Introduction

We work with memory, and we work with gender. We are aware of a notably strong and rapidly growing feminist scholarship on autobiography, which is the focus of Laura Marcus’s review article in this volume. And intuitively we have felt that there are differences between the ways in which men and women remember. We have all had direct experiences, both in our personal lives and in our research activities, which anecdotally support this feeling. We also know that our intuitions are widely shared. Indeed, it would seem common sense, given the sharply differentiated life experiences of men and women in most human societies, and the very widespread tendencies for men to dominate in the public sphere and for women’s lives to focus on family and household, that these experiences should be reflected in different qualities of memory. Hence, when we hear on the radio a public memory contest, for example about past football scores, or identifying snatches of music, we are not at all surprised if the winner is a man. On the other hand we would be astonished if we came across a couple in which the woman constantly turned to the man to confirm how and when they first met, when their first child was born, when it was weaned, and so on. It rings very true when John Updike writes, as a novelist, of a husband and wife recalling a former summer together, and how her memories ‘danced ahead, calling into color vast faded tracts of that distant experience . . . It made him jealous, her store of explicit memories . . . Their past was so much more vivid to her.’ ¹