Susan Ware
Feminist biography has always been about finding a voice – “I speak as loudly as I can,” says Susan B. Anthony in Gertrude Stein’s The Mother of Us All, “I even speak louder than I can” – and then using that voice to speak out, which sums up Susan Ware’s personal credo as a feminist biographer and historian. At a moment when so much of the feminist agenda remains not just unfulfilled but under attack, women’s lives can provide inspiration and blueprints for future activism as well as a truer picture of the past. Embracing feminist biography felt like a political act in the 1970s. It still can.
Author Susan Ware
A pioneer in the field of women’s history and a leading feminist biographer, Susan Ware is the author and editor of numerous books on twentieth-century U.S. history, including biographies of New Deal politician Molly Dewson, aviator Amelia Earhart, radio talk show pioneer Mary Margaret McBride, and sports activist Billie Jean King. Other publications include American Women’s History: A Very Short Introduction and Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote, timed to coincide with the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020. Her most recent book, Speaking Louder Than I Can: The Power of Feminist Biography, surveys the past, present, and future of the field through profiles of nine exemplary twentieth-century figures, weaving her own journey as a feminist biographer into the stories she tells.
Born in Washington, D.C., Ware grew up in the Chicago suburbs, graduating from New Trier High School. Like her mother and grandmother, she attended Wellesley College and then did graduate work at Harvard University, where she earned a Ph.D. in history. She has taught at New York University and Harvard, where she served as editor of the biographical dictionary Notable American Women: Completing the Twentieth Century (2004). From 2012-2022 she served as the general editor of the American National Biography.
Ware has long been associated with the Schlesinger Library at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, most recently as the Honorary Women’s Suffrage Centennial Historian from 2016-2022. She is currently preparing two volumes on Eleanor Roosevelt for the Library of America (forthcoming 2027) and writing a biography of Alpinist and rock climber Miriam O’Brien Underhill, who pioneered “manless” climbing in the 1920s and 1930s.
“Writing about American women’s lives and accomplishments through a feminist lens is historian Susan Ware’s personal and professional calling.”
Elaine Weiss, author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote
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“For Susan Ware, reading the first wave of feminist biographies published in the 1970s felt like ‘a revolutionary act.’ Soon she joined the cause herself … offering guidance to a future in which ‘all biography should be feminist biography.”
Megan Marshall, author of After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human
edited collections & other books
American Women’s History
(Oxford)
American Women’s Suffrage
(Library of America)
American Women: A Concise History
(Oxford)
Title IX: A Brief History with Documents
(Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007; reissued by Waveland Press, 2014)
Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism
(W.W. Norton, 1993)
Letter to the World: Seven Women Who Shaped the American Century
(W.W. Norton, 1998)
Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century
(Harvard University Press, 2004)
It’s One O’Clock and Here is Mary Margaret McBride: A Radio Biography
(New York University Press, 2005)
Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics
(Yale University Press, 1987)
Forgotten Heroes: Inspiring American Portraits From Our Leading Historians
(The Free Press, 1998)
Modern American Women: A Documentary History
(McGraw-Hill, second edition, 2002)
Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s
(Twayne Publishers, 1982)
Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal
(Harvard University Press, 1981)
“Susan Ware is a long-time champion and pioneer of women’s biography” and “a treasure to those of us who care about women’s history and write about their lives.”
A’Lelia Bundles, author of Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance
CONTACT
Susan Ware divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and a farm in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, where she writes. She is especially proud of the “Why They Marched Suffrage Forest” she created on the property, which she visits regularly with her Bernese Mountain dogs Chesa and Bernina.
Speaking Louder Than I Can
The Power of Feminist Biography
(Oxford University Press)
Expertly laying out the themes and contributions of feminist biography interwoven with profiles of nine exemplary twentieth-century figures, this book finds feminist biography in unusual places, such as an opera libretto, a family history, and an oral history collaboration. It also shows how the approach illuminates the lives of LGBTQ+ subjects and women who do not identify as feminist. Throughout Susan Ware weaves her own journey as a feminist biographer into the stories she tells.
Why They Marched
Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote
(Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2019)
For far too long, the history of how American women won the right to vote has been told as the tale of a few iconic leaders, all white and native-born. Why They Marched uncovers a broader and more diverse story waiting to be told, providing a fresh account of one of the most significant moments of political mobilization in American History. Feminism and women’s rights are an ongoing struggle with no clear endpoint in sight and the women’s suffrage movement is a vital part of that story.
Game, Set, Match
Billie Jean King and the Revolution in Women’s Sports
(University of North Carolina Press, 2011)
When Billie Jean King trounced Bobby Riggs in tennis’s “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973, she placed sports squarely at the center of a national debate about gender equity. Combining biography and history, this book argues that Billie Jean King’s spirited challenges to sexism on and off the court, the supportive climate of second-wave feminism, and the legislative clout of Title IX sparked a women’s sports revolution in the 1970s that fundamentally reshaped American society. King’s place in tennis history is secure, but now she can take her rightful place as a key player in the history of feminism as well.