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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Hundreds of English-language biographical reference books devoted to women subjects were published between 1966 and 2006. These works compensated for underrepresentation of women in standard sources and responded to the intense interest in women's lives on the part of feminist scholars. The findings in this article are derived from a bibliographic database that includes works limited by nationality, race, occupation, and other factors, as well as general biographical dictionaries. A decade-by-decade analysis reveals trends in subject content that parallel developments in the scholarly field of women's studies and the public arena. Problems with duplicative content, subjectivity, and factual errors are described, and points for evaluation are recommended. As biographical information about women is increasingly available on the open Web, questions remain about the nature and future of this type of information source.
INTRODUCTION
For as long as books have been published, collective biographies have been in vogue. From the lives of the saints, to multivolume national biographical dictionaries, to gossipy works about movie stars--readers and researchers have many resources to satisfy their seemingly inexhaustible appetites for information about the lives of others.
Why Women's Biography Matters
Biographical dictionaries are important materials in every library's general reference collection. According to a popular textbook on reference services, "one of the most consistent features of reference work has been the high demand for information about people" (Fairchild and Bopp, 2001, p. 381). People, of course, come in two genders; yet prior to the advent of the women's movement, standard biographical sources slighted women. For example, the classic British resource, the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB), included 34,533 men and only 1,518 women, about four percent. In the supplementary Missing Persons volume, issued in 1994, the portion of women was twelve percent, or 130 of 1,086 entries (Fenwick, 1994), and this was hailed as a major improvement. American women fared no better in the Dictionary of American Biography (DAB); in the original set and its first two supplements, there are 706 biographies of women and 14,164 of men--again, women are just over four percent of the total (Garraty, 1988).
Of course, when it comes to female biographical subjects, quantity is not the only issue. Quality of content is obviously also important. A historian, looking back on the DAB, ventures that "in general, the sketches of the women are no better or worse than those of men" (Garraty, 1988, p. 674) while he calls attention to the cursory treatment of certain luminaries (Louise May Alcott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Abigail Adams) and an occasional tendency to dwell on women's physical appearance, frail health, and domestic details. He laments that genealogical references are almost always to the male line of descent. In her extensive analysis of the female subjects and female contributors in the DNB, Fenwick (1994) discovers some women entered under husbands' names by which they were scarcely known in their own lifetimes, let alone by posterity. On the whole, women who were admitted to the pages of the DNB were not treated in as great a depth as their male counterparts. Among other examples, Fenwick points out that Jane Austen merited less than two pages, while Jonathan Swift was accorded twenty-three pages.
With the rise of the women's liberation movement (often called the "second wave" of American feminism) in the late 1960s, came a renewed interest in concise biographies of women, both living and deceased. This article looks at that prolific era. One should bear in mind, however, that earlier generations of "first wave" feminists likewise gathered biographical data on women into dictionary-style books. For example, A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred-seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life (Willard & Livermore, 1893) went through several editions and reprintings. The most recent reissue was in 2005 (Willard & Livermore, 2005). The compilers--temperance crusader and suffragist Frances Willard and journalist and social reformer Mary Livermore--declared in their preface that "the nineteenth century is [the] woman's century." With a nod to "all the cyclopaedias and books about famous women," they announced their intention to "supply a vacant niche in the reference library" and to enlighten readers: "Even to those best informed on this subject, we believe that a glance at these pages will bring astonishment at the vast array of woman's achievements here chronicled, in hundreds of new vocations and avocations." They foreshadow the populist credo of the social historians of our own time, by stating that "this book is not alone a book of record of famous names, but one which aims to show what women have done in the humbler as well as in the higher walks of life" (Willard & Livermore, 1893, preface).
A century later, Willard and Livermore's sentiments are echoed by Barbara J. Love, editor of Feminists Who Changed America, 1963-1975 (2006), who explained her motivation for creating a biographical dictionary thus:
This book had to be written. The 2,220 biographies in this reference work must be available for anyone who wants to understand why the second wave women's movement succeeded so quickly and pervasively. More than any other social revolution in history, ours grew from the struggles of thousands of individuals to erase thousands of separate forms of discrimination in every sector of society. (p. xi)
In our own era, Love asserts, the United States has experienced another burst of progress by women, and learning about the lives of feminist leaders will inspire the next generation of activists:
It is my hope, and the hope of dozens of others who worked on this reference book, that young feminists today and in the future will know the contributions each of us made and that this knowledge will nurture them in the continuing struggle. (p. xv)
That biographies have an educational value is obvious. By presenting successful role models, they inspire readers and instruct them in strategies for overcoming life's obstacles. Moreover, the true stories of individual lives lend immediacy and interest to dull historical study. When we identify with the people of the past, we may better understand the times in which they lived and their relevance to our own times. Furthermore, biography has a particular role in advancing women's equality:
What better approach to understanding social injustice inflicted on women throughout the ages, than the biography of an exceptional woman, for to speak of a woman as exception because she did not fit into the stereotype is already to denounce the injustices of the stereotypes. (Gutierrez, 1992, p. 54)
Feminist biography has two important consequences: it "allows us to see women as central actors, and from the perspective of their own lived experience"; and it "allows us to see gender as a historical construct" (Smart, 1992, p. 62). Put another way, "feminist biographers in particular appreciate that the possibility of a viable future depends, at least in part, on securing a usable past" (Long, 1999, p. 104).
Present-day feminists have been especially drawn to autobiographical genres, including memoirs and life histories. The very act of writing one's life story can be empowering and affirming for women authors, and certainly reading about a woman's life in her own words is a moving and inspirational experience for an empathetic female reader. A number of popular books have reproduced the diaries or oral histories of "ordinary" women of the past whom standard historical studies ignore. Arguably the best example of this subgenre is A Midwife's Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (Ulrich, 1990), which won a Pulitzer Prize.
Scholarly studies of women's autobiographical writings are legion. To a lesser extent, feminist theorists and critics have examined and discussed biography, both as a literary genre and a liberationist strategy. Among the themes that feminist scholars grapple with are: the relationship of the biographer to her subject; the blurred boundaries between autobiography, biography, and fiction; the theoretical underpinnings of feminist biography; and the response of female readers to biographies of women (Barry, 1990; Chevigny, 1983; Heilbrun, 1988; Iles, 1992; Long, 1999; Stanley, 1992).
Nearly all recent scholarship on women's life-writing (1) is concerned with books, diaries, and other lengthy works that treat individual women. Alison Booth's research is a notable exception. Booth identified more than 930 English-language collective biographies of women (i.e., works in which three or more women's lives are treated in narrative form) published between 1830 and 1940. Faced with this sizeable corpus, she concluded that feminist historiographers are mistaken when they assert that women's history was invisible, forgotten or lost until our own era. Rather, "over the centuries, it seemed that a nation or community was hardly worth its salt without its lists of eminent women" (Booth, 2004, p. 3). She documents an uninterrupted tradition of chronicling women's lives, a tradition with several purposes: "The presenters of these group panegyrics assumed that assortments of female biographies served not only as sound evidence concerning women's nature and as reliable guides to feminine excellence but also as contributions to national history" (p. 3). She demonstrates that these popular biographical compendia offered a wider range of role models for women readers than did advice literature or novels during the same time span. Booth's study does not extend to works published after 1940.
Although there has...
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