SOURCE: "Institutionalizing Women's Autobiography: Nineteenth-Century Editors and the Shaping of an Autobiographical Tradition," in The Culture of Autobiography: Constructions of Self-Representation, edited by Robert Folkenflik, Stanford University Press, 1993, pp. 80-103.

In the excerpt below, Peterson explores the structure and subject matter of women's autobiographies and notes the differences between women's and men's writings.

What is women's autobiography, and when was it first written? Answers are difficult to give. We do not know what English-woman produced the first piece of self-writing; what women's texts we have lost from the mid-seventeenth century, the moment that seems to mark the beginning of an unbroken English autobiographical tradition; or what texts we have lost—or lost sight of—from centuries before and after the seventeenth. Despite such lacunae, feminist scholarship of the last decade has attempted to delineate a tradition of women's autobiography. Beginning with Mary G. Mason's "The Other Voice" (1980) and...