The Challenge of Feminist Biography

Writing the Lives of Modern American Women
Author: Edited by Sara Alpern, Joyce Antler, Elisabeth Israels Perry, and Ingrid Winther Scobie
The challenges and pleasures of writing women's biography
Paper – $30
978-0-252-06292-6
Publication Date
Paperback: 01/01/1992
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About the Book

This path-breaking anthology illuminates the lives of ten influential twentieth-century American women and looks at the challenges experienced by the women who have written about them. Exploring the frequently complicated dialogue between writer and subject, the contributors discuss tools appropriate to writing women's biography while their riveting accounts reveal how feminist scholarship led them to approach the study of women's lives in unconventional ways.

About the Author

Sara Alpern is an associate professor emerita of history at Texas A&M University and the author of Freda Kirchwey: A Woman of the Nation. Joyce Antler is Samuel J. Lane Professor Emerita of American Jewish History and Culture and Professor Emerita of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University. She is the author of You Never Call! You Never Write! A History of the Jewish Mother. Elisabeth Israels Perry (d. 2018) was a professor emerita of history and women’s and gender studies at Saint Louis University. She is the author of After the Vote: Feminist Politics in La Guardia's New York. Ingrid Winther Scobie is a retired professor in the Department of History and Government at Texas Woman’s University and author of Helen Gahagan Douglas: A Life.

Reviews


Blurbs

"This wonderful collection demonstrates the significance of women's biography as a central part of feminist scholarship. The feminist biographer inserts a second life into a biography, her own, giving us yet another layer of depth and insight."--Ann J. Lane, author of To "Herland" and Beyond: The Life and Work of Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Awards

Winner of the Susan Koppelman Award, 1993.