggest, and as Jochen Hellbeck notes in his contribution to the AHR roundtable, biography’s ethics-making claims invite questions about the conditions in which biography is written, the way biographical subjects are made, and the formation of “cultures of biography” at certain moments in which individuals are encouraged to think of themselves, and of others, according to certain discursive strategies that highlight writing (and living) certain kinds of life narratives as ethical and political imperatives.³ Writing biography encourages attention to the processes of self-making—and the ways these processes may undergird...