How to Make It as a Woman: Collective Biographical History from Victoria to the Present (review)

Alison Booth's study of collective biographies is itself a kind of collection. Booth expands a relatively straightforward academic structure—a set of wide-ranging chapters that follow an extensive introduction and are supplemented by thorough notes—to include a helpful set of suggestions for navigating her book; a bibliography of 930 works that have qualified as "collective biographies of women," written between 1830 and 1940 (also rendered in chronological order); and—best of all—a "pop chart" displaying the number of times a given subject appears in collective biographies during each of three subperiods. Like many of the texts Booth studies, moreover, How to Make It as a Woman points the reader beyond its covers, as it contains the URL for an even more comprehensive bibliography that Booth has placed online. This is not merely worthy and admirable—words that matter a great deal in Booth's sources and in her arguments; rather, these elements of Booth's book actually enact its arguments, as the variety of strategies of listing, repetition, visual presentation, juxtaposition, and digression suggest the complexity—and some of the pleasures—of multipart texts that can be freely read out of order.

Booth's precision in compiling, constructing, and explaining the materials she is studying helps the reader, although perhaps not always sufficiently, to cope with two ways in which How to Make It as a Woman can become overwhelming. On the one hand, many of the collective autobiographies that Booth lists have virtually interchangeable titles: the Women of Achievement; the Heroines of History; the Notable Women of [geographical entity]; the Famous whose Portraits bespeak their Prominence, their Eminence, their Beauties, or their place in the Bible. Although the highly particular, such as Pioneer Nuns of British Columbia (1931), jostle alongside more general works, such as Notable Women in History... in All Ages, All Lands and in All Womanly Occupations... (1913), the sense of blurriness that these titles can create is undeniable. On the other hand, Booth's project ranges beyond her readings of any of these individual works to larger speculations about life-writing, feminism, and scholarship, and the reader may again feel overwhelmed by the number and scale of the thoughts that contend for space. Prominent among these are the lists of tropes and conventions that Booth argues move across texts, and the engagements with other critics that move implicitly and explicitly throughout her own book. It should be understood, however, that noting the risks Booth runs with both her archive and her arguments is not a complaint per se, but rather a simultaneous confession and a commendation: this is a very hard book to summarize in a brief review. In offering only a brief sketch of some of the book's structures and engagements, I shall perhaps be paying homage to the kinds of texts Booth has studied.

Booth offers an elegant examination of the organization of tables of contents (91–97), which invoke broad categories and specific names; her own table of contents promises both generic typologies of women's life-stories (chapters 1 and 6) and chapters that examine particular kinds of "deeds" and "vocations," and name names (97). Chapter 2, on "heroic types," considers warrior women (Judith) and captive but cunning wives, but also suggests that heroism was both tamed and preserved in some nursing stories—like those of Sister Dora (Dorothy Pattison) and Clara Barton—in which women not only hover over dead or damaged (and non-kin) male bodies, but also command scenes and give orders. Chapter 4 explores the writings of, and the writing of, Anna Jameson and takes particular note of how Jameson, Harriet Martineau, Margaret Fuller, and Margaret Oliphant write about each other in "mutual multibiography" (182); that Jameson's name is alone in the title of a chapter bringing together these other...