Book excerpt: Women's Lives/Women's Times reflects the growing interest in life-writing as a basis for both feminist theorizing and women-centered education. It discusses the many ways in which the study of autobiography can contribute to the theory, practice, and politics of women's studies as curriculum, and to feminist theory more generally. This volume is concerned with the application of theory to text—particularly with the assumptions and discourses of postmodernism—but also in exploring how general theories of the subject do not always fit comfortably with the specifics of autobiographical writing. It also recognizes the challenge women's autobiography offers to theory, taking us, in its complex weave of the personal, the political, and the theoretical, beyond the usual generic and disciplinary boundaries.