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| Book Review | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.4 | The History Cooperative
103.4  
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December, 2007
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REVIEWS

Irma
A Chicago Woman's Story, 1871–1966

By Ellen FitzSimmons Steinberg
(Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2004. Pp. xxi, 231. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. Clothbound, $49.95; paperbound, $19.95.)

Memoirs and autobiographies continue to intrigue historians and general readers. While the lives of famous individuals have always been sought after and Americans remain fascinated with celebrity, the memoir has, since the advent of the new social history in the 1970s, benefited from another trend: interest in the lives of ordinary people. Ellen FitzSimmons Steinberg, author of Irma: A Chicago Woman's Story, tells us that "by her own admission, [Irma] was 'nobody famous'" (p. xiii). Steinberg goes to considerable lengths to present the story of Irma in the woman's own words—"the more than half a million words Irma wrote during her adult life" (p. ix)—even though she left no sustained manuscript that reflects her own ordering of her life story. Steinberg spent more than twelve months transcribing Irma's diaries, journals, letters, and other papers. She carried out additional research, spoke with family members, and then "placed Irma's writings within a temporal-social-religious framework to explain what might otherwise be unfamiliar to a reader" (p. ix). . . .
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