Feminism's family drama

Female genealogies, feminist historiography, and Kate Walbert'sA Short History of Women

Bibliographic Data

ID4367383
AuthorsNadine Muller (0000-0001-8047-7180, Liverpool John Moores University, corresponding author)
Year2017
Volume18
Issue1
Pages17-34
Publication date2017-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueFeminist Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1464-7001 • E-ISSN: 1741-2773
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/1464700116683655
OpenAlexW2563575486
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited18

This article considers Kate Walbert's A Short History of Women (2009), a novel that tells the stories of a hunger striking suffragette and four generations of her female descendants. Tracing feminist history through female genealogy, Walbert's historiographic metafiction helps us think through the perils and potentials of the generational methods that have long dominated feminist historiography. Critically engaging with what has arguably become a feminist family drama, the novel makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary feminist theory and feminist historiography, illustrating of feminist genealogies as simultaneously fruitful and fraught, limiting and liberating and yet inescapable and useful

Art · Drama · Feminism · Feminist philosophy · Feminist theory · Historiography · Literature · Sociology · Women's history · American and British Literature Analysis · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gender Studies · History · Short Stories in Global Literature