Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

The question of which women wrote childhood autobiographies is simpler to answer than why they chose to write those accounts, according to this thoroughly researched and analyzed study. Including almost 200 narratives by professional women of letters in multiple languages over more than a century, the result is the first historical examination of the female childhood autobiography of its kind. Martens (German and comparative literature, Univ. of Virginia) organizes the autobiographies chronologically into distinct periods based on important events, such as wars, and on shifts she notes in the works themselves. Though only a few autobiographies appeared prior to 1900, women began writing them more frequently from the 1920s onward. The genre exploded with the arrival of second-wave feminism, which Martens notes has much to do with gender. Women's literacy expanded over time as did women's access to publishing houses. Reflecting on childhood constituted a suitable genre for women writers, who wrote not just about themselves but also about their surroundings and the events they experienced. Painting a widely varied picture of women's childhood, these autobiographies defied easy categorization as "trivial, fluffy, or boilerplate" (p. 17). Martens's rich cache of stories reveals new insight into women as they saw themselves.Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; professionals.