SOURCE: "The Autobiographer and Her Readers: From Apology to Affirmation," in Women's Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, edited by Estelle C. Jelinek, Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 93-111.

In the following excerpt, Winston argues that nineteenth-century women autobiographers were more self-conscious and conciliatory than women of the twentieth century.

From the seventeenth century into the twentieth, women writers have shown an acute self-consciousness of the criticism they often aroused simply because they were female. One finds an interesting pattern of response to this criticism in the autobiographies of professional women writers, British and American, who were born in the last century. Those whose autobiographies were published before 1920 tended to establish a conciliatory relationship to their readers, by this means attempting to justify their untraditional ways of living and writing so as to gain the audience's sympathy and acceptance. Women who published autobiographies after 1920, however, no longer apologized for their careers...