My Life as I Remember It: Subjectivities, memory and narrative in British working-class women's self-representation, 1830-1990

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This research is an interdisciplinary study of British working-class women's autobiography and life writing exploring how this historically neglected group engaged with autobiography as a form to construct a classed, racialised, and gendered 'selfhood'. It will examine how working-class women constructed and represented their subjective selves through life writing and how they negotiated the intersection between race, ethnicity, class, gender identities, age, and sexuality through their writing. While there have been important contributions in the field studying the relationship between working-class women, autobiography, and subjectivity, historiography has thus far almost exclusively focused on women writing in the nineteenth and around the turn of the twentieth centuries where women "remain a minority presence" in the archive, representing less than ten percent of known texts. The Burnett Archive holds many sources written by working-class women following John Burnett's request for working-class narratives on Women's Hour on BBC Radio Four in 1973. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the late twentieth century saw flurries of working-class autobiographies produced. Expanding the scope of previous studies to include the mid to late twentieth century and focusing on how working-class women constructed and represented their subjective selves through life writing, this research will compare these two waves using an original methodology and examine how developments on the concept of selfhood over the twentieth century have impacted upon working-class women's subjectivities and their documentation. Additionally, undertaking a literary analysis of working-class women's autobiographies, this project will examine the language, cultural forms, and subjectivities that were available to working-class women and how they came to influence their self-representation. This research aims to reorient the focus of present scholarship that uses working-class autobiographies primarily as empirical data. Where historians have focused on literary readings of working-class autobiography, they have often expressed concern that they defy interpretation. This research will offer a more nuanced picture of how working-class women drew upon genre, rhetorical devices, and models of identity to frame their experiences in the absence of traditional routes of material and social progress. Autobiography will be taken in the broadest of terms, including fragments of personal histories, diaristic entries, collective biographies, and oral histories. Autobiography has come to be associated with "master narratives of conflict resolution and development" featuring "the overrepresented Western white male". Working-class women's life writing significantly diverges from this definition of the genre and has subsequently been seen in opposition to it, and in critically investigating the fragmentary nature of working-class women's autobiography this project will have broader implications on understandings of the genre itself. In reassessing the relationship between class, gender, and life writing with issues of race and intersectionality, this project will enhance understandings of how class and gender identity are inextricably linked and how working-class women's identities are produced intersubjectively, by prevailing ideologies, and textually.