Education of a Woman The Life of Gloria Steinem [Paperback]

From one of America's most respected critics comes an acclaimed biography of the controversial feminist. Here, Heilbrun illuminates the life and explores the many facets of Steinem's complex life, from her difficult childhood to the awakening that changed her into the most famous feminist in the world. Intimate and insightful, here is a biography that is as provocative as the woman who inspired it. Photos.Carolyn G. Heilbrun is the Avalon Foundation Professor in the Humanities Emeriti at Columbia University. In addition to her many works of criticism, which include the bestselling Writing a Woman’s Life and Hamlet’s Mother and Other Women, she is also the author of the acclaimed Kate Fansler series of mysteries under the name of Amanda Cross.INTRODUCTION
 
CHILDHOOD CAN MAKE a destiny, and most of us believe that it does. But it is also possible, if childhood trauma has not imprisoned us in a cycle of unconscious repetition, that the early years, or memories of them, serve mainly to reveal a pattern only discernible when the life is considered as a whole. In adulthood we can, if we look, find in childhood the seeds of the life we have lived. Whether that life was made inevitable by the childhood, or whether we remember only that part of childhood that explains what we have become, may be less important to the biographer than to the therapist or the suffering individual requiring therapy.
 
Autobiography is not the story of a life; it is the recreation or the discovery of one. In writing of experience, we discover what it was, and in the writing create the pattern we seem to have lived. Often, of course, autobiography is merely a collection of well-rehearsed anecdotes; but, intelligently written, it is the revelation, to the reader and the writer, of the writer’s conception of the life he or she has lived. Simply put, autobiography is a reckoning.
 
Biography is another matterlS€