PACIFIC NORTHWEST HISTORIANS GUILD
NORTHWEST HISTORIAN Newsletter
November, 2004
"Women Writing Women's Biography Panel:
The Relationship of Autobiography to Biography”
by
Esther Altshul Helfgott
[This panel of writers speaks Tues. Nov. 16, 2004, 7:30 pm. at Richard
Hugo House, 1634 Eleventh Ave., beginning at 7:30 pm.]
Autobiography and biography are story, and story evolves from self, which is I, which is we
and you and she, which is he and they. The self is I and me and the person I am speaking to, or the
person I am speaking about.
How much history gets told or not told in biography depends on how much autobiography is
contained within the other’s story and how much of the other’s story is contained within the
biographer’s desire to write the biography in the first place. The five women writers speaking on this
panel know the call to subject, as well as the instruction: do not exploit, all the time desiring/wanting
information and thereby intruding, even betraying, the self that does the writing and the self who
does the speaking and remembering.
Dorothy Laigo Cordova, is a second-generation Filipino American, born in Seattle who writes
from her Filipino heritage. She began her professional pursuit of Filipino history in 1980 in a journal
writing workshop in the University of Washington’s Women’s Heritage project and has since become
a nationally recognized researcher and oral historian of Filipino American history. She is the
Founder and Executive Director of the Filipino American National Historical Society.
Mildred Andrews is a Northwest social historian with more than twenty years
experience in research, writing, education, publishing and curating exhibits. Her work
evokes a strong sense of place, as she brings to light stories of people and organizations
in the region. She is the author of Woman's Place: a Guide to Seattle and King County
History and Washington Women as Path Breakers.
Elizabeth Salas’ work on Mexican-American politicians reflects her life as a writer and
Chicana studies teacher. Salas will introduce our panel to the life and work of Rep. Phyllis Gutierrez
Kenney of Seattle’s 46th district who “stands out because she is the most progressive politician of
them all. Salas’s article, “ Mexican-American Women Politicians in Seattle” appears in More Voices,
New Stories: King County, Washington’s First 150 Years, a project of the Pacific Northwest Historian’s
Guild, edited by Mary C. Wright, 2002.
Susan Starbuck “interviewed Hazel Wolf (1898-2000), in 1980 for the Washington Women's
Heritage Project. “I was supposed to produce two 2-hour tapes, but ended up publishing her
biography--all in her own words—after twenty two years of following her about, both as her
biographer and as her student.” The University of Washington Press published Starbuck’s Hazel
Wolf: Fighting the Establishment in 2003.
My relationship with the psychoanalyst Edith Buxbaum (1902-1982), began in the early 1990s,
a decade after her death. As a student of psychoanalysis in the Northwest, I wanted to know why
there were not more women psychoanalysts in Seattle and why those who were practicing here were
not training analysts.
We might as well carry a mirror around with us while writing the stories of other people’s
lives, hold it up to our ever-changing selves to see what it is of the other person that we might find
there, especially when arriving home from an interview. Join us for the panel. Help us explore these
ideas, all the while listening to the exciting stories of five, or perhaps ten, women’s lives.