Historical Life Stories.(Viewpoint essay)

I TEACH A U.S. HISTORY course in which I assign autobiographies of the most varied kinds. We look at classics like Benjamin Franklin's, already accepted in the historical canon, along with a range of other accounts that reveal differing slants on the past of the United States, including slave narratives that have only recently been accepted as "historical evidence." These autobiographies transcend the purely personal. Franklin's is not just a rags-to-riches story; the life of the elder statesman, who claimed his face was seen as frequently as the moon, parallels the life of the small British colony in its transition to becoming a great sovereign state. Slave narratives by Frederick Douglass and Linda Brent (who went under the pseudonym "Harriet Jacobs") reveal how slavery affected individual lives and show how describing the struggle for freedom was regarded as inflammatory and subversive in the South. In the case of Linda Brent, doubt was even cast over whether a black woman could have composed a narrative at all, until historian Jean Fagin Yellin painstakingly verified all its events and people.

My course also includes examples of the confessional mode of autobiography, for these too can illuminate aspects of a wider context. St. Augustine's Confessions enables us to comprehend the continuing power of the sexist sexual ideas of early Christianity, While Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions demonstrates how sexism appeared within the Enlightenment. Adopting the subjective voice that Rousseau and the Romantics pioneered, Mary Wollstonecraft would retaliate with her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. After Wollstonecraft, many women who sought emancipation would write their lives into history, although recognizing that they could not reveal many of their hidden desires and aspirations.

Recently the confessional autobiography has assumed a new twist as the daughters of celebrated women vent anger against their mothers: examples are Mommy Dearest by Joan Crawford's daughter, Christina, bewailing her mother's alcoholism, competitive rages, and denial; and Rebecca Walker's diatribes in essay form against her prize-winning but neglectful feminist mother, Alice Walker. (1) The last decade has seen a spate of memoirs and autobiographies written by participants of radical movements in the 1960s and 1970s. These are now being joined by writings by women caught up in the extended mobility of globalization. Although the latter have been indirectly affected by the diffuse impact of the women's movement, the background to their personal struggles as women is the migrant's Predicament in an alien land. All these personal journeys combine to shift prevailing assumption about whose story can be told; their keyhole views into cultures and communities suppressed within the dominant historical frame combine to shift its parameters.

It is hardly surprising that the women's liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s should generate confessional remembering, for consciousness raising (CR), the innovative organizational form, was predicated on an experiential approach to knowledge. It offered a research tool connecting theory and practice, one that encouraged women to contemplate and write about their personal lives and link their personal experiences to larger structures of gender. Women came to understand that many of their "personal" problems such as insecurity about appearance and intelligence, exhaustion, and conflicts with fathers, husbands, and male employers--were not individual failings but a result of the systematic discrimination that is sexism. The idea of CR was that women, rather than doctors, psychologists, and religious leaders, were the experts about their own experiences and that feminist theory and practice should arise from the experiences of women's daily life. The idea of a connection between the personal and the public lodged in the consciousness of many women who were not actually in CR groups, and they too were emboldened to speak and write.

CR involved the individual reworking and interpreting of memories. When it was first practiced among New York Radical Women, we would pick apart each others' memories, compare and interrogate them, and start to recast memory as theories about the forms taken by sexism. We wanted to create an open-ended, fluid approach to politics that would lead to change and to a new theory of causes of female oppression. Several women in the early CR groups in which I participated, New York Radical Women and Redstockings, grew impatient with the tedious process and ...