SOURCE: Braham, Jeanne. “Lens of Empathy.” In Inscribing the Daily: Critical Essays on Women's Diaries, edited by Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff, pp. 56-71. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Braham underscores the unorthodox and personal nature of the memoirs of Sarton, Nancy Mairs, and Audre Lorde.

Scholars working within both the humanities and the social sciences are beginning to challenge the male, white, upper-class model of “achievement and quest” dominating the field of biography and autobiography until the last twenty years. Whose lives, they ask, have been studied as exemplary and what enlargements of our understanding of human experience can occur when “different” (women, blacks, working-class, disabled, gay) life experiences are included?

Some women's personal narratives reveal what their authors believe they are supposed to feel; their formulas acknowledge the conformist power of the dominant culture. Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, for...