Feminism’s family drama: Female genealogies,feminist historiography,and Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women

Abstract

This article considers Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009), a novel that tells the stories of a hunger striking suffragette and four generations of her female descendants. Tracing feminist history through female genealogy, Walbert’s historiographic metafiction helps us think through the perils and potentials of the generational methods that have long dominated feminist historiography. Critically engaging with what has arguably become a feminist family drama, the novel makes an invaluable contribution to contemporary feminist theory and feminist historiography, illustrating of feminist genealogies as simultaneously fruitful and fraught, limiting and liberating and yet inescapable and useful.