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This is an annotated bibliography of the more than 930 books published
in English between 1830 and 1940 that collect three or more women's
biographies in narrative form (a few reference works are included). The
bibliography in How to Make It as a Woman provides the basis for
this online version, but omits the annotations, and lacks some
recently-discovered information. We will continue to enhance the
information gathered here, and enhance the capabilities of this site.
How to Make It as a Woman is the first full-length interpretation
of the form, female prosopography, or collective biographies of women,
in which much of the existing records of women's history and biography
have been preserved across the centuries. Generation after generation
has lamented the supposed absence of stories of celebrated women of the
past. Yet elegies for the missing often accompany fresh memorials to
women who have been acknowledged in many previous tributes. There has
been a surprising consensus in favor of praise of famous or virtuous
women, as an important appendix to the praise of groups of great and
good men. Over the centuries, it seemed that a nation or community was
hardly worth its salt without its list of eminent women. The people who
compiled these group panegyrics (most often men, but increasingly women
in the later nineteenth century) offered assortments of women's lives
not only as evidence concerning women's nature and as reliable self-help
guides for women, but also as contributions to national history. Part
of the excitement of rediscovering these popular, often entertaining and
richly illustrated books lies in the variety of women recognized in
them. Standards of feminine conduct are waived, more often than not,
for the saints, queens, politicians, warriors, nurses, writers,
assassins, mistresses, explorers, artists, reformers, farmers,
entrepreneurs, celebrities and mothers, wives, or sisters of famous
men—all types of "women in all ages and all countries," as a common
phrase puts it. As Christine de Pizan wrote in 1405, "All things which
are feasible and knowable . . . are possible and easy for women to
accomplish." For the multitudes of women who could read but not get in
such volumes, these representations offered a wider range of "how to
make it as a woman" than contemporary advice literature or novels.
-- Alison Booth
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This online
version expands upon the Bibliography of Collective Biographies of Women
published in Alison Booth, How to Make It as a Woman (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2004). It has been developed with the
assistance of Cindy Filer Speer of the Electronic Text Center at the
University of Virginia, Aimee Geoghan, and Mara Bandy.
The bibliography in the book was compiled with the assistance of Christopher Jackson,
Karen Dietz, Erin O'Connor, Sarah Whitney, Christine Bayles-Korstch,
Margaret Cooke, and Regan Boxwell.
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