Volume III
Issue 17
Summer 2001

In This Issue

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Arts4All, Ltd.

Maya Angelou, et al.: Women and Autobiography

by Kristin Redpath

Maya Angelou
delivers the Jane E. Ruby Lecture in the Humanities
at Wheaton College (Norton, Mass.)
on 19 October 2000

When I received my first library card - a thing of great value - and was allowed to take home with me one book at a time (which policy, I think, discourages young readers), the one book I chose was as often biography as fiction. I remember a series of orange-bound, somewhat frayed volumes of the lives of the founding fathers (and a few mothers), as well as such notable personages as Jane Addams from later in history. This set of biographies included the lives of many more men than women; however, I would, week after week, bring home the bio of a woman, even if I had read it a dozen times before.

My parents urged me to read the men's stories as well, and, dutifully, I did, but they did not interest me much. Perhaps my sense of self was developing. I was not looking for history lessons; I was looking for role models.

Last October, Maya Angelou delivered the Jane Ruby Memorial lecture at Wheaton College. One of the nicest things about living in a small New England town with a top-notch college is that most of the really good cultural events are open to the public, first come, first serve. So, when Maya Angelou appeared at Wheaton, I made sure I was among the first comers.

I arrived at 5:00 pm, armed with sandwiches, to await the 6:45 opening of the doors. What I didn't take into account, however, was that the first people in line didn't necessarily get the best seats. I forgot that most of the later comers were young students who, once through the doors, could RUN...and they did...for the seats up front. So I was relegated to the back quarter of the chairs set up in the field house, although I was able to get a center aisle seat.

There was no prohibition against photography or tape recording, the former of which I did blatantly with my not-so-trusty, non-flash, five-year-old, bottom-of-the-line digital camera. I also taped with a small tape recorder in my jacket pocket. There was nothing sneaky about it since I took the recorder out and looked at it openly from time to time to make sure it was working, but I felt a small thrill which must be a latent tendency toward covert activities. However, my intention in taping was only to be sure any quotes I used later were accurate. (That throws cold water on the spy glamour, doesn't it?) Actually, I was surprised any of Maya Angelou's words were clear enough to hear over the thunderous applause that regularly reverberated through the enormous Wheaton field house. (To give you an idea, the between 1,500 and 2,000 chairs that had been set up filled slightly less than half the available space.)

The first vocal impression is of a voice like warm caramel syrup, rich, satisfying and enviable. While Dr. Angelou (she received an honorary doctorate from Wheaton College in 1981 and is entitled to the honorific) is, as her writings and her lecture make clear, painfully aware of her race, that awareness in the audience seemed only to exist when she herself called our attention back to it. We were mesmerized by her, Maya Angelou the poet, autobiographer, singer, actress, teacher, woman. She has been quite a few other things, too, but you'll have to read her books to find out what, if you don't know already.

Her first sounds were not words but song, "When it seemed that the sun wouldn't shine any more, God put a rainbow in the sky." She demonstrated a vocal quality without vibrato and seemingly undiminished in range, despite her years. If I had to guess her age, I would have been at least a decade on the low side.

She spoke of early African-American writers and urged us to read them. [An Appendix appears as a link, below, in Resources. Ed.] She joked about her grandmother holding her between her knees while braiding her unruly hair - a joke shared by the African-American students in the audience - but outside my experience, except that my straight, baby-fine, blond hair couldn't be controlled either, as my grade school photos will attest.

She believed herself to be ugly as a child - tall, lanky, boyishly thin (all desirable characteristics today, but not in the 30's), but most of all, dark, as far from the contemporary standards of beauty as possible. She clearly carries emotional scars related to her appearance. At one point in her lecture, she read part of a letter from a young woman to the young woman's mother, in which she says that the optimism in Maya Angelou's charismatic personality was able to instill in her a desire to live rather than to take her own life as she had been contemplating. The mother had attended one of Dr. Angelou's lectures later and thanked her profusely and humbly for saving her daughter's life. The first sentences of the letter, a copy of which had been given to Dr. Angelou, describe a lecture probably similar to that which we were attending. Maya Angelou's focus was on one sentence, which I paraphrase: "...she [Maya Angelou] was so big and so black and so ugly...."

Thinking about the letter and the part of it that Dr. Angelou emphasized, I have two comments:

What does it matter what the person who saves your life looks like?

Maya Angelou clearly carries wounds from her past related to her appearance that are so deep that a letter that poured out a soul in writing was not as meaningful to her as this young woman's first impression of her physical appearance.

Maya Angelou is far from ugly; she is tall but not big in the sense of being heavy; she is clearly of African-American ancestry. So what! But not being ugly seems to mean so much to her....

Aside from a few such asides (isn't the English language wonderful?), regardless of the scars she carries from the past, her philosophy is optimistic and forgiving. If she holds grudges, she makes light of them. There is not a trace of "poor me" in her words, no breast-beating, no moaning. She is what she has made herself.

Her last words were from one of her earliest poems: "We are more alike my friends than we are different."

So, after the lecture, I started thinking about autobiography in general. Who writes it? When is it successful literature and when is it not? What is there about people who allow their personal lives to be examined by the public that makes it possible for them to do it? I started to look at other autobiographers to find patterns if I could.

Jill Ker Conway, another noted autobiographer, I have never seen in person, but have seen on television, particularly on Book TV where she discusses books with authors in front of a live audience. I first discovered her while I was browsing in a bookstore and stumbled across The Road from Coorain. After having heard Maya Angelou, I revisited Dr. Conway's books and found some interesting commonalties. Superficially, they are both tall and slim (why is that so important?), erect of carriage (neither try to hide their height). However, Dr. Conway is of Caucasian descent and was considered pretty (why is that so important?). She is Australian. Half a world away from one another, growing up at almost the same time (Conway is younger than Angelou but not by much), these two remarkably different yet remarkably similar women have had concerns in childhood about their outward appearances, issues with mothers (who doesn't), feelings of loss of control over their own lives, and extraordinary success in their professional lives (Dr. Conway was the first female president of Smith College). But it is the horrors of their youth that, burned in their memories, forced them to speak out in autobiography.

Surely, however, these two are not the only humans with disastrous childhoods. No one grows up unscathed. Why doesn't everyone write an autobiography? It is my premise that we do.

From the minister's Sunday sermon to the second grader's first-day-back-at-school "How I spent my summer vacation" theme, to these essays I write now and then for the Arts4All Newsletter, all we think and all we say and all we write is in some way autobiographical. We are the sum of our experiences. Even writers of horror or fantasy fiction, like Stephen King or Anne McCaffrey, have to find their ideas inside themselves first. I couldn't write this essay without having life experiences to relate to others.

Australian countryside.
Photographer: Jimmy Deguara. Image courtesy Australia Severe Weather. http://australiasevereweather.com/photography/photos/1991/0110jd02.jpg

To try to find a common ground with either of these fine writers is a grueling task. I was not born of African descent in Arkansas in the 1930's; I was not born on a drought-ridden sheep ranch in Australia. I never lived in a wrecked automobile in a junkyard. I didn't find my father just after he committed suicide. I grew up in a two-parent family and remember my childhood as happy, not hell.

What common thread can I find to relate to these two women? Well, the most obvious is that we are all women, and all women are concerned about their appearance (oh, yes, we are, and any woman who says she doesn't care how she looks is prevaricating).

Briefly, let us speak of autobiography in general and as literature, with the presumption that literature is art, good literature is good art and great literature is great art.

But, not all autobiography is literature. That presumption eliminates "tell-all" trash...er, books - unauthorized volumes about anyone and "as told to" books, even if they are well written. To fit into the confines of this essay, the work must be written by the subject herself and the writer must write both literally and literately (I still find the English language wonderful!). I will also limit myself to women autobiographers, with apologies to the great male writers of the genre.

First, a brief history lesson. Early - really, really, early - opportunities for women's autobiography simply didn't exist. If you really want to know why, I suggest the first chapter of Dr. Conway's book When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (Random House, 1998).

Lady Julian, the Anchorite, of Norwich
(born, near Norwich, England, in 1342).
Image courtesy The Julian Centre, Norwich, UK.

Earliest recorded autobiographies by women were by cloistered nuns such as Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avilla. They spoke of the emotional and spiritual inner lives of the women who wrote them. These women suppressed their deeds and experiences in the physical world to describe instead their journeys of the soul.

Little secular autobiography written by women exists with the exception of purely pedantic household accounts or fantasy romances disguised as fiction until the latter half of the Nineteenth Century when women finally began to have access to education and to be allowed aspirations other than the romantic heroine. Generally women's experiences were disguised as fiction, such as Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and end with the heroine safely married and living happily every after. However, even then women who were "successful" (whatever that means) enough to write autobiography were generally unmarried or widowed early enough to "do something with their lives" other than marriage, childbirth, and housekeeping - valuable but not valued occupations. Women had to choose one or the other - marriage and family, along with the financial security provided by a husband, or worldly education, professional success, fame, or notoriety provided primarily (unless they were heiresses) by their own sweat (excuse me, perspiration) and tears. The few exceptions - Marie Curie comes to mind - lived and worked for her husband's success or fame and continued her husband's work after his death, thereby, and only thereby, achieving professional success in her own right.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). Image courtesy the Working Group for the Promotion of the Tradition of Hildegard, Mainz, Germany.	Alice Hamilton, M.D. (1869-1970)

Women's lives were supposed to be like those portrayed in romantic novels in which life, love and adventure happened to them as a result of outside influences, not because of their own actions.

Ironically, the first women to have broken the tradition of portrayal of women's lives as romance novels were the escaped-slave narratives encouraged by abolitionists in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century. These "stories" did not break the gender taboo because slave women were not "real" women and the narratives still portrayed women as victims rather than masters of their own destinies.

As more women entered the professions previously dominated by men, they began to write of their struggles. In Exploring the Dangerous Trades, published by Little, Brown and Company in 1943, Alice Hamilton, M.D. (1869-1970) describes her entry into medicine (because the family finances were dwindling) and her years as a physician researching and treating trade-related illnesses contracted by miners, smelters, painters, enamelers, dyers and others who worked with dangerous substances or in dangerous places in the process of earning their daily bread, thereby contracting such diseases as black lung, tuberculosis, malaria and so on.

While Alice Hamilton's name is hardly the household word that Marie Curie's is, her work was probably of comparable significance. Because she was a professional woman and unmarried, her literate, forceful and compelling autobiography was finally published, but not until 1943 when she was 74 years of age. Interestingly, her book is now published, and considered required reading, by the American Industrial Hygiene Society.

Conway says,

"What makes the reading of autobiography so appealing is the chance it offers to see how this man or that woman whose public self interests us has negotiated the problem of self-awareness and has broken the internalized code a culture supplies about how life should be experienced. Most of us, unless faced with emotional illness, don't give our inner life scripts a fraction of the attention we give to the plots of movies or TV specials about some person of prominence. Yet the need to examine our inherited scripts is just beneath the surface of consciousness, so that while we think we are reading a gripping story, what really grips us is the inner reflection on our own lives the autobiographer sets in motion."

We in Western society expect the books we read for recreation to be stories with beginnings, middles, and ends (preferably happy ones, but sad or even tragic is acceptable). After all, there's nothing like a good cry. So why is autobiography popular when written by a living person whose "end" has not yet been reached? Conway says it best: "...that magical opportunity of entering another life is what really sets us thinking about our own."

There are beginnings and endings in all our lives if we stop to think about them seriously. The rites of passage represented by births, graduations, marriages, divorces and deaths are the most obvious. In the first volume of her autobiography, Maya Angelou begins her narrative with her coming, with her brother, into the care of a strong mother figure and ends with her having come full circle by becoming a mother herself.

Jill Ker Conway begins the first volume of her autobiography before her own birth (obviously not direct experience but necessary to explain how her family came to be living on an Australian ranch) and ends with her leaving Australia altogether to enter a graduate program at Harvard University.

Both these books required sequels. In both cases the story wasn't (and still isn't) finished. Personally, I would greatly enjoy another installment in both their sagas. I should note here that Dr. Angelou has written several additional autobiographical works and Dr. Conway has written one. These books are installments in a series just as enticing as any miniseries or daytime drama, perhaps more so because they are real. In fact, the first sentence of Dr. Conway's book, When Memory Speaks, asks the question, "Why is autobiography the most popular form of fiction....?"

Perhaps (my theory) it is because we become so interested in the characters that we must know what happens to them. Certainly this is true of some actual fiction series I find enjoyable: Elizabeth Peter's Amelia Peabody series, Rita Mae Brown's Mrs. Murphy stories, the adventures of Koko and Qwilleran in Lillian Jackson Braun's The Cat Who... books, Julian May's Pliocene Exile/Intervention sequence. And we regret that we will hear no more of Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, creations of Agatha Christie, and Brother Caedfael by the late Ellis Peters. Why? I think because each of the series is biographical or autobiographical, albeit fictional, and just as fascinating, at least to me, as the adventures of Dorothy and friends in book after book of the Oz stories or the current Harry Potter books (which I confess I have not read).

If we think reality is not as interesting as fiction, think back not too far to the O. J. Simpson trial when the magic of television allowed us to enter the sordid world of the rich and famous. Even more recently, who was not glued to the television to learn the outcome of the closest Presidential election in our lifetimes, if ever. Living autobiography!?

In the first paragraph, if you can remember back that far, I mentioned looking, as a young girl, for role models in the biographical books I read. While I certainly admire the women I have mentioned in this essay, and a number of others as well, taking a public figure for a role model is like thinking that Cinderella and the Prince really lived happily ever after. So, if you asked me today who my role models are, you probably wouldn't recognize their names. They are people I know personally - men and women of courage, and grace, and dignity in the face of life's greatest challenges. I am privileged to know them. They are real, more real than those who write autobiographies telling us what they want us to know, no matter how fine the literature they write.

To end on a lighter note, the women I have mentioned in this article are all tall. Irrelevant you say? Perhaps. Think of the most admired women and who comes to mind? Eleanor Roosevelt (6 feet tall), Maya Angelou and Jill Ker Conway (6 feet tall), or Christine Todd Whitman (I don't know, but tall). I never saw a petite woman college president (I'm sure there are some, I just haven't seen them). Tall women aren't pushovers; they can look most men straight in the eye without straining their necks and they don't have to develop unpleasant personality traits as compensation to maintain respect or discipline. Take it from one who is 5'4" on a good day after hanging from monkey bars for an hour or so, it's true! They can concentrate on the aspects of their lives that make their autobiographies worth reading.

On an even lighter and more irrelevant note, an interesting study I read not too long ago, and wish I could find the source for again, states that in every (or almost every) presidential election, the taller candidate has won. The candidates in the past election were just about the same height (officially) and look what happened! By the way, I wonder how tall Hillary Clinton is.

About the Author:

Kristin Redpath is a former professor of computer technology and is the owner of Redpath Studios, an artist's collaborative with studios in Wilmington, Vermont, and Norton, Massachusetts. She is a regular contributor to the Arts4All Newsletter.

Angelou, Maya, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969

Bloom, Harold, Ed., Bloom's Notes, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Chelsea House Publishers, 1996

Bloom, Harold, Ed., Modern Critical Views: Maya Angelou, Chelsea House Publishers, 1998

Conway, Jill Ker, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography, Random House, 1998 (The first quotation is from page 17, the second is from page 18.)

Elliot, Jeffrey M., Ed., Conversations with Maya Angelou, 1989

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969
Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Diiie: The Poetry of Maya Angelou, 1971, 1988 with Oh Pray My Wings are Gonna Fit Me Well
Gather Together in My Name, 1974, 1985
Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well, 1975
Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, 1976
And Still I Rise, 1978
Weekend Glory, 198-
The Heart of a Woman, 1981
Shaker, Why Don't You Sing?, 1983
All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes, 1986
Now Sheba Sings the Songs, 1986
I Shall Not Be Moved, 1990
On the Pulse of Morning, 1993
Soul Looks Back in Wonder, 1993
Lessons in Living, 1993
Life Doesn't Frighten Me, 1993
Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now, 1993
I Love the Look of Words, 1993
And My Best Friend Is Chicken, 1994
Complete Collected Poems, 1994
My Painted House, My Friendly Chicken and Me, 1994
Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women, 1994
Our Grandmothers, 1994

Jill Ker Conway

http://www.bkstore.com/mit/fac/conway.html
http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Conway.html
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/australia/jconway/conwayov.html
http://www.c-span.org/guide/books/booknotes/archive/bn0524.htm
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/june98/conway_6-1.html
http://www.cs.umb.edu/~rwhealan/jfk/jillkc.htm
http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/coorain.html
http://www.theage.com.au/bus/20000120/A34258-2000Jan19.html
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/australia/jconway/conw8.html
http://www.desert.net/ww/05-18-98/boston_books_1.html
http://landow.stg.brown.edu/post/australia/jconway/conw4.html

Maya Angelou

http://www.mayaangelou.com/
http://falcon.jmu.edu/~ramseyil/angelou.htm
http://www.empirezine.com/spotlight/maya/maya1.htm
http://ucaswww.mcm.uc.edu/worldfest/about.html
http://www.educeth.ch/english/readinglist/angeloum/index.html
http://voices.cla.umn.edu/authors/MayaAngelou.html
http://web.reed.edu/academic/departments/english/courses/english213/
African_American_.html
http://www.dqydj.com/prod2.htm
http://eserver.org/poetry/angelou.html (Inaugural Poem)
http://www.motherjones.com/mother_jones/MJ95/kelley.html
http://afgen.com/pioneer.html
http://www.wic.org/bio/mangelou.htm 

Alice Hamilton

http://encarta.msn.com/find/Concise.asp?ti=0B476000
http://library.thinkquest.org/20117/hamilton.html
http://www.cwhf.org/browse/inductees/hamilton.htm
http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/alice.html

Hildegard of Bingen

http://www.uni-mainz.de/~horst/hildegard/ewelcome.html (website of Arbeitskreis zur Förderung der Hildegardstradition [The Working Group for the Promotion of the Tradition of Hildegard])
http://www.stlawu.edu/nhes:http/medieval.html
http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/2600/ (Contains links to many other women's contributions)
http://www.healingchants.com/hvb_links.html
http://www.uni-mainz.de/~horst/hildegard/spuren/espuren.html

Julian of Norwich

http://users.visi.net/~longt/julian.htm (interesting paper)
http://home.clara.net/clara.net/f/r/m/frmartinsmith/webspace/julian/ (The Julian Centre's website)

And many others by doing a web search.

Consult Ms. Redpath's research summary of resources about African-American authors.

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Benedictine Abbey of Saint Hildegard. Image courtesy the Working Group for the Promotion of the Tradition of Hildegard, Mainz, Germany.	Lady Julian's Cell, today. Image courtesy the Julian Centre, Norwich, UK.