| Chapter 1: | Portraits and Portraiture |
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their capacity for individual agency while highlighting the discourses of gender that framed women’s professional lives. As Alison Prentice has commented, biography offers a unique perspective on issues at the interface of the individual and society, for ‘only in the lives of single individuals is it possible to glimpse the complexity of motivation and experience that makes up human history’.32 At the same time, we are mindful of Kathleen Weiler’s warning regarding the constructed quality of evidence, the seductive attraction of writing the past as a coherent historical narrative, and the need for a ‘critical suspicion of the evidence of written texts or the oral accounts’.33
Historical biography sketches partial, imperfect, and fallible views of the lives of academic women, and interpretations are inherently flawed. As historians, we live with an essential paradox: On the one hand, there is a reliance on sources that can never be fully reliable; on the other hand, these sources must be interpreted in order to construct meaningful narratives about academic women and the world they inhabited.34 However, in spite of the prominence of a number of the women (as professors and academics) and their long service to the universities in which they were employed, archival records are incomplete or missing and accounts of their contributions to research and academic life are unrecorded. Locating archival sources for and about women is difficult because they exist as needles in the haystacks of male prose.35
Our methodological approaches have adopted a broader sweep of historical sources and artefacts and move beyond ‘the records of the official central state run by bureaucrats and politicians’.36 This involved considerable work in archives across New Zealand, England, and the United States. Examples of the biographic materials that were produced by these searches include photographic and oral history collections, university calendars, local newspapers, alumnae publications, newsletters, the census, academic periodicals, and biographical encyclopaedias as well as obituaries and a wide variety of web-based material. It is by collecting information from these disparate sources that the jigsaws of women’s lives can be put together. Liz Stanley has outlined that