Elaine Bernstein Partnow, also known as Elaine Partnow, is a Los Angeles-based author and actor known for her living history portrayals and for her nationally lauded book The Quotable Woman, The First 5,000 Years (2010), a collection of nearly 20,000 quotations by over 5,000 women from 167 nations. First published in 1977 as The Quotable Woman: 1800-1975, it is currently in its sixth edition. Among the 17 published books Partnow has written or co-written are: Speaking with Power, Poise & Ease (2012), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Your True Age (2009), and The Female Dramatist (1998). She is a featured performing artist with the National Women's History Project. Most recently, Elaine earned six Best Actress Awards from international film festivals for her leading role in the independent feature film Slipaway; see her IMDb page for details.
Acting and writing career
Raised in the Los Angeles, California neighborhoods of Boyle Heights and Baldwin Hills, Partnow began acting in school plays as a kid and was cast in her first professional show two weeks after graduating high school. She won Best Actress at the Pasadena Playhouse during a county-wide high school contest. She attended UCLA, where she majored in Theatre Arts and was the youngest person at the time to win Best Actress from the department’s Kap ‘n Bells Honor Society. She moved to New York after college where she studied for two years with the late German-American actress and drama teacher Uta Hagen at the HB Studio in New York; she also studied there with William Hickey. A member of SAG-AFTRA and AEA, Partnow’s resume includes roles in dozens of stage plays, films, television shows, commercials, and music videos, including supporting roles in three Peter Bogdanovich films. More recently she has had cameo roles in several feature films and a leading role in the prize-winning feature Slipaway.
She left Los Angeles in 1981 to move to New Orleans. There she began doing arts-in-education in the schools, receiving sponsorship from Young Audiences, the Louisiana Division of the Arts and the Arts and Humanities Council of Louisiana. She developed a number of programs for the schools, community centers, and other civic institutions, including “A Visit with Emily Dickinson,” “Hispanic Women Speak,” and “Movers & Shakers: American Women in the Public Arena.” In these presentations Partnow portrays historical figures with monologues prepared from the woman’s own words. With grant funding from the Southeast Disciplinary Fund (Rockefeller and NEA sponsored) in the 1980s, she wrote, produced and performed her own one-woman show, Hear Us Roar, A Woman’s Connection. From New Orleans she moved to Seattle where her programs became popular with the “Inquiring Minds” series sponsored by the Washington Commission for the Humanities. In addition to her nonfiction books and magazine articles, Partnow has written three screenplays and two novels and has had some poetry published.
In the spring of 2014, she began production of an educational video series that grew out of her arts-in-education work and the 39-character repertoire she developed. She and her husband, Turner Browne, ran a successful Kickstarter campaign garnering 188 donors to fund the video series. The Quotable Woman Speaks: Living History Portraits of Amazing Women is now available in its first series, "Global Women Speak”; the six historical figures she portrays are Murasaki Shikibu, Juana Ines de la Cruz, Sarah Winnemucca, Sojourner Truth, Golda Meir, and Benazir Bhutto.
Quotology career
A self-taught “quotologist,” Partnow’s work is cited in Quotology (2009), by Willis Goth Regier, director of the University of Illinois Press. In addition to The Quotable Woman, her other quotation collections include The Little Book of the Spirit (2010), The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Great Quotes for All Occasions (2008), and The Quotable Jewish Woman (2004). For four years she wrote a column featuring women’s quotations, “Women of Wisdom,” on the award-winning website Feminist.com.