About the Editor & Publisher
Although I now live in a major city, I was born and raised in a small
town. A romance with writing probably began when I was seven and I
handprinted, on many small pages of foolscap, an outraged letter to the
Cracker Jack Company complaining about a box of their product which did
not contain the promised prize. The result was an apology and two dozen
free boxes, which may have planted in my mind the idea that the written
word could bring delight and also possessed the power to correct
wrongs. Upon graduation from college, I discovered it would not be easy
to pursue my goal of earning a living as a writer. Repeatedly, I was
told that a job I sought had to be given to a man because men had to
support families. I tried several cities and encountered much the same
attitude. The new field of public relations, however, offered
opportunities to women (and low salaries), and I worked in that field
for twelve years, until I switched to journalism.
In 1988 I founded 20th Century Women, a
project to collect the stories of ordinary elderly women of this
revolutionary century. The project’s mission is threefold:
- to help older women make a record of
their experiences in the family, the workplace and society in a way
that preserves each individual’s unique voice,
- to
document the ways women have tried to make and remake their lives,
celebrating the imagination, courage and daring in their struggles to
maneuver within and against the constraints placed upon their sex, and
- to reinvent narrative structures and language in order to more truthfully reflect women’s view of the world, women’s reality.
The method I
used is a blend of life review, oral history, a variation of intensive
journal and modern biography. The final text is a synthesis of
memoir—in that the content is not a product of research, details and
dates are not fact-checked, but wholly derived from the subject’s
recollections and her own words; and biography—in that a second person
has created a structure that reflects a theme or something else of note
that the writer finds in the subject. To alert readers to this duality,
I call these narratives first person biographies.
