Since the ancients, “Biography” was gendered male, assumed to be by and about public men. Newly recovered evidence allows us to trace the equivocal evolution of women’s life-writing that has always struggled to extend the gender of biography. We examine women's representations in various media, including textiles, from many cultures to consider how biography and autobiography reflect, refract, and resist the persistent historical misogyny that continues to thwart female authority. We track searing accounts of female enslavement from the Middle Eastern harem to the American South; consider new feminist commentary about the silencing of global queens from post-Biblical time to the present; learn about the lives of female spiritual teachers around the globe who were martyred for their subversive influence like the Hindu Khona and Hildegard of Bingen. In the Western early modern tradition, we interrogate the 15th-century "confession" of Christine de Pizan in which she imagines a subversive City of Ladies; read barely veiled autobiographical writings of early modern women like the poet Anne Askew; 17th-century author and scientist Margaret Cavendish; the enslaved Phillis Wheatley; and political theorist Mary Wollstonecraft. We read a sampling of Mary Hays' groundbreaking Female Biography (1803), which reveals how women's reputations have been calibrated by their compliance or resistance to sexual norms. We conclude with recent forms of biography by and about women that reveal the distinctive qualities of producing a woman’s life as integral to the struggle to secure female autonomy in women’s public, as well their private, lives. A key component of the course is producing an original biographical entry on a previously unknown or under-researched woman for The New Historia, an online platform and laboratory of feminist historical recovery (thenewhistoria.org).