Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Ann D. Gordon

Critical Essay by Ann D. Gordon

SOURCE: "The Political Is the Personal: Two Autobiographies of Woman Suffragists," in American Women's Autobiography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, edited by Margo Culley, The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992, pp. 111-27.

In the following essay, Gordon analyzes how Stanton and Abigail Scott Duniway portray themselves in their autobiographies.

Woman suffragists, like other leaders of women in the nineteenth century, approached the art of autobiography with their public identities well crafted and their public voices tuned closely to a particular pitch of the cultures they sought to influence. In autobiography they might aspire to the definitive variation of their personal story but they did not start afresh. With an acute sense of the historical importance of their work, these leaders knew that they had etched their lives into the history of women and the nation. That record would stand whether or not they retold their story; they would shape its interpretation, fill...
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