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One hallmark of recent feminist biography has been its focus on the interplay between the personal and the political in constructing the narratives of individual women's lives. The case of Alice Paul suggests that not all subjects are amenable to such an approach. Paul so defined her life by devotion to the cause of feminism, first woman suffrage and then decades of advocacy for the Equal Rights Amendment, that she had no personal life to speak of. When the personal is so completely subsumed to the political, it poses a huge hurdle for the feminist biographer.
Successful biographies are marked by two outstanding qualities: they have a fresh and compelling story to tell, and they exude a demonstrable engagement between the biographer and the subject. Needless to say, this engagement can range from admiration to hatred-and practically every emotion in between-but the connection has to be there to propel the biographer through the years of research necessary to do justice to the life, and then to capture the interest of the readers, either general or academic, who are the intended audience for the work. This spark or connection is one of the great mysteries of the craftof biography, but it is essential to a good outcome. When it happens it makes for something akin to a great marriage: think how well suited Kathryn Kish Sklar is to Florence Kelley, Susan Pederson to Eleanor Rathbone, or Blanche Wiesen Cook to Eleanor Roosevelt, to name three stellar examples of historians and their subjects.1 But what happens when, in the words of a feminist colleague, you realize that your subject is not the girl you want to go home from the prom with?2
In theory Alice Paul and I were a perfect match. She was one of America's most intrepid, albeit polarizing, feminists, whose career spanned practically the entire twentieth century from suffrage militancy to second-wave feminism; no major biography of her had ever been completed. I had spent almost my entire career as a women's historian writing about the fortunes of feminism through the lens of feminist biography. As an independent scholar unencumbered by regular teaching responsibilities, I had the time and energy to put in the years of research that it would likely take to...