Great Dames

Great Dames is a Collection of Short Biographical sketches, memoirs, and essays about Canadian women of the twentieth century from all walks of life. The fifteen essays by such contributors as Aritha van Herk, Carolyn Strange, and Patricia Smart, represent many theoretical and auto/biographical approaches to feminist biography including chronological narrative, thematic exploration, multiple biography, conversations between biographer and subject, interviews, diaries, and fictional accounts.While attempting to capture the meaning of the ordinary lives of extraordinary women, the collection also sets out to explore the possibilities of challenging, perhaps even subverting, the traditional view of life-writing as an endeavour to describe, interpret, and thereby fix in time, the public careers of public men.The subjects, from Mennonite refugee women to an Ojibwa ethnologist, were felt to be unlikely candidates for a longer biography and were also chosen in an attempt to address perceived gaps in regional, class, racial, and disciplinary representation in life-writing.Together, the essays reveal that the content, form, and perspective of biography is now bound only by the creativity, research energy, and taste of the biographer.