Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

Reading the Autobiographical

Let us begin with a few theoretical remarks about autobiographical acts before turning to a consideration of women’s participation in American autobiographical discourses.

Assuming her experiential history as a reference base and point of departure, an autobiographer represents her life story in order to share it with others. Her “experience” and the “memory” through which it is routed are already interpreted phenomena and thus at least once removed from any pure facticity. After all, autobiographers sometimes take liberty with that most elementary fact, the date of birth, choosing for themselves a more propitious moment or purposefully confusing the date. And memory is selective and untrustworthy. What truth we come to know in reading autobiography derives not from the facts of a life truly remembered, though they may be of interest if we can find them, but from the meanings the autobiographer assigns to and extracts from the representation of her life. She reads meaningful reality into her life and we read her reading. Because of the interpretive nature of any autobiographical act, then, the distinction between autobiographical narrative and fiction remains elusive. Autobiography is always a story in time interweaving historical fact and fiction.

The meanings the autobiographer reads into her life are historically and culturally contingent. Telling her story, she negotiates—sometimes with little, sometimes with discerning, self-consciousness—the cultures of subjectivity available to her, the discourses of identity circulating around her, and the narrative frames commonly used to tell stories. These identities and frames establish what goes into the text as part of an intelligible and official story, and what remains outside as unintelligible and unofficial excess—a kind of noise troubling conventional meanings. In effect, then, she reads her life through her readings of other life stories.

But discourses within the dominant culture are multiple, their calls to normative subjectivity often contradictory, their effects on a specific autobiographical subject unpredictable. And each specific autobiographical subject speaks not from a single location within the community but simultaneously, from multiple locations determined by gender, race, class, nationality, ethnicity, religion, and sexuality, among other markers of identity. Moreover non-dominant communities conserve their own alternative discourses of identity and modes of storytelling. They too circulate heterogeneous calls to subjectivity. Given this multiplicity of the “real,” the autobiographical subject does not necessarily imitate prevailing cultural scripts in passive conformity. (And in fact, an imitation by a marginalized subject creates its own kind of noise in the system.) From her specific location within a complex experiential history she may quietly contest, critically adjust, or actively resist normative autobiographical meanings. The impact of her autobiographical mediation depends on the narrative adjustments she makes as she pursues her narrative act, her audience, the models available to her, and her social context and historical circumstances. Autobiographical practice, then, is neither static nor uniform.

Autobiographical Genres in the “Forgotten” Century and the History of American Autobiography

Our choice of time frame, 1819 to 1919, might seem unusual, bridging as it does two centuries. We have skewed this framing of the century in order to de-emphasize the centrality of the Civil War and to focus instead on multiple shifts in what constitute the territories and boundaries of the nation and thus the changing status of American Indians, African Americans, immigrants, and disenfranchised women as workers and writers. Ranging from the end of the early republic to the passage of the twentieth amendment to the Constitution in 1919 that enfranchised women, these narratives link a range of autobiographical genres to broad social transformations, geopolitical, economic, technological, social, and cultural. They offer opportunities to consider the forming, deforming, and reforming of identities in the dynamic context of American myths of identity and belonging. And they focus on what might be called the “forgotten” century for American women’s life writing, a time whose myriad and diverse autobiographical forms have as yet not been carefully studied or organized as a canon.

As we have argued elsewhere, the autobiographical is not a single genre but a conceptual umbrella encompassing different forms that serve diverse audiences, purposes, and narrative strategies.[3] Personal narratives are not merely transparent “accounts” of some past experience, or exact records of historical events in people’s lives or the life of the nation. Rather, they are performances of self-narration through which the meanings of the past are produced for the occasions and social identities of the present and the future. Therefore, we cannot assume an unproblematic relationship between autobiographical remembering and the events of the past. Nor can we regard life narratives as merely private acts or acts marginal to literary and cultural production. These modes provide a forum for interrogating issues in gendered experience that change throughout the century: literacy and education; coming-of-age and the life cycle; the nature of work, marriage, and family; mobility and adventure; sexuality and experimentation with identity; and shifting notions of personal and collective identity.[4]

In sum, autobiographical modes are not static. Rather, they are changing, improvisatory, in motion, hybrid modes always in dialogue with the specificities of personal remembering and the cultural expectations generated by the contours of a life story. Autobiographical narratives are always compelled to satisfy certain cultural conventions, the forms, patterns, and rhetorical styles of stories tellable and intelligible at a particular historical moment. They are motivated by particular audiences, contexts of publication, consumption, and desires. And they are mediated by publication practices and venues, as well as editorial intermediaries and policies. Yet, however constrained, the modes of the autobiographical continue to be fluid and improvised, and thus malleable to the individual teller’s understanding of her past and negotiation of her identity in the present.

Before commenting on autobiographical practices during this “forgotten century,” we want to comment briefly on the relationship of gendered autobiographical discourses and “America.” The history of “America” and the history of autobiographical practices are intimately connected. Autobiographical writing emerges as a compelling cultural activity in the West at approximately the same historical moment that European colonists and enslaved Africans began settling into the space described as “the New World,” a world well known to its indigenous inhabitants. This New World, laid out in all its abundance before the colonists, invited ever-new opportunities for recreating self and community. America called for autobiographical subjects. Of course the earliest first-person written narratives were accounts of travel and travail through which male Europeans mapped their encounters with and projections of new geographies, peoples, experiences, and identities.

In the Puritan colonies, self scrutiny saturated the environment as what Daniel B. Shea calls “the ur-narrative of God’s saving activity in time,” a salvation history at once personal and communal that justified and sustained the beleaguered community (1991). In these close communities, soul searching and community building coincided. Individual lives affirmed and secured communal norms; those norms organized the spiritual lives of individuals, including the lives of women, for whom marriage was an economic necessity and public anonymity the mark of God-given femininity.

Despite the dutiful femininity expected of them in this Old World of gender relations, women left accounts of their lives. Autobiographical forms—the poetry of Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672), the captivity narrative of Mary Rowlandson (1682), the diaries of Sarah Kemble Knight (1704–1705) and Elizabeth House Trist (1783–1784), the journal of Esther Edwards Burr (1754–1757), the spiritual testimonies of Quakers Jane Hoskens (1771) and Elizabeth Ashbridge (1774)—provided ready and intimate vehicles through which colonial women simultaneously heeded the cultural call to feminize subjectivity and negotiated their personal and often eccentric responses to unsettling experiences. These are the autobiographical inscriptions of women undomesticated, if only temporarily, by captivity, by travel, or by ministry. Traversing new, often hostile, assuredly fluid environments, these undomesticated subjects end up disrupting communal constructions of femininity. Disputatious women, they adventure through a frontier of their own, reinventing femininity.

By the late eighteenth century heterogeneous autobiographical forms circulated through the vast space of what was becoming a new republic. These included conversion narratives, spiritual journals, adventure narratives, travel diaries, captivity narratives, sea adventures, gallows narratives (or criminal confessions), and slave narratives—all of which contributed powerful cultural myths and communal models of identity to a colony becoming a nation with its own incipient identity. The most influential of these personal narratives was The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, begun in 1771 but not published as a complete work until 1868. Through his adroit manipulation of the rhetoric of self-fashioning, Franklin creates an exemplary type of American subject: the national, communally-located self-made man, bourgeois, optimistic, flagrantly individualistic, and decidedly masculine. The legacy of his model American continued throughout the nineteenth century. But another autobiographical mode emerged, influenced by Romanticism and Transcendentalism, that celebrates an intensified, sometimes secularized, antinomianism in which the autobiographical I as creator of the world defies all provided frames and selves. In either mode the autobiographical subject assumes its participation in the making of an American history.

Not everyone in the nineteenth century, however, had equal access to the official status of the new republican subject or assumed equal access to the making of autobiography and, with autobiography, the making of history. The republican subject remained normatively white, male, and bourgeois, even in its rebellions. Its exclusions were manifold and manifest: bourgeois white women, Native Americans, slaves, former slaves, Mexican Americans, recent immigrants, and members of the working class. When such marginalized subjects turned to autobiographical writing, then, they brought to the official stories unofficial and eccentric histories.

Throughout the one hundred years from 1819 to 1919, women adopted and adapted a range of autobiographical forms to bring personal stories into print and public circulation. Certainly they turned to diaries, journals, and letters as convenient modes of self-inscription, as documented by a number of scholars (see Bloom, Bunkers, Buss, Culley, Gwin, Huff, Schlissel, Temple, Wink). Such genres were understood as properly feminine forms of the autobiographical for literate women during the nineteenth century. These sheltered scribblings were intimate, personal, and colloquial. They focused on the quotidian and were circulated within a vibrant private circuit of exchange among women, rather than the marketplace, as chronicled in Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s groundbreaking study Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America. There were, however, many more modes of the autobiographical to which they turned as they registered their forays into public worlds, and these additional forms were of interest to the expanding outlets for publication. These additional autobiographical genres included confession, captivity narrative, slave narrative, spiritual autobiography, travel narrative, coming-of-age story, collective autobiography, personal essay, ethnographic history, manifesto, immigrant narrative, as-told-to narrative, testimony, and oral witness.

For example, Mary Jemison’s story of captivity takes up one of the most important genres of life writing in the nineteenth century. Other narratives unfold through plots common to their era. Mary Antin’s narrative of immigrant assimilation to an idealized America tells a different story than does Zitkala-Ša’s “Sketches,” but immigration narratives inevitably identify tensions between American and ethnic discourses, as Betty Bergland notes (144). Yet some essayistic life writing is less well known and less commonly thought of as autobiographical, such as Fannie Barrier Williams’s “The Club Movement Among Colored Women in America.” What these disparate narratives have in common is their complication of the assumption that women’s writing was confined to particular genres of the “personal.” The spiritual autobiography of Jarena Lee, for instance, not only documents an African American woman’s public mission but also attests that the slave narrative was not the only genre of life writing taken up by African American women in the first half of the nineteenth century. Thus, such narratives turn the focus of women’s writing from domesticity and the home to aspects of public life—work, travel, social movements, and political struggles.

Considering the hybrid and diverse modes of subjectivity in nineteenth-century women’s life writing reveals how much these writers experiment with the cultural forms permeating private and public worlds. That is, they perform subjectivity in ways that undermine any simplistic binary opposition of public and private. And women’s practices of autobiographical writing were multifaceted and wildly divergent. At different moments and in various regions, the audiences addressed and the modes used differed, depending upon the politics of publication, the desire of the public for narratives, and the social and cultural pressures for certain kinds of stories. Perhaps this very mobility and malleability of life writing accounts for why autobiographical practice flourished as an enabling means to articulate and reform subjectivity for many diversely located women. Life writing was restricted neither to middle-class women, nor to women of the northeast, nor to white women. Nor was it restricted to a dialogue sustained only between African American and white women. Life writing flourished during this century-long period as an enabling means of articulating and re-forming subjectivity, re-authoring a previously written self, or reflecting on the writer’s professional roles for many kinds of women who were otherwise differently advantaged and situated (see Boardman, Lee, Ling, Namias).

Women’s Life Writing and Print Culture

Over this century, women took up autobiographical genres for the multiple possibilities of subjectivity these forms made available. They used the existing media available through small and large publishers and in newspapers and magazines for the dissemination of their life stories to an American reading public. And it was not just the literati and the reasonably well-off, educated people of the northeastern states who participated in these thriving publication and circulation ventures. The poor, the vagrant, the criminal, the mobile, and women, too, became not only consumers of other people’s writing but also tellers or producers of print culture in very public ways. In his exploration of the history of the book in nineteenth-century America, David D. Hall suggests that “several factors coalesced to bring about this transformation: new printing and paper making technologies that reduced the price of books, improvements in how books were marketed, a rapid increase in the rate of literacy, and a general speeding up of communication. With abundance came the introduction of new literary genres” (37). People began to recognize that writing one’s story was not only an “American” thing to do; it brought social status, public recognition, and economic gain as well.

Autobiographical genres of self-narration multiplied. “A market economy, evangelical religion, and romanticism all encouraged people to think of themselves as free agents, characters in the making (and on the make) on the stage of their own devising,” suggests Scott Casper (14). Personal stories could circulate far beyond the local community, materializing elsewhere as a commodity of self-locating. With the expansion of print culture, “a pamphlet,” writes Ann Fabian, “created ‘a memorial’ more permanent than either the gossip of the street or the coverage of the press” (55). Autobiographical writing thus became a strategy for making one’s way in the world, making the world attentive to one’s passions, commitments, and goals, and making oneself as a world.

Casper points out that, for some people, life stories were the only capital readily available, a kind of personal property that could be turned into some modicum of profit for immediate return from audiences and readers. Those who were non-literate could dictate their stories to an intermediary or a publisher. The literate could write down their stories and either self-publish them or find a willing printer. Editors could publish the confessions of the non-literate, the renegade, the downtrodden, and the condemned. Travelers could produce chapbooks that focused on true-life adventures. Publishers increasingly directed their attention to “marginal figures who otherwise would not have survived in print: Indian captives, victims of shipwreck, eccentrics” (Casper 156). Accounts of criminal acts, a popular form of storytelling in America since the late seventeenth century (Fabian 52), became profitable publishing ventures for “printers, confessors, and some literate convicts” (51), and were peddled to an increasing working-class readership.[5] Exploring the kinds of narratives told by the poor, Fabian notes the importance of confessions of sinners and criminals, such as the narrative of the condemned Rose Butler that profited her editor rather than her, while still incorporating her narrative of her brief life.

Writing and publication histories are revealing for what they suggest about the political contexts and the emergent venues of life writing, as well as public responses to particular kinds of stories. What began as a rather brief narrative, such as Mary Jemison’s “as-told-to” captivity narrative first published by James Seaver in 1824, was repeatedly reprinted and expanded with supporting materials to become a substantial book later in the century, including such materials as photographs, letters, and testimonials. What was written at one historical moment might be published at a much later moment. Frances Anne (Fanny) Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation, written in 1838 and 1839, did not appear in published form until 1863 when Kemble decided to go public with her reflections on the degraded life of the slave plantation to counter English support for the Confederacy during the Civil War. At the turn of the twentieth century, many narratives appeared originally in national magazines or newspapers, among them The Independent, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Boston Globe, and in local newspapers such as The Butte Evening News.

By the 1850s an increasing number of women began to make their living as writers—journalists, novelists, magazine writers (see Bauer and Gould, Kelley). Publishers recognized the money to be made by directing attention to the consumer public, especially middle-class women. With the market for print material expanded, middle-class white women could establish and sustain themselves as professional writers, along the lines that George Sand profitably did in France and George Eliot in England. Margaret Fuller, Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Orne Jewett, Lucy Larcom, Elizabeth Phelps, and Rebecca Harding Davis are among the nineteenth-century women who made their living as writers, something unheard of for women writers before Margaret Fuller.[6] Not restricted to domestic life, these women were publicly active and vocal. Their narratives, however, testify to the cultural pressures of official bourgeois femininity. In each narrative the autobiographical subject has to constitute femininity as well as national subjectivity and construct it in such a fashion as to legitimate her claim to narrative authority. By the early twentieth century, however, aspiring professional writers, such as Mary Antin or Mary Hunter Austin, could assert that her life story was simultaneously the making of the writer.

Writers sought to publish autobiographical narratives for a variety of purposes. The possibility of earning money from publishing one’s life story, as noted above, could be very important, as it was for Adele Jewel, who helped support her family through reprintings of her brief life story of growing up as a deaf woman. In the case of Mary MacLane, the publication of her 1902 life narrative, originally titled I Await the Devil’s Coming, led to national celebrity and public hunger for more of her spicy stories of life as a single woman. Important too was the possibility of modeling a transformed life. African American preacher Jarena Lee was motivated to write her life story as a way of calling others to God’s purpose and validating her own “call.” Sometimes the purpose was at once individual and collective. The ante-bellum speeches of abolitionist activists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman referenced their own experience as representative of that of enslaved African women. The post-bellum narratives of Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes; or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1869) and Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892), shift the emphasis away from the horrors of slavery and the moral dilemma of the African American woman’s sexual concubinage, to the representation of the African American woman as the independent self-supporting member of an emerging black bourgeoisie desirous of participating in the Franklinian myth of self-making (see Santamarina). Autobiographical narrative becomes a means to affirm the subject’s identification with the mainstream values of American life, and to affirm it on behalf of the collectivity. This was the case at the dawn of the twentieth century when Booker T. Washington gathered essays and polemical writings in A New Negro for a New Century, including Fannie Barrier Williams’s essay on the club movement, “The Colored Woman and Her Part in Race Regeneration” (1900).

For other writers the motivation for collecting life stories was linked to gathering alternative histories of cultures disappearing in the United States. Although there were indigenous forms of oral and pictographic personal narratives in Native American cultures (Hertha Dawn Sweet Wong 1992), only after contact with white Americans did written autobiography by Native American women emerge as a bicultural product, whether written alone or in collaboration with a white amanuensis/editor.[7] This communal identification is signaled in the titles of such narratives as Catherine Brown’s Memoirs of Catherine Brown, a Christian Indian of the Cherokee Nation (1824) and Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Paiutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883). Yet the narrator weaves this alternative notion of communal subjectivity through narrative patterns inflected by the individualistic ethos of the dominant culture. Brown is influenced by Christian conversion narratives; Winnemucca may have been influenced as much by protest narratives as by traditional coup tales that establish communal stature (David Brumble, American Indian Autobiography, 1988). In these cultural contexts the ideologies of gender they engaged differentiate the narrative spheres of men and women.

The personal testimonies of nineteenth-century Mexican American women have only recently been recovered from various archives, primarily the archive of Western historian Hubert H. Bancroft, who collected over one hundred personal narratives (most in oral history form) of native Californians in the 1870s. In the late nineteenth century Bancroft hired assistants to collect oral histories of California pioneers and indigenes for his history of California, published from 1884 to 1890. One of the women Thomas Savage interviewed was Eulalia Pérez, whose testimony here marks a past that was being appropriated and suppressed by the national narrative of the new state of California. Perez’s life narration provides a lively testimony countering the official history of an emergent nation. These women’s personal narratives, according to Genaro M. Padilla, reveal common preoccupations: the affirmation of a distinct cultural heritage and a way of life forever changed by the Anglicization of California, the recording of the personal experiences of cultural disruption, and the braiding of domestic and social histories. But Padilla also notes that these women variously reflect upon and critique the gender arrangements deployed in the community and affirm their ability to find forms of empowerment in public life within the constraints of a patriarchal, racist society (My History 111).

Many autobiographical narratives of culturally eccentric subjects emerged through collaborative ventures. Often the narratives had to be authenticated by white patrons/editors who testified to their veracity and thereby legitimated the “life.” In other cases the autobiographical occasion became entirely collaborative. White editors, whether amateur political activists or (later) professional anthropologists, collected the narrative, framed it, organized it, and in the process conformed both narrative mode and autobiographical subject to their ideological agenda. Nonetheless, autobiographical acts, even if collaborative, also became a medium of cultural critique and resistance. Women like Harriet Jacobs implicitly challenged the exclusionary bases upon which cultural notions of white feminine identity rested, bases implicating racial, ethnic, and class identifications. In the process these subjects reproduced different forms of femininity. They thereby undermined the assumed naturalness of sexual and racial differences, simultaneously affirming and troubling the meaning of American lives by turning their own specific lenses upon the process of forced Americanization.

By the early decades of the twentieth century, great masses swelled the populations of urban centers, including large numbers of immigrants who established ethnic communities in America’s cities. Like African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans, these immigrants and their children struggled with hyphenated identities and the different histories determinative of those identities. Thus each group of immigrants and each generation of ethnic Americans confronted the dynamic tension between assimilation to a normative American identity that devalued cultural difference and the immigrant’s allegiance to the culture of origin and its indigenous traditions, which continued over generations, as Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong’s critique makes clear. Autobiographies of immigrant and ethnic women reveal how these tensions are exacerbated by multiple gender histories. Gender arrangements line up differently in different cultural contexts, their effects on women influenced by the intersection of generational position, class status, ethnic group, and racial identification. Autobiographers negotiate competing histories of normative femininity and, in those negotiations, make gender adjustments. The destabilizing possibilities of adjustments to and in a new land, to and in a multicultural identity, are evident in the succession of names Mary Antin adopts in her autobiography, The Promised Land (1912), as well as in the undoing and reinvention of identity in Lillian Wald’s The House on Henry Street (1915) and Anzia Yezierska’s Children of Loneliness (1923).

Women’s Life Narratives in the Reconfiguration of American Studies

The reconfigured concept of the nineteenth-century United States as a nation with imperialist ambitions articulated by Amy Kaplan, Donald Pease, John Carlos Rowe, Robyn Wiegman, and others finds support in several narratives by women that attest to internal colonization (Fanny Kemble, Zitkala-Ša) and inequitable access for working class and non-white people (Lucy Larcom, Fannie Barrier Williams, the prostitute “Madeleine”). Several autobiographical narratives also suggest how seemingly disenfranchised women, such as Sarah Winnemucca and Eulalia Pérez, negotiated the boundary of the American nation transnationally. Notions of the dominance of the Eastern states—New England, mid-Atlantic, the South—are also challenged by the work of women writers publishing not just in private, daily forms but publicly throughout many regions of the nation: for instance, Mary Hunter Austin in California and the Southwest or Mary MacLane in the northern Rockies.

Compelling support for reconfiguring American studies as a site of comparative ethnic studies is also offered in the focus on ethnicity and class position in writers as diverse as African American preacher Jarena Lee and Russian Jewish immigrant Mary Antin, both of whom figure “Americanness” across multiple axes of identification. We have only to turn to Sui Sin Far’s brief autobiographical essays to note how inadequate any single characterization of her ethnicity would be, or how her texts intervene in simplistic notions of ethnic identity formation by critiquing stereotypes of the Chinese in North America. Each of these reconfigurations of literary and cultural activity in the period between 1819 and 1919 redefines the nation as transnationally situated, a site of the colonization of some and the enfranchisement of others.

American literary culture becomes a marketplace of heterogeneous forms of writing and testimony through which seemingly marginal subjects exert their claims to a subjective agency not necessarily grounded in being of European descent, male, prosperous, or Christian. Most strikingly, perhaps, texts ranging from Rose Butler’s public confession of arson in 1819 to Harriet Quimby’s narrative of flight in 1912 contest an early dictum about gendered difference: that women’s worlds in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries constituted a separate sphere. Because this notion has been so pervasive in American literary studies and is implicitly challenged by many women’s narratives, it requires further discussion.

The “Separate Spheres” argument, an orthodoxy of 1970s and 1980s theorizing of women’s history in the United States, asserted a binary opposition between public and private spheres, with women situated in an increasingly privatized zone of domestic femininity and men active within the public zone organized according to masculine values, behaviors, attitudes, and practices.[8] As the essays in No More Separate Spheres! make clear, the separate spheres model was productive in the early stages of feminist theorizing of the historically specific construction of gender and gendered roles in nineteenth-century America.[9] It provided, as Linda Kerber notes, a “device” through which women’s historians could explore the lives of nineteenth-century women and the social organization of gendered bodies, practices, and discourses (37). Although enabling as a framework for constructing the gendered differences of and in women’s lives and cultural production, that model has become increasingly problematic for understanding the intersection of gender with other vectors of identity, including race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and regional location. Separate spheres arguments universalize “woman,” equate public powerlessness with the privatized virtues of pliant femininity, attach sentimentality to women and the feminine, depoliticize the home and family, and reproduce a rigid binary of private and public. In so doing, this bifurcated model belies the diversity and complexity of gendered lives.

For one thing the private sphere invoked through this schema tended to be a particular private sphere, one characterizing only particular households—the bourgeois households of the expanding white middle and upper classes. For millions of immigrants and for slaves—captive, escaped, and eventually “freed” by the Emancipation Proclamation—the household remained a space of labor commanded through slavery, indenture, and economic exigency. Then too, on the ever-moving western “frontier,” the amorphous spheres of people’s lives were constantly reconfigured and renegotiated through the demands of life on the prairies, in the mountains, and along the coasts. Finally, the intersection of gender with race, ethnicity, and sexuality suggests that feminized spaces could be spaces inhabited by men alone, and that within women’s relationships the organization of gendered difference maps unequally across cultural locations. Indeed, as Amy Kaplan argues, in the age of Manifest Destiny, the 1830s through the 1850s, when U.S. boundaries were in continuing fluctuation, domesticity relied on and reproduced the contradictory logic of nationalist expansion. Far from being a “separate sphere,” the domestic served as “an ambiguous third realm between the national and the foreign,” and even women’s texts dedicated to household management—such as those of Catherine V. Beecher and Sara Josepha Hale—inscribe the “racial underpinnings” shared by domestic and imperialist discourses (584).

A focus on autobiographical narratives written and/or published between 1819 and 1919 exposes the limitations of early feminist mappings of women’s separate spheres. Women who wrote autobiographically came from regions as far-flung as New England and Mexican California, the Rocky Mountain west and the tenement streets of New York, the Georgia plantation and the Mojave Desert. They were not constrained in spaces understood problematically as “domestic.” Certainly there are spaces of constraint exposed in these narratives, but they are diverse spaces of negotiation, both public and private. The brothel in Butte, Montana, for instance, is at once a place of labor, domesticity, and public entertainment. And the separate spheres that Zitkala-Ša negotiates are not those of feminized consumption and masculine labor but of the Lakota reservation and the Carlisle Indian School, with their differing political practices, ideas of education, and spiritual belief systems. Moreover these women are on the move, adventurous, and questing intellectually, spiritually, physically, and geographically. They emerge from a range of domestic spheres, though not idealized ones, to become agents in their worlds, making, mapping, negotiating, and sometimes changing those worlds.

The diversity of earlier women’s autobiographical practices questions easy assumptions about what women were doing, during the century that led up to women’s suffrage, that took them outside the home, and outside the imminent foreclosure of sentimental fiction’s plots of marriage, childbirth, and/or death. Collectively such life writing challenges our assumptions about what characterized their pursuit of action and agency in public worlds, the worlds of labor (physical and intellectual) and professional work, the world of communities, and the worlds beyond the borders of the expanding nation. Even when these women reflect on domestic life in the home, they do so as accomplished writers, not simply recalling an early life but telling stories about coming of age as a process of encountering and negotiating constraints of gendered, sexual, and ethnic difference. Their narratives foreground the continually fluid, and at times migratory, social locations occupied by American women during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They also expose the variety and the vagaries of becoming American and the gendered and racialized identities subsumed in the national narrative.

Conclusion

The autobiographical texts gathered in Before They Could Vote suggest a larger story, beginning with the 1819 as-told-to confession of nineteen-year-old Rose Butler, sentenced to death for alleged arson in a poor rooming house; to the transgressive narratives of women as disparate as the prostitute “Madeleine,” the aviator Harriet Quimby, the accomplished writer Sui Sin Far (Edith Maude Eaton), and the American Indian activist, author, and opera composer Zitkala-Ša in the early twentieth century. While theirs is no simple story of triumphant emergence onto a public stage, these women all intervened in the social, racial, and religious constraints that aimed to keep them fixed in domestic life, without, in most cases, renouncing the communities that sustained them and their activist commitments to important issues of their times. From Jarena Lee refusing to suppress her preaching in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, to Fanny Kemble protesting the wrongs of slavery on Butler Island, Georgia, to Sarah Winnemucca asserting the rights of the Paiute nation through her narrative of broken promises, to Eulalia Pérez telling a complex story of empowerment and compliance at the California mission, to the Massachusetts mill worker Lucy Larcom chronicling her humble beginnings and rise to literary eminence, to Fannie Barrier Williams’s prominence in the African American middle-class in Chicago, these writers all tell stories of making their way in the multiple, changing public worlds of American life.

Yet few of these women became as famous in their own time as did writers Margaret Fuller, Sarah Orne Jewett, Mary Hunter Austin, Mary Antin, and Bryn Mawr College president M. Carey Thomas or activists Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman. Many have remained little known. The three brief testimonies published in The Independent describe the tensions of daily life between African American and white women in the aftermath of the Civil War and their changing sense of American public life. And a few “forgotten” writers such as Mary MacLane are included both for their piquant sense of the costs and pleasures of autobiographical writing and to introduce them to a wider public. Taken together, all these women, through their life narratives, produce a complex portrait of the challenges and costs of aspiring to self-affirming lives.

By collecting these narratives as Before They Could Vote, we argue against the tendency to overinvest in the notion of sentimental modes of cultural production in the nineteenth century, and call for a more nuanced understanding of the affective dimensions of writing in the myriad modes of the everyday. We dispute a reading of the “forgotten” century as predominantly a period of suffragist reform negotiated in domestic spheres prior to the Nineteenth Amendment and call for approaching this time as one generating heterogeneous narratives of activism and adventuring. We counter the tendency to approach this hundred-year span methodologically through the lens of a black-and-white binary of slavery versus freedom and to see its multicultural and transnational complexity. We assert that assimilation to an “American” identity was invariably complicated by the ambivalent relationship of women at multiple sites of immigration to the prospect of American citizenship. Finally, we hope that readers will take as much pleasure as we did in discovering some previously unknown autobiographical writers and texts.

The narratives of lesser-known women writers in Before They Could Vote, along with the diaries and journals of such self-conscious writers as Alice James and Louisa May Alcott, are a fascinating “pre-history” to reading lists that explore the “golden age” of Modernist women’s narratives by such writers as Emma Goldman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Edith Wharton, Isadora Duncan, H.D., Ida B. Wells, Anzia Yezierska, Gertrude Stein, Zora Neale Hurston, and the later work of Mary Hunter Austin.

There are rich prospects for future research. New explorations of women’s autobiographical cultures, contexts, genres, and rhetorical strategies might question prevailing understandings of the “canon” of nineteenth-century autobiographical writing employed by individuals and communities to negotiate national belonging and the organization of everyday life. How might lesser-known nineteenth-century women’s narratives lead us to read core canonical American autobiographical texts such as those of Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and Henry Adams differently? How might we understand the organization of gendered social systems and the socially constituted boundary between the zone of domesticity and the zone of public activity in the nineteenth century without recourse to a “separate spheres” model? How might attending to works by lesser known writers, as well as the little-known works of well-known writers such as Sarah Orne Jewett and Margaret Fuller, offer a more nuanced picture of the cultural meanings and uses of writing lives in the decades prior to suffrage? If the self-made man is a trope that informs many male autobiographical narratives of the time, from Frederick Douglass’s to Edward Bok’s, what complex terms and contingencies might inform the pressures on and impulses to self-making among “undomesticated” women? We leave it to readers to explore possible responses to these questions and to generate many others.

Notes

We thank Oxford University Press for permission to excerpt sections of Sidonie’s essay on “Autobiography” from The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States.

1. In a 1991 essay on “Nineteenth-Century Autobiographies of Affiliation: The Case of Catharine Sedgwick and Lucy Larcom” in the influential collection American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, Carol Holly acknowledged that her reading of these neglected texts was only a step toward the “comprehensive contextual study of “nineteenth-century autobiography by literary women, indeed by all nineteenth-century American women” (227).

2. Fewer than half (ten) of the women included in Before They Could Vote are subjects of entries in the encyclopedic Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States, published in 1995 (edited by Cathy N. Davidson and Linda Wagner-Martin), suggesting that autobiographical narratives still may be seen as “sub-literary.”

3. For an expanded discussion of the types and terms of autobiographical writing, including sixty genres of self-narrating, see our Reading Autobiography. See also the Encyclopedia of Life Writing edited by Margaretta Jolly.

4. As many of these women attest, becoming literate was critical to identity formation (Zagarri on literacy, 33, note 7). Acquisition of literacy was a major achievement for Zitkala-Ša, Sarah Winnemucca, and Sui Sin Far, among others. In Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic Mary Kelley explores how women’s lives were reshaped through female academies and seminaries.

5. Such personal stories were seen to give “authentic voice” to those confessing and, as Fabian points out, to persuade readers to accept their truth as authoritative, despite the fact that they were often lurid and sensationalized narratives designed to capture their audiences through titillation and revelation. Sometimes the authenticity was fictional, but powerful and compelling nonetheless, as in the case of certain Barbary Coast narratives presented as women’s adventures of being captured by pirates but written by men (see Baepler, cited in Fabian 52).

6. Lawrence Buell points out that Sigourney’s Letters of Life (1866) was “the first full-dress autobiography written by an American author of either sex whose primary vocation was creative writing” (60).

7. The narrator constitutes her self as an autobiographical subject through what Arnold Krupat calls a synecdochic sense of self “where narration of personal history is more nearly marked by the individual’s sense of himself [sic] in relation to collective social units or groupings” (xx).

8. See Linda Kerber’ s essay on feminist scholarship of the nineteenth century, especially the work of Barbara Welter in The Cult of True Womanhood and Aileen Kraditor on the notion of the cult of domesticity. See also Frances Cogan’s alternative of Real Womanhood. These critiques help us see how the notion of women’s constitutive domesticity was “a normative ideal [for white women] rather than a description of reality” (Zagarri 33, our interpellation).

9. For critiques of the separate spheres argument, see Dana Nelson and Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher.

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