Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University Of ...

events; and then to connect them in order to create a compelling portrait. In doing so, the biographer hopes to uncover and recover the hidden self as well as to determine what is important to highlight and reveal. Both the portraitist and the biographer must be multivocal as well as multifocal in order to reveal the individual lives of those people who are on their canvas. That is, the portraitist and the biographer must take into account multiple voices and multiple readings of the evidence as they give shape and meaning to the portrait they ultimately create, and they must also make possible multiple readings by the viewer.

Historical writing has seen a growing focus on biographical research. This has particularly been the case in the expanding studies of women’s lives.²⁹ According to Barbara Finkelstein, biographical inquiry offers four points of entry for historical analysis: (1) the capacity to explore the origins of ideas, (2) a useful tool for analyzing social choices and alternative possibilities, (3) a window through which to observe the nature of social change, and (4) a way to explore intersections between human agency and social structures.³⁰ The tools of biographical research offer a particularly appropriate vehicle for exploring these hidden lives and, as Jane Ribbens has argued, ‘the links between “private” and “public” knowledges and ways of knowing’.³¹

In this book, we employ the biographical frame as a way of constructing a series of portraits of academic women. Each portrait is composed of diverse and sometimes fragmentary sources, including oral testimonies and documentary, visual, and archival texts; each portrait links with others as a way of understanding the lives and contributions of the first generations of home scientists at the University of New Zealand. Our goal has been to portray the significance of almost-forgotten life stories—to explore women’s location in the academic world, the constraints they experienced, the strategies they utilized to enhance their professional and personal opportunities, the intricacies of their decision making, their struggles for power, and the influence of their social and professional networks. Biographical analysis is helpful because it creates a greater awareness of the complexities that underpinned the lives of these women; it also offers a lens through which to understand