This article considers Kate Walbert’s A Short History of Women (2009), a novel that follows the history of feminism from the nineteenth century to the present by telling the stories of a hunger striking suffragette and four generations of her female descendants. By exploring feminist history through female genealogy, Walbert’s historiographic metafiction illustrates the perils and potentials of the generational methods that have predominated feminist historiography in recent decades. By thus engaging in feminism’s family drama, the novel provides a self-conscious illustration of feminist genealogies as simultaneously fruitful and fraught, limiting and liberating, and yet inescapable and useful
