In search of women's history: Conflicting narrative in the autobiographies of two American women foreign correspondents (Helen Foster Snow, Milly Bennett)

This study looks broadly at women's autobiographies as a way to recover women's actual experience in the past. Specifically, it examines the autobiographies of two U.S. women journalists who worked in China during China's Civil War, 1927 to 1937, using Deborah Cameron's categories of the ambiguous and unambiguous woman as expanded upon in Writing a Woman's Life (1988) by Carolyn Heilbrun. Heilbrun contends that the quest plot is the narrative device most commonly used to tell life stories. She maintains that it works well as a device for men's biographies and autobiographies, but is ill-suited to telling the stories of women's lives.; The autobiographies of Helen Foster Snow and Milly Bennett were selected for this study largely because, by objective facts, Foster Snow seems to exemplify the unambiguous woman and Bennett the ambiguous woman. China during its civil war is a backdrop primarily for two reasons: U.S. women represented a significant number among the foreign press corps at the time; and the civil war was a social revolution in which women's rights were an important issue.; The study shows that autobiography is not as useful as one might wish as tool for the recovery women's actual historical experience. The authors of the autobiographies under study seem overly self-conscious and concerned with audience perceptions of their lives and characters. Because of the strictures of the quest plot, Foster Snow and Bennett were forced to choose whether to present themselves as ambiguous or unambiguous. After examining their lives through other sources, the study found that women move in and out of the two categories at different times throughout their lives. Strictly ambiguous and unambiguous women exist only as narrative conventions.; Finally the study indicates that the fundamental problem of autobiography as a useful category for recovering women's actual historical experience is language. It supports Dale Spender's contention that women speak and write a man-made language using the symbolic forms developed largely by men to describe male-constructed social reality.