Jane Rule and the Archive: New Models for Researching Women’s Lives

Marlene Kadar's injunction to expand the conceptual framework of autobiography had implications not only for the study of the genre, but also for research about and by women more generally. The strict boundaries by which autobiography had been governed were thus expanded to include genres that had been more readily accessed by women, not simply a matter of their preference but also the result of restrictions and expectations related to gender. Taking Kadar's work as a cue, this paper calls upon my own investigation of how archival research for women necessitates moving radically beyond formal institutions and beyond understandings of what constitutes an archival document.