A Co-authored Series of Posts ‘About 1919,’ that is, about English-language books published from 1914 to 1921, according to the online bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women

Gamaliel Bradford VI was born October 9, 1863 in Boston, MA to Gamaliel Bradford V (1831-1911) and Clara Crowninshield Kinsman Bradford. Three years after Bradford’s birth, his mother died of tuberculosis and he was raised by his father and his aunt Sarah Hickling Bradford. Throughout his youth, Bradford was educated at the Wellesley common schools, though his academic career would be frequently interrupted due to his chronic health issues. In 1882 he enrolled at Harvard, staying for only six weeks before deciding to withdraw. Following the withdrawal, Bradford was tutored by Marshall Livingston Perrin, a professor at Boston University. Though Bradford credited Perrin as being an excellent tutor in Greek, Latin, and math, he claimed that Perrin “knew nothing about English writing.” On his affinity for writing, Bradford stated: “I had no training whatever, except what I gave myself.” Bradford was indeed a successful writer, particularly in the genre of biography. He wrote several collective biographies in his lifetime, four of which are dedicated to exclusively female subjects and can be found in the CBW database: a103 Portraits of Women (1916), a102 Portraits of American Women (1919), a104 Wives (1925), a101 Daughters of Eve (1930)

Bradford’s biographies are particularly notable for their unique narrative style. Throughout his career he employed and advocated for a biographical technique called psychography. He began experimenting with this technique in his 1912 biography of Robert E. Lee titled “Lee the American”:

What I have aimed at in this book is the portrayal of a soul. We live in an age of names and a new name has recently been invented—psychography. This means, I suppose, an art which is not psychology, because it deals with individuals, not general principles, and is not biography, because it swings clear of the formal sequence of chronological detail, and uses only those deeds and words and happenings that are spiritually significant.

As Bradford touches on in his biography of Lee, he saw biography and psychography as being radically different. On April 8, 1920, Bradford wrote to William Roscoe Thayer:

The proper affinity of psychography is, of course, with biography. But I cannot help thinking there is a sufficiently radical difference, even in the aim, to justify a distinct classification. Biography necessarily gives an ordered picture of the life in its sequence of events with all the relations of condition and circumstance about it. Psychography leaves all this aside and busies itself only with what concerns the man’s soul.

Psychography emerged in the early twentieth-century when the public was beginning to desire a new kind of biography. The standard three-volume Victorian biography was falling out of fashion, and there was a demand for biographies that depicted the personal and private aspects of an individual’s life. The Great War and women’s rights movements in the West greatly influenced this shift. Following the war, biographers focused less on achievement, and more on personality, gender, and sexuality. In the eyes of the biographer, a subject’s ‘genius’ was not found in the work they produced, but in the life they led. For the psychographer, however, there was arguably no event more influential than the advent of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, which Sigmund Freud began formulating in the 1890s, presented a promising solution to this new demand for biographical interiority. In A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Freud describes psychoanalysis as “a method of treating nervous patients medically”:

The patient talks, tells of his past experiences and present impressions, complains, confesses his wishes and emotions. The physician listens, tries to direct the thought processes of the patient, reminds him of things, forces his attention into certain channels, gives him explanations and observes the reactions of understanding or denial which he calls forth in the patient.

In 1910, Freud endeavored to apply this method of psychological treatment to the medium of biography, taking on Leonardo da Vinci as his first patient in Leonardo da Vinci: A Psychosexual Study of an Infantile Reminiscence. Rather than enumerating the events of da Vinci’s life, Freud investigated the psychological makeup of da Vinci that was borne out in his art: “The painful struggle with the work, the final flight from it and the indifference to its future fate may be seen in many other artists, but this behavior is shown in Leonardo to the highest degree.” Though Bradford maintained an adversarial relationship to Freud’s work, calling it “a distortion and exaggeration and fantastic elaboration and misunderstanding of perfectly plain and long known facts,” his psychographs could not have existed without the popularity of psychoanalysis.

Freud’s endeavor to illuminate the “springs of character in those whose mind is not accessible to direct investigation” was similarly central to Bradford’s work. The subjects of his psychographs were often figures of the past whose character and image were already ingrained in the American public consciousness. His book Portraits of American Women for instance, highlights women such as Abigail Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott who would have been familiar figures for the average American. If the public was already aware of the writing and achievements of these women, Bradford did not have to spend the time enumerating them as previous biographies had done. With psychography, he was able to provide readers with a more intimate connection. A reader might be familiar with Mary Lyon as an educator who founded two colleges for women, but did they know that she enjoyed making jokes? Or that Harriet Beecher Stowe had a “tender and devoted affection in the most intimate relations of life” — as Bradford writes in Portraits of American Women?

To understand the kind of intimate connection Bradford was trying to build between the subject and the reader, let us compare two descriptions of Louisa May Alcott, the first from biographer George Barnett Smith and the second from Bradford.

Smith from a730 Noble Womanhood: A Series of Biographical Sketches (1894):

Miss Alcott, doubtful of her ability to do so, wrote Little Women, a story of her three sisters and herself in their home at Concord. The writing of the first part occupied two months, and it was issued in October 1868. When the second part came out in April 1869, success was secured: and when Little Men was announced, fifty thousand copies were ordered in advance.

Bradford from a102 Portraits of American Women (1919):

Nor did she lack the discouragement and depression inseparable from all artistic effort. There were the endless external difficulties which every artist knows and none but artists much sympathize with: the frets, the home cares, always so much accentuated in the case of a woman, even when she is unmarried, the perpetual, the trivial, and more harassing because trivial, interruptions. Idle neighbors chat of idle doings; hours slip away; when at last the free hour and the quiet spot are found, weary nerves have no longer any inspiration left in them.

Both excerpts detail Alcott’s authorial life, but in dramatically different ways. Smith documents the number of months it took for Alcott to write the novel, the dates of publication, and the number of copies sold. Though he mentions how Alcott was “doubtful of her ability” to write Little Women, he does not pry any deeper into her psyche. Conversely, Bradford’s writing focuses solely on Alcott’s feelings of doubt, endeavoring to paint an image of Alcott’s tormented psychological state. Similar to Freud’s portrait of Da Vinci, Bradford homes in on the “discouragement and depression” which necessitates art. The last sentence of Bradford’s excerpt reads less like a biography, and more like a confessional journal entry. Bradford works to make Alcott’s intimate feelings of doubt and despair tangible to readers, giving them a look behind the curtain, so to speak. Though Bradford did not reveal much about his process of writing a psychograph, it is evident that it was an extensive one. He spent years writing these portraits, poring through letters and diaries, and agonizing over every detail of his writing. In a journal entry from March 7, 1919, Bradford wrote:

I have been toiling for three years over my portraits of women, have spent really a good many hours, though nothing, I suppose, to what a conscientious worker would have spent, and I had hoped the portraits were fairly complete. Now it occurs to me that not in one single portrait have I made any allusion or reference to the subject of dress.

Psychography was a new and evolving genre that had not yet developed a formula. As Bradford’s only biographer Edward Wagenknecht writes, he was “the inventor and leading exponent in psychography.” Bradford’s psychographs were archetypal, every detail was liable to be contested. Was dress a necessary characteristic of a subject’s portrait or was it trivial, having no connection to the subject’s character? These questions made the writing process exceptionally difficult for Bradford as the spearhead of a specialty genre.

Regardless of Bradford’s passion for the biographical form, psychography never took root as a genre. Bradford aptly feared that “in dealing topically with the qualities of character which, in varying guises, appear in all men, psychography might become repetitive and monotonous” - as Wagenknecht writes. Even Bradford’s admirers such as Ambrose White Vernon and Richard C. Cabot were concerned about the future of psychography. Though Bradford might have been the most notable figure in psychography, he was outshined by his contemporaries in the field of biography. Lytton Strachey, André Maurois, and Emil Ludwig who wrote traditional biographies far surpassed Bradford in popularity. Few admirers of Bradford’s, such as his biographer, fought to keep psychography alive, but its failure to capture the attention of readers resulted in its short life.

A Co-authored Series of Posts ‘About 1919,’ that is, about English-language books published from 1914 to 1921, according to the online bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women.

Collective Biographies of Women’s eponymous genre almost naturally gives rise to network analysis. In the same way that researchers today look at social networks (online or otherwise) and think about the meanings of “connections” or “nodes” within them, so too can we look at collective biography as a mode of textual and social connection. Collective biography is sometimes called prosopography, a method of studying sets of people as “parallel lives,” to echo the title of Plutarch’s classic prosopography of the lives of Greeks and Romans (widely read in the nineteenth century). Each time we look at a table of contents in CBW, we are presented with a suggested grouping. Here, the author and publisher say, are women who belong together. Yet we call these connections a documentary social network, unlike an actual one built by letters, meetings, relationships. The subjects of the chapters in a collection often had no interaction with each other but lived in different centuries, countries, or social circles. Nevertheless, prosopography strives for measurable comparison by carefully documenting as much as can be known about individuals in the comparative network.

A woman’s life narrative may belong in more than one place. One of the main ways researchers at UVA have been using the CBW database has been to compare the recognition rate, our term for how many times an individual appears in tables of contents across the database. This rough measure of person A’s and person B’s relative usefulness as examples can be even more revealing in our study of networks, discussed in a moment: how often do A and B get placed together in a book of women’s lives? For now, think of a woman like Abigail Adams, who predictably appears in collections of revolutionary women, of first ladies, of the mothers of presidents, and of American women more generally. See: the prolific historian Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet’s The Women of the American Revolution, first published 1848 a259; almost a century later, Kathleen Prindiville’s First Ladies in 1932 a654. During World War I, Adams resurfaces in William Judson Hampton’s 1918 collection, Our Presidents and Their Mothers ([a374] (http://cbw.iath.virginia.edu/books_display.php?id=1705); and again in Gamaliel Bradford’s Portraits of American Women in 1919 (a102). Bradford’s distinctive career as a biographer is featured in Mackenzie Daly’s post, third in this series.

What might it mean for a person–versions of a historic woman–to occupy various positions, inherent in the tables of contents she appears in? What kinds of documentary social networks arise? In the realm of collective biography, how can we quantifiably discuss “connectivity”? Probably, a high “recognition rate” (RR) will indicate that a person was (at the times when the collections were published) far from obscure. But this measure of status may not correlate with the actual rank or power of a particular woman during her life. We see some isolated, single-biography subjects in CBW were once upon a time queens. Some 6000 women appear only once in CBW’s 15,000+ biographical chapters. All of these measures resonate with the narratives themselves as our team tags them with an XML schema. Does a person’s relative connectivity correspond to that murkier (but perhaps more intuitive) notion of “obscurity”? Do either of these aspects of a person make any difference to how their story is told?

In this blog, I’ll try to answer each of these questions in turn. As examples we’ll look at two collections both published 1919, just in the aftermath of World War I. The first was noted above for including Abigail Adams: a102 Portraits of American Women by Gamaliel Bradford (Houghton Mifflin, Boston). Its counterpart here is a108 Women of Achievement by Benjamin Griffith Brawley (Women’s American Baptist Home Mission Society, Chicago). These volumes make different claims to speak for the mainstream, by highly educated men, one an academic historian, addressing general readers.

Table of Contents for a102 Portraits of American Women (HathiTrust)

Table of Contents for a108 Women of Achievement (HathiTrust)

As the word “Negro” in the table of contents underlines, Brawley’s featured women have achieved in a context of racial discrimination. Readers might have guessed a criterion of selection that the titles don’t tell by looking at the publishers and cities on the copyright pages: Houghton Mifflin is a prominent New England publisher to this day and the American Baptist Home Mission and its Women’s offshoots in the East and Midwest continue to work with the poor and people of color. A closer look, and we find that all of Bradford’s eight subjects are white, without remark. Brawley’s five biographical chapters portray African-American women under the non-racial rubric, “women of achievement.”

“American” has a meaning in both books that presumes whiteness as default. “Home” refers to missions like the Salvation Army (originating in London as “Christian Mission” and launched in the U.S. in 1880) or Jane Addams’ Hull House that serve onshore rather than in foreign lands. Addams, 1860-1935, RR=21, and many other American female leaders of home missions were white, not Baptist, and would not fit in Brawley’s book. Collective biographies published in the U.S. often focus on varied nationalities, yet these two are invested in defining American women.

The database and other resources identify Bradford as a white man and Brawley as a Black man, contemporaries. Gamaliel Bradford VI, born in Boston before the US Civil War (9 October 1863 – 11 April 1932), was the grandson of an abolitionist namesake and educated at Harvard, who became a well-known biographer (see Mackenzie Daly’s blog). Brawley (22 April 1882 - 1 February 1939) was born in a middle-class minister’s family in South Carolina and earned a BA from University of Chicago and MA from Harvard before serving as Dean of Morehouse College and later teaching at Howard; he was a prolific poet and published a range of histories of African Americans, college texts and literary criticism, and autobiography. Brawley in his day was well-known in African-American elite circles. Bradford gets mentioned in literary histories of biography.

These rather short-list collections identify a range of female achievers most of whom are well-known now, though early in the twentieth century biographical sources on the recent and living Black women would have been scarce. Whereas Bradford’s “psychographies” portray a New England “American Renaissance” canon before the twentieth century, Brawley’s starring roles in 1919 include Meta Warrick Fuller, a versatile artist who lived until 1968, and national leaders Mary McLeod Bethune and Mary Church Terrell, whose most famous achievements occurred between World War I and their deaths in the 1950s. Both biographers portray female character and public action, broadly a cause of progress for their sex and their nation, while Brawley’s volume overtly supports an organized social mission. There is a race-based time lag, in a sense; activism calls for recognition of more obscure, living workers for the cause.

Documentary Social Networks and Degrees of Separation

As with other social networks, these women can be thought about in terms of degrees of separation. To be precise—if Woman 1 and Woman 2 appear in the same book, they have a degree of separation designated 1 (the CBW team has dubbed them “siblings”). If Woman 2 and Woman 3 appear in the same book, but Woman 1 and Woman 3 do not appear in the same book, then Women 1 and 3 have degree of separation 2 (and we can call them “cousins”). In this blog post, we shall consider as many degrees of separation as possible for a woman: call them, perhaps, third or fourth cousins. While we see the significance of this sort of measure by looking at two 1919 publications, I used the searches of tables of contents across the database of 1272 books to generate relative degrees of obscurity or connectivity. (CBW’s radial graph for visualizing degrees across tables of contents is being redeveloped; ask Alison Booth, email ab6j@virginia.edu.)

For each woman in the two collections I looked at, I determined their connectivity within our database of collections by finding the total number of women listed in contents at each degree of separation, up to 6 degrees of separation. I then used those numbers to determine “average degree of separation”—let us, to use a spicier term, call it “d-factor.”

Thus, Abigail Adams has 601 siblings, 3994 cousins, and so on. Here are the results for Portraits and Achievement represented in tabular form:

A102 Bradford, Portraits

Person	1	2	3	4	5	6	d-factor
ADAMS	601	3994	2783	148	0	0	2.32925857
RIPLEY	7	1416	5600	487	16	0	2.878952963
LYON	201	4893	2347	85	0	0	2.307733192
STOWE	588	6218	691	29	0	0	2.021392506
FULLER	418	5700	1340	68	0	0	2.140579325
ALCOTT	467	6105	903	51	0	0	2.071485517
WILLARD	224	5375	1875	52	0	0	2.233191602
DICKINSON	180	4766	2467	113	0	0	2.333909115

A108 Brawley, Achievement

Person	1	2	3	4	5	6	d-factor
TUBMAN	482	471	2244	85	0	0	2.256675967
GORDON	187	580	5281	1422	57	0	3.077321642
FULLER	30	797	5245	1420	35	0	3.08409725
BETHUNE	341	4786	2284	116	0	0	2.288959745
TERRELL	188	579	5281	1422	57	0	3.077188787

Stowe and Alcott have the lowest d-factors of this array of women, that is, we might say the highest connectivity. And here is the data presented graphically. In the graphs below, the X axis represents degrees of separation and the Y axis represents the number of connections at that degree of separation.

A102 Bradford, Portraits

A108 Brawley, Achievement

It’s difficult to assign too much meaning to the absolute values of these women’s d-factors, but these measures add significance in comparisons and contexts across CBW, including the narrative methods themselves. Further analysis might show tendencies such as fewer episodes or descriptive passages correlating with longer tables of contents and perhaps higher rates of “singleton” subjects (RR=1). To write a biography of a rare subject or a living person who has been little documented generally takes more time and effort than to patch together and embroider from previous printed sources. For the audience, too, the familiar biographical subject may be preferable. The supply and demand economics seem not to apply strictly when circulating the name and narrative of a historic person. Less separation (closer association between two women and their associates in turn) can indicate being closer to the centrality of a national history, and higher probability of cropping up in a table of contents of lives of women of any type. Ripley, with RR=1 (solely in Bradford) has a d-factor slightly larger than Mary Lyon, RR=20.

It’s more interesting to think about them in relation to each other. We can say that a woman with a d-factor of 2 is certainly more closely linked to the mass of other women appearing in our database than a woman with a d-factor of 3. A woman with a d-factor of 2 is more closely connected to the rest of the database than a woman with a d-factor of 2.3; though this difference is nowhere near as intense as the first example, it is still quite significant. In the tabular data above, for instance, look at the disparity between Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Tubman. Though both are 1 degree of separation from roughly the same amount of women (467 vs. 482, respectively), Alcott is 2 degrees of separation from over 1000 more women than Tubman is. This difference, which could be attributed both to the wider social networks of a white woman in New England who published widely and to the bias of CBW books’ documentary networks–their tendency to privilege white women writers, for example. Their respective d-factors, in small but telling averages, reflect this: Alcott 2.07; Tubman 2.25.

You might expect d-factor to simply correlate to the number of chapters about a woman in the volumes in the database, her recognition rate (RR) as we call it. But at a different level d-factor helps showcase how some women are more likely to be connected to specific well-connected women. It is another way of displaying “fame” or “notability,” and with d-factor we can begin to surmise about the distinctions in obscurity between women brought together into the same collection. Some, I suppose, will be “central nodes,” and others will be more “peripheral.”

As we can see from both representations (but more quickly in the graphs), both Bradford’s and Brawley’s collections have two identifiable subsets of women. Broadly, Portraits is divided into Sarah Alden Ripley and everybody else, with Ripley the least “connected” woman with RR=1 (Bradford alone of 934 authors of CBW’s texts decided to include her in a collection). Comparably, Achievement is divided between Gordon/Fuller/Terrell and Tubman/Bethune as, respectively, less connected and more connected women. An effort has been made to equilibrate the two graphs’ size, but note that their y-axes have different maxima.

Achievement’s women seem to have low deviance within those two groups, at least compared to the group of Portraits’s women with a d-factor near 2. Particular attention ought to be paid, again, to Abigail Adams, who in spite of having the highest number of siblings (1 degree from her), has a relatively low number of people 2 degrees of separation from her. We speculate that this lower indirect (cousinly) connectivity may be due to Adams’s tendency to appear in the same book with wives or mothers of U.S. presidents, as we already have seen, rather than in more mixed tables of contents with varied subjects. We could explore this for other types of American women.

Now, does any of this affect the way the author tells the story? That is, does a person’s relatively low d-factor (a quantity that the author would not directly know but may have some proxy conception of)—change how their story is told? Let us localize this discussion to the introductions of the works in question.

We see an authorial awareness of obscurity in the first paragraph of Bradford’s lone obscure biography, for Sarah Alden Ripley (who happened to be his relative): Few American women of to-day know of Mrs. Samuel Ripley, but a sentence from Senator Hoar’s “Autobiography” will give her a favorable introduction: “She was one of the most wonderful scholars of her time, or indeed of any time. President Everett said she could fill any professor’s chair at Harvard.” Contrast this introduction with the way he introduces Frances Willard (“She had the great West behind her; its sky and its distances…”), Louisa May Alcott (“Her father thought himself a philosopher…”), and Harriet Beecher Stowe (“She was a little woman, rather plain than beautiful…”). With Ripley there is something of a necessary justification, an initial pivot to a secondary source which proves that she belongs with the subjects of the other chapters, and at the same time an implicit criterion of inherent, merited but uncrowned achievement. With Ripley as contrast, we see more clearly what the biographer can do when they work with a well-known biographical subject: dramatize, begin in medias res, take advantage of the fact that the reader is coming back to someone familiar, so that the introduction is really a reacquaintance. Ripley, with a higher d-factor, earns Bradford’s least artful flourish of narrative technique in her opening sentence: the lower the d-factor, the less an introduction needs to actually introduce.

That, at least, is the conclusion I can draw from Portraits. But does looking at Achievement change that thesis at all? Let us see how Brawley introduces his two “well-connected” women (Tubman and Bethune) vs. his three “obscure” women. [^bignote]

Tubman: “Greatest of all the heroines of anti-slavery was Harriet Tubman.” Bethune: “On October 3, 1904, a lone woman, inspired by the desire to do something for the needy ones of her race and state, began at Daytona, Florida, a training school for Negro girls.”

Gordon: “This is the story of a young woman who had not more than ordinary advantages, but who in our own day by her love for Christ and her zeal in his service was swept from her heroic labor into martyrdom.” Fuller: “The state of Massachusetts has always been famous for its history and literature, and especially rich in tradition is the region around Boston.” Terrell: “With the increasingly complex problems of American civilization, woman is being called on in ways before undreamed of to bear a share in great public burdens.”

It is more difficult to make the same argument out of these quotes as we did with the Bradford book. Might Brawley be working in a different mode altogether? We see that Tubman, by far his most famous subject, least requires citation to an external authority in his introduction. Alternatively, we might say that Tubman’s importance demands his respect, his summative statement of her greatness. Could there be a difference to writing Black biographies vs. writing white biographies, that manifests in this particular manner?—that is, to deal with a “well-known” persona unlocks a white biographer’s capacity to do away with formality, but absolutely necessitates formal announcement for a Black subject. Bradford indulges in his breezy approach favoring interiority and impressions upon the security of generations of New England insider status. Brawley, in spite of his academic credentials and prestige, knows his Black women needed to dress in their Sunday best to be classified as “American women” or “women of achievement” without the racial modifier. Such inequities might appear in the more formal, grander dressing of Brawley’s subjects.

These are just a few considerations, a starting set of theses. As with much digital humanities research, this brief discussion has offered more questions than it has answered. It has hoped to provide a new quantity for potential analysis, applicable most readily in the CBW database but, with some trivial modifications, easily applicable in similar databases representing networks of people–similar prosopographies.

A Co-authored Series of Posts ‘About 1919,’ that is, about English-language books published from 1914 to 1921, according to the online bibliography and database, Collective Biographies of Women.

Graduate and undergraduate students and I worked as a research team in 2022-2024.

Is war good for women? It’s an absurd question—no, war has always meant a terrible fate for women. The theaters of war around the world today are blighted by “conflict-related sexual violence,” CRSV, as it is too well known. The war dead too often are women and children. Refugees or survivors suffer all the more because of codes, doctrines, and religious or political laws concerning women’s rights, along with economic, racial, ethnic, and national inequalities. So let’s rephrase the question. Which war, which women, what is their social status and location during it? What have some historical women gained from military conflict?

I wouldn’t attempt to answer this question for all eras and wars, nor would I quibble about a cost/benefit analysis. We noticed that collections of chapter-length biographies of women show the impact of wars across centuries, even though it is widely assumed that politics and the military are exclusively male. (Feminist studies have gone further into historical gender analysis than biographies can go, for example Carol Cohn, ed. Women and Wars: Contested Histories, Uncertain Futures [Polity, 2012].) Within the horizon of a digital humanities project on English-language books published 1914-1921, we considered the effects of World War I on this genre of biographical record about women’s lives. Versions of women’s life stories published during and after World War I suggest that some women gain recognition for their war efforts, but also that this war called new attention to historical women of many times and occupations. Books published during the war and its aftermath years opened up pathways to becoming noteworthy that still seem pioneering or defiant of gender norms of that time.

What We Did and Who We Were

“A Gallery of World War I Women” was a rewarding collaboration in 2022-2024 of graduate, undergraduate, and faculty researchers supported by a library staff and infrastructure. Our nickname for the team’s focus on a set of books from these years “the 1919 project,” was a humble, distant echo of the famous 1619 Project, the New York Times Magazine production by Nikole Hannah-Jones (also a major book by many hands). This series of blog posts is no controversial transformation of women’s history as The 1619 Project is of U.S. history. But we found surprising reconfigurations of women’s nationalities and collective histories in this period.

We were Alison Booth, Director of Collective Biographies of Women, Professor of English and Faculty Director of the DH Center, UVA Library; Lloyd Sy, project manager for CBW, PhD (’23) English, now assistant professor at Yale; Isabel Bielat, research assistant, PhD candidate in history; Mackenzie Daly, research assistant, MA (’24) in English, soon to enter the doctoral program at Boston College; Yichu Wang, research assistant, MA (’23) in English, now a PhD candidate at Cornell; Anna Seungyeon Lee, research assistant, BA (’23) in English and statistics. We met, usually weekly during semesters, in my English-department office to coordinate our parallel research on the books listed in Isabel’s guide to the CBW books 1914-1921. Find these texts in CBW through the hyperlinks, e.g. a844.

A meticulous bibliography underlies the database, so we have a ready-made timeline of publication dates. Some books on this chronological sample are conspicuously about World War I, as a844 is; others belong to perennial types of collection: biblical, regional, religious, beauty, high status, arts, mothers. CBW researchers have identified collections by tagging with terms for the kinds of subjects/roles depicted in them. Although Yet many biographies showcasing women’s lives are liberal, advocating Abolition or education. CBW includes volumes dedicated to African American women’s lives; many Irishwomen, adventuresses, writers and artists, and figures who seem to have superpowers desired today.

It was a good guess that volumes published in and around World War I would reflect greater internationalism and wider vocational range. As you will see in the series of posts, each researcher focused at a different angle and scale on texts in this project. Perhaps the books that seem to have least to do with the trenches of European power struggle reveal the most surprises for readers today, as some books feature women of nationalities, religions, or races at margins of Empire.

Lloyd, Isabel, Mackenzie, Yichu, and Anna have each come up with their own contributions, peer reviewed them, and shared them with members of the Scholars’ Lab staff for further vetting. This series of blog posts gives an idea of our explorations of a varied set of volumes as they appear in CBW’s records.

On Collective Biographies of Women

Collective Biographies of Women has seen decades of development with support of both the Scholars’ Lab and the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH). The “1919” effort began before the DH Center joined these two groups upon IATH’s migration to the Library’s budgetary and HR organization. The database and schema for narrative analysis were greatly indebted to Worthy Martin and Daniel Pitti of IATH along with Doug Ross, Cindy Girard, and Shayne Brandon. Rennie Mapp served as project manager until 2016, followed by Lloyd Sy relying on Rennie’s documentation.

See CBW About. The project helps users access information about (with digitized text where available) 1274 books, some issued centuries before and after the project’s focus dates, 1830-1940. These are not encyclopedias, not researched full-length biographies, but appealing books for general readers with several chapters of documentary entertainment about an assortment of women. These books were often written by men, and inevitably have a Eurocentric and upper-class bias.

Beyond the queens, writers, and celebrities who predominate in such books, many more ordinary women were deemed significant enough to be placed among Notable Women in History. A closer look across the spectrum of the books in CBW (not solely 1914-1921) shows that the reason a woman made a name is related to upheavals of war. War, of course, often relates to race and religion as well as territory and resources. Of approximately 8,000 women identified in CBW’s texts, 140 appear in a search for any of four of our terms for persona types: “soldier,” “military,” “heroine of war,” or “role in revolution.” Searching by other person types–“adventure, physical feat or survival,” “assassin,” “expatriated, exiled person,” “pacifist,” “patriot,” “nationalist,” “model of race,” or “representative of nationality” turns up 604 names. There are 34 female subjects of short biographies in these collections identified as “spy,” while 399 are labeled “nurse.” In short, this genre helps to dislodge the assumption that women are simply the victims of war and that they typically eschew politics. Women as agents of history do not necessarily frequent courts or theaters or salons of Europe or North America.

This series of blog posts gives an idea of our exploration from different angles of a varied set of volumes as they appear in CBW’s records. Each book, with its bibliographical data and its chapters and their human subjects, is organized in a relational database that offers us varied kinds of comparative data.

Users can search persons by various criteria including type from the “backend” pages of CBW: Persons. Email me, Alison Booth if curious to learn more ways to search and sort by person or collection type, publication data, and so on. For more on this genre, see my book, How to Make It as a Woman, University of Chicago Press, 2004.