Women's autobiographies began to be published in greater numbers in the United States and other Western countries in the mid-nineteenth century, an era when authorship became regarded as an honorable, viable profession for women, and when numbers of readers--and the accessibility of books--grew exponentially. Immigrant memoirs, a popular genre in the late nineteenth century, were soon joined by autobiographical writings from the women's suffrage movement. Both of these types of memoirs, energized by what Lois J. Fowler and David H. Fowler have called an "unapologetic consciousness of self," tended to stress the particular hardships inherent in women's lives and to celebrate their triumph through emancipation or assimilation. Wartime memoirs such as The Diary of Anne Frank (1947) and Greta Kuckhoff's Vom Rosenkranz zur Roten Kapelle (1972) bore witness to events that shaped women's lives during World War II.
The mid-twentieth century witnessed the rise of feminist consciousness and a new valuation of and interest in women's autobiography. Such works as Mary McCarthy's and Ellen Glasgow's memoirs traced their author's awareness of constraints in their lives and documented the ways, large and small, in which they rebelled against social and familial strictures. Some female autobiographers, for example Simone de Beauvoir, Nathalie Sarraute, and Maya Angelou, chose to define themselves in their autobiographies partly by writing about their mothers; others, such as Zora Neale Hurston or Evelyn Scott, developed their memoirs against a specific time and place.
While literary critics have always been aware of general differences between the autobiographical writings of men and women, they have devoted much more attention to them in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Such scholars as the Fowlers, Shirley Neuman, and Marisa Herrera Postlewate have examined the social and individual causes contributing to these differences. Scholars largely agree that while men tend to define themselves as first and foremost individuals in their autobiographies, women more often describe their lives in relation to other people--family members, spouses, or mentors. Whereas men tend to focus on their public lives, including details about careers and political and intellectual achievements, women more often focus on the personal and private aspects of their lives in their narratives--as for instance in Hanna Tillich's autobiography. Men's autobiographies tend to progress in straightforward, linear fashion, whereas women's memoirs are typically discontinuous, sometimes fragmented, focused on other significant people in their lives, and often centered on the importance of the writing process itself. Sometimes women's narratives are confessional, but they almost always testify to the authors' desire to articulate and define their identity.
Scholars Jo Maslin, Kwakiutl L. Dreher, and Clara Juncker have explored the development and characteristics of the narrative stance female autobiographers employ to negotiate writing about themselves. They have noted various rhetorical techniques and narrative strategies that autobiographers like Hurston, Eartha Kitt, and Maya Angelou use to convey a sense of commenting both from inside and outside their lives. Rejecting the theoretical model of a unified self, contemporary critics have emphasized the extent to which women's identities are linked to their social and cultural roles and have, as Marisa Herrera Postlewate has written, "challenged traditional definitions of autobiography that were developed through the study of autobiographical texts written by white males." In response, they have devoted increasing attention to the autobiographies of women from other traditions. For example, Farzanah Milani has written about women's memoirs from Iran, a culture where their voices have been suppressed, and Chantal Zabus has explored the dictated memoirs of Egyptian women recounting their experiences with female genital mutilation (Source: Literature Criticism Online, 2010).
The early years of the eighteenth century saw a dramatic explosion in publishing, not only of books, poems, and pamphlets, but of the periodical press. In 1695 the Licensing Act expired, which effectively ended state censorship of the press in England. In 1704 Daniel Defoe launched his essay-based periodical the Review (1704-13), a chiefly political publication. Richard Steele and Joseph Addison began writing the Tatler in 1709 (ending in 1711), and later published the Spectator (1711-12). Addison and Steele created a new style of journalism, writing about politics, fashion, culture, and arts in a variety of fictional personae, often with a satirical or ironic approach. The success of the Tatler and Spectator encouraged hundreds of rivals not only in England but abroad, and the essay periodical was firmly established as a popular literary genre. Addison and Steele addressed women as well as men as part of their audience, offering opinions and advice on domestic issues and women's clothing. In doing so, they helped clear the way for the growth of journals that identified women as their primary readership.
The pioneer in the field of women's periodicals premiered over a decade before the Tatler. the Ladies' Mercury ran for a short time (possibly as few as four issues) in 1693 as a feminine edition of the Athenian Mercury. The emergence of the Tatler, however, brought a flood of new contenders, most notably the Female Tatler, which ran from 1709 to 1710. The Female Tatler was effectively a scandal sheet, and its supposed "feminine" orientation consisted in its propensity for gossip, often of the most lurid kind. The Female Tatler and similar periodicals were not necessarily written by women. The authorship of the Female Tatler, whose putative editor was the fictional Mrs. Crackenthorpe, has been attributed to men and women alike, including well-known writers Delarivier Manley, Susannah Centlivre, and Bernard Mandeville. The Free-Thinker (1718-19) was written by male author Ambrose Phillips. Not until 1744, when Eliza Haywood began publishing the Female Spectator (1744-46), was there a periodical that was written specifically for women and from an authentically female perspective. With the Female Spectator the women's periodical had genuinely arrived. Though Haywood did not maintain her journal for more than a few years, a female readership had been securely established, and titles such as the Lady's Magazine (1749-53) and the Lady's Museum (1760-61) continued to appear and multiply.
The influence of Addison and Steele's essay periodicals was also felt abroad. One clear imitator in France was La Spectatrice (1728-29). Though the authorship of La Spectatrice is unknown, some sources contend that it was written by a woman; it may have been the work of Marie-Anne Barbier, a French playwright. Mme Spectatrice, the persona in which the journal was written, took on the task of educating her reading audience in culture, manners, and mores in the style of her English counterpart, Mr. Spectator. Among the most prominent of French periodicals edited by women was the Journal des dames (1759-78). The longevity of the Journal des dames allowed it to evolve over time. Begun by a conservative male editor, it was at first created with the expressed purpose of amusing women at their toilette. In 1761, however, Mme de Beaumer took the helm and put an end to the paper's policy of printing only "delicious nothings" so as to avoid stirring up an increasingly restless populace. De Beaumer turned the Journal des dames toward both oppositional politics and the defense of women. She boldly described herself a female philosopher and argued in an editorial that men had historically used their physical superiority to constrain the imaginative and intellectual talents of women.
The Journal des dames was not typical of women's periodicals, however. De Beaumer and some later editors of the journal used the potential of the press to challenge social standards and advocate for greater freedoms for women. Most serials aimed at women, however, participated in constructing a domestic sphere that became increasingly remote from the public sphere, and increasingly confining for the women therein. Modern critics of early women's periodicals have suggested that the origins of the Victorian cult of True Womanhood--characterized by rigid separation between men's and women's social roles--can be found in the domestic advice propagated by Mr. Spectator and his imitators in England and elsewhere. Some readers have observed that female authors like Haywood and Mme Spectatrice seemed unable to claim that voice of moral authority assumed by Steele, Addison, and other male journalists. As a result, even when writing for the benefit of women the female commentator is thought by her readers to write from a more limited perspective. In the women's press of the eighteenth century, the "improvement" and education of women thus proved restricting more often than liberating. The efforts of de Beaumer, Mme Spectatrice, and Haywood notwithstanding, the sphere of women's influence ironically diminished even as the publication of women's periodicals flourished (Source: Literature Criticism Online, 2007),