Overview

Beginning in the 1970s, feminist biography has been dedicated to discovering and reclaiming lives that have been ignored or marginalized. These works shook up the genre of biography by introducing a different type of person as worthy of biographical treatment and utilizing a narrative and interpretive strategy that focused on gender as a primary influence on women's lives, alongside a commitment to exploring those lives through the lens of modern feminism. In this work, acclaimed women's historian Susan Ware masterfully lays out the themes and contributions of feminist biography interwoven with profiles of exemplary twentieth-century figures, including Alice Paul, Doris Stevens, Gertrude Stein, Pauli Murray, Mildred Jefferson, and Dorothy McConnell. Ware finds feminist biography in unusual places, such as an opera libretto, a family history, and an oral history collaboration. Among the themes she addresses are intersectional challenges faced by biographers of women of color and LGTBQ+ women and writing about the lives of women who did not identify as feminists. She also speaks to the ongoing development of the genre to speak to the concerns and issues of the times. Offering models for living in the present and inspiration for a more equitable future, Speaking Louder Than I Can is a masterful example of feminist biography's central insights---that women's lives matter and that gender is essential for understanding them---and argues forcefully for its continued relevance.

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9780197834510

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A pioneer in the field of women's history and a leading feminist biographer, Susan Ware is the author and editor of numerous books on twentieth-century US history, including American Women's History: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2015), Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote, Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century, and the American National Biography. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Hopkinton, New Hampshire.

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