The New Historical Syntheses: Women's Biography

Dialogue The New Historical Syntheses: Women's Biography* Kathleen Barry This paper posits a feminist-critical approach to biography that redefines biography from the particular study of a unique life to a structural socio-political history that is grounded in the temporality and subjectivity of a life. This approach rejects the great man biographical model that finds historical forces and periodization shaped and biographies built from the unique characteristics of special historical figures and, therefore, dissociates epochal history (made by great men) from everyday lived experience. When epochal history, with the political structures and major defining events which characterize it, is understood both to emerge from and intersect with daily life, a dialectical interaction between political and social history can be set in motion through the life-story. This feminist-critical approach locates biography in that dialectic and gives women's biography the potential of forging a new historical synthesis. This critical approach to women's biography is built from several assumptions about gender and stratification. Because they have constituted the core of feminist theory for over twenty years, I will only summarize them here: that gender stratification has not disappeared with the new postmodern historical era, and, therefore, all biographies are located in sex-class hierarchies that not only structure societies but shape interactions; that gender stratification is hierarchally shaped by patriarchal relations of power that contextualize but do not necessarily determine the life situation, events, and biographies; that despite theoretical deconstruction's dismissal of binary oppositions , in social reality gender stratification continues to be at core dyadic; the male-female couple is its fundamental unit and the origin of other institutional political relations of sex-class power; that sex domination collectivizes women through patriarchal relations of power and establishes them as a subordinate class; the ideology of gender stratification essentializes women, reducing them to what the ©1990 Journal of Women's History, Vol. ι No. 3 (Winter)__________________ *This is a revised version of "Biography and the Search for Women's Subjectivity" that appeared in the December issue of Woman's Studies International Forum and is reprinted here with the permission of Pergamon Press. 76 Journal of Women's History Winter patriarchal ideology construes to be their nature and making them ahistorical by universalizing them based on that essentialization. Biographer, Subject, and Self Feminist-critical biography must assume a self that is knowable through its doing and actions, that is, through intentionality. Through daily actions, subjects reveal their intentions in the choices they make and reveal their interpretations of reality in their interactions. Biographers move from this first-order experience to interpreting the subjects to know better how their choices and interpretations lead both to intended and unintended consequences. That is, feminist-critical biography begins with woman's self as she knows herself instead of determining that self with theoretical impositions such as psychoanalysis and deconstruction that ultimately rely on unconscious formulations often despite the subject's knowledge of her own reality. When, in women's biographies, subjects are viewed as products of predetermined forces, their life situations are usually reduced to essentialisms that relate to either their sexuality or their reproductivity. Perhaps the most fundamental challenge to interpretation in writing the biography of Susan B. Anthony1—who, in becoming a symbol of women's rights and a charismatic leader, became a legend who had ceased to be known as a real woman with a subjective self—was to grasp who she was, to understand how she knew herself, and to know her as she knew herself in her interactions with others. To do biography, the first demand upon the researcher is to reveal the subject as a subject. Biography must give a feel for the person, who she was or is. In women's biography, this most often means retrieving lost subjectivity, subjectivity lost because it has been historically suppressed and subjectivity lost because women's actions have been determined and essentialized to their sexual and/or reproductive functions. At the same time, when women's biography is approached through a search for subjectivity and history is understood to be political as well as social, epochal as well as daily, biography opens the way for creating a grounded...