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TEACHING WOMEN’S HISTORY TROUGH WOMEN’S
AUTOBIOGRAPHIES
Inmaculada ALVA *
Women’s history is a relatively new discipline. Its appearance and development are related to the
extent of access to university education for women. Many female historians drew attention to the
invisibility of women in official histories. Some of them had suggested that there was a need to write
a new, more interdisciplinary sort of history, using a different methodology, which would give a voice
to those previously silenced. This essay presents the general outline of a research project I am
carrying out on the autobiographical writings of three North American historians: Gerda Lerner,
Natalie Z. Davis and Jill Ker Conway. All three were important activists who defended equality for
women in academe and other professional spheres.
Lerner, Davis, and Conway wrote their memories as an exercise in self‐understanding, but also to
leave a record of the situation of women in the second half of the twentieth century in the United
States. Their texts are, for this reason, valuable historical sources. Whilst reflecting on their academic
and research trajectories, they also express the motivation for and influences on their decisions –
above all their election of women’s history as research material – their struggles to achieve academic
positions at a time when there was no tradition of them being occupied by women, and the
conditions that limited their work and that of other women. 1
Although my project covers all their autobiographical output, in this paper, I will limit myself to
stressing some common elements in their autobiographies which throw light on the way they looked
at women’s history.
A common element in their autobiographic writings lies in their interest in women’s history, a
focus with roots in their experience of being outsiders, relegated to minority status, living – in some
way – in the borderlands, between two conflicting worlds. Davis and Lerner, because they were Jews
and sympathized with the leftist ideology which, in the 1960s, was considered anti‐American. As
Davis explains:
I still wanted to be part of the center of the community and also to be its critic, but
now the source of the critical spirit came from seeing myself as part of an intellectual elite
and from a more fully developed political ethical vision […]. I still felt as if I belonged to
two worlds, but now it was not so much being Jewish that created the tension between
them, but being part of the political left. 2
Gerda Lerner felt like “an outsider, as a woman, a Jew, an immigrant and a radical.” 3 This feeling
had begun in childhood, when she “saw the world as divided into warring fields; I felt an obligation to
choose among them”: between her artist mother –“a self‐defined Bohemian, rebelling against
bourgeois standards of propriety, advocating sexual freedom and experimenting with all kinds of
then novel practices” 4 – and her strict grandmother – who tried to prevent her daughter‐in‐law’s
ideas from influencing her grandchildren. In her first autobiography, The Road from Coorain, Conway
also describes her lonely childhood, as she felt alienated from her classmates at the Queenwood
School. Her shyness and the family conflicts that had brought her to Sydney separated her from the
world and conversations of the other girls. She remembers that “it was painful when others talked
happily about their fathers or boasted about the family fortunes. I couldn’t join in either, and became
slowly aware that my family and life circumstances were unusual.” 5
*
University of Navarra (Spain).