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.

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.