Speaking Louder Than I Can
The Power of Feminist Biography
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:1st Aug '26
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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. Throughout she weaves her own journey as a feminist biographer into the stories she tells 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 â that women's lives matter and that gender is essential for understanding them â and argues forcefully for its continued relevance.
For Susan Ware, reading the first wave of feminist biographies published in the 1970s felt like 'a revolutionary act.' Soon she joined the cause herself, writing and editing over the next half century some of the key works in the burgeoning field and helping to define a genre that set out to document the ways 'women have always been a force in history.' In the nine exquisitely crafted essays of Speaking Louder Than I Can, Ware brings a new constellation of activist women to light while reflecting on her past work and offering guidance to a future in which 'all biography should be feminist biography.' * Megan Marshall, author of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart *
Susan Ware is a long-time champion and pioneer of women's biography. Five decades ago, when naysayers questioned the field, she validated its scholarly merit and remained steadfast in her pursuit of critiquing the lives of the famous and legendary while amplifying the voices of the forgotten but no less consequential. Speaking Louder Than I Can is both grounded in Ware's trademark intellectual rigor and attentive to biography's role in affirming and inspiring future generations. She is a treasure to those of us who care about women's history and write about their lives. * A'Lelia Bundles, author of Joy Goddess: A'Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance *
Writing about American women's lives and accomplishments through a feminist lens is historian Susan Ware's personal and professional calling, and in this charming and insightful book she steps back to examine her own intellectual journey within the evolution of her field. With candor and humor Ware explores the chemistry between biographer and subject - including her own, sometimes fraught, relationships to the women she aspired to capture on the page - and in pungent portraits she wrestles with the political and scholarly dynamics of deciding who will be restored to their place in history. * Elaine Weiss, author of The Woman's Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote *
ISBN: 9780197834510
Dimensions: 212mm x 152mm x 25mm
Weight: 490g
312 pages