Three decades after the pioneering collection, The Challenge of Feminist Biography: Writing the Lives of Modern American Women, it is time to rethink the gender analysis of writing biography after the intervention of intersectionality and the transnational turn. The original collection brought together one-time and repeat biographers to reflect on how applying a feminist lens to biography reshaped the contours of U.S. history. Introspective in focus, these essays outlined what the process of feminist biography offered as an intervention in a genre historically preoccupied with the public lives of “great men.” As contributor Anne Wexler noted, The Challenge of Feminist Biography contributors offered “new ways of thinking about female subjectivity and the construction of identity that have already begun to transform the genre of biography itself.”

Feminist biographers have made a noticeable and lasting impact since the collection’s publication in 1992. No longer is it adequate to overlook the personal spaces and relationships that animate biographical subjects’ lives. Nor is it adequate to overlook caregiving, health concerns, or intimacy. Yet, since 1992, feminist scholarship—and in turn feminist biography—has been refined as a craft and expanded in focus. The original collection centered entirely on white women reformers most active in the first half of the twentieth century in the United States. Since then, Americanist feminist biographers have expanded past this exclusive narrative, drawing out the stories of BIOPIC and LGBTQIA+ subjects. Feminist biographers have also demonstrated the richness of moving beyond borders and outside a single subject, birth-to-death conceptualization.

This panel brings together U.S. historians whose work reflects this expansive approach to discuss the limits and possibilities as well as the joys and frustrations of feminist biography. There remains considerable recovery and discovery work to be done in women’s history. Questions we will explore are: do we think that collection contributor Joyce Antler’s concept of “feminism as life process” still applies? What other frameworks are useful in exploring our subjects? How has intersectional and queer approaches to historical research shifted the contours of feminist biography? How has greater attention to global travel and transnational alliances reshaped Americanists’ approach to biography? How can biography help explain embedded structures of inequality and the struggles for justice in the U.S.? Is there still more to be done to theorize how biography can offer insights about the workings of power and authority? What more can be said about the interrelationship between public and private lives? This panel aims to generate a vibrant conversation and ultimately provide the foundation for a new collection that speaks to the vibrancy and continued relevance of feminist biography. Note that the chair/commentator is a contributor to the original collection reconsidered by this inter-generational panel.