This roundtable explores the opportunities and challenges of researching, writing, and selling biographies of women in American history. In a Perspectives on History article entitled “Missing Women: Tackling Gender Imbalance in Social Studies Textbooks,” teacher Bridget Riley expresses frustration with the dearth of women featured in textbooks. This erasure owes to a variety of factors, including the relative paucity of biographies of women. That situation, in turn, owes to a range of factors. The records of men, particularly elite white men, have been more often saved than women’s records have. Meanwhile, archival practices in the past often subsumed women’s papers within the collections of their male relatives with metadata hindering the discoverability of women’s records. In addition, editorial and digitization projects for the papers of notable men have long received copious support from universities and funding agencies and have brought together manuscript sources housed at far-flung repositories into accessible formats. Meanwhile, Father’s Day is an important holiday for the sale of history books to general readers, and biographies of women may not fare well in that context.

While authors continue to face these challenges, they also have opportunities in exploring women’s lives. Biographers may have chances to work with little-used sources, to develop creative approaches to research or storytelling, and to help change the canon of American history by elevating unfamiliar stories for a range of audiences including general readers, schoolchildren, museumgoers, and scholars. Finally, exploring women’s lives offers readers’ fresh perspectives on familiar subjects or well-studied figures associated with the less well-known women.

This roundtable brings together a group with diverse professional and research interests in women’s biography to explore these topics. Tanisha Ford, professor of history, biography, and memoir at the CUNY Graduate Center, is author of Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Money, Glamour, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (Harper Collins, forthcoming). Author and journalist Allison Gilbert, has recently published Listen, World! How the Intrepid Elsie Robinson Became America’s Most-Read Woman (co-authored with Julia Scheeres, Seal Press, 2022). Gabriela Gonzalez, associate professor of history at the University of Texas at San Antonio, is writing a biography of Mexican American activist, journalist, and suffragist Jovita Idar. Laura Mazer is a literary agent specializing in adult nonfiction, with a focus on women’s issues, history, and biography. Chairing the session will be Amanda Moniz, curator of philanthropy at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, who is writing a biography of the early-national philanthropist Isabella Graham.