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Biography 23.3 (2000) 555-557



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Judy Long. Telling Women's Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text. New York: New York UP, 1999. 184 pp. ISBN 0-8147-5074-5, $55.00 cloth; ISBN 0-8147-5075-3, $19.50 paper.

Telling Women's Lives is well suited for adoption in an introductory graduate course in the social sciences, especially if a teacher is looking for a useful overview of established theories on the practice and pratfalls of life writing. Its concluding chapter--which directly addresses graduate pedagogy as one means of improving the androcentric bias in not only the field of sociology but also the genres of autobiography, life history, and biography--indicates that sociology graduate students and professors may very well be Long's intended audience, and her book should serve as an important contribution to their studies.

For those of us outside the social sciences who are interested in life writing, however, there is little that is new here. In particular, the first three chapters are primarily devoted to summarizing other critics' views, especially those of feminist literary critics who concerned themselves with the intersections of gender and genre in the 1970s and early 1980s. 1 Presumably, sociology lags several decades behind literary studies when it comes to acknowledging the presence of gender bias in life writings, though Long may be retreading familiar ground in her own field as well. Whichever, she builds her critique out of somewhat dated sources: at the same time that she rarely cites feminist critics writing in the 1990s, she tends to criticize male critics writing in the late 1960s and early 1970s. For example, James Olney, whose Metaphors of Self was published in 1972, is taken to task for his use of male pronouns as universal, a critique that seems unfairly presentist.

Writing in the spirit of the early feminist pioneers she favorably cites, Long subscribes to an opposing camps, "men vs. women" brand of feminism, which often runs the twin dangers of oversimplification and overstatement. Take this passage: [End Page 555]

Narratives of women's lives stand in contract with those of men. Where male subjects portray themselves as separated, women represent themselves as connected. Where men's stories are set in the public eye, women chronicle private scenes. Where men prune their lives down to a terse outline, women's accounts remain "messy." Where men claim a destination, women record process. Women's autobiographies differ from those of men in terms of plot, content, and form. (56)

While these contrasts may be true in general, they are also truly generalizations, and Long does not account for the numerous exceptions on both sides that spring to mind. Similarly, in a chapter entitled "Gender and Genre" devoted to "examining autobiography as a discourse of institutionalized androcentrism" (15), Long accuses "male critics" and male models of marginalizing women's voices, but she pays little attention to the ways in which women may have been willing or unwitting agents in their own marginalization. References not only to more recent critics but to recent female-authored life histories might have added nuance to Long's less than ambiguous account. Her strategy of ranging men against women does seem unfortunate, if only because the men she identifies as doing the excluding might be those who would benefit most from reading her study, and yet her approach is bound to alienate them. Invariably, Long complicates her own picture, though without explicitly acknowledging it: we see this when she discusses her own field of sociology and cites among the sources who recognize diversity and complexity a good number of men (for example, Vincent Crapanzano, Georges Devereux, and Howard Becker). Likewise, her indictment of at least one woman, Mabel Dodge Luhan's biographer Emily Hahn, for employing misogynistic reading practices further undermines Long's own gender-segregated model.

It seems unfair to criticize a sociologist for not knowing more about literary theory and texts, and yet Long invites such criticism by relying primarily on such works in the first half of her book. Her facts are at times imprecise, as...

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