Speaking Louder Than I Can: The Power of Feminist Biography

Feminist biography burst on the scene in the 1970s dedicated to discovering and reclaiming female characters whose lives had been ignored or overlooked. Recovering women's lives wasn't enough. Feminist biographers pioneered an interpretive and narrative strategy that focused on gender as a primary influence on women's lives alongside a commitment to exploring those lives through the powerful lens of modern feminism. Until there are no significant differences between men's and women's experiences, telling women's lives will call for a different kind of biography. Feminist biography offers that fresh perspective to the larger biographical enterprise. In this work, acclaimed women's historian Susan Ware lays out the themes and contributions of feminist biography interwoven with profiles of exemplary twentieth-century figures, including Alice Paul, Pauli Murray, and Carolyn Heilbrun. Ware finds feminist biography in unusual places, such as an opera libretto, a family history, and an oral history collaboration, and shows how the approach illuminates the lives of LGBTQ+ subjects and women who do not identify as feminists.