ABSTRACT

Feminists have long used a form of memoir - the personal testimony - to highlight the contradictions between normative expectations and representations of women and actual women's lives. A century ago the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst wrote a vivid first person account of being force-fed in prison to highlight the suffering some women were prepared to endure in the campaign for suffrage. In recent years, scholars have argued that consciousness raising has been given a new life by women writing personal stories online. Friedman argues the power of blogs is in the way they have replaced notions of objectivity with an 'insistence on authorial stance'. The responses to both Freedman's and Pryor's stories bore out Friedman's argument that readers hunger for the 'intimacy' of personal stories of motherhood. In providing authors and readers with the opportunity to share experiences and receive consolation, Pryor's and Freedman's personal stories are clearly an offspring of Second Wave feminism's consciousness-raising tradition.