Carolyn G. Heilbrun

Reinventing Womanhood

Carolyn Heilbrun's important investigation into issues of identity for twentieth-century American women: the problem with past role models, ways to construct new ones.

"Men have monopolized human experience, leaving women unable to imagine themselves as both ambitious and female. If I imagine myself (woman has always asked) whole, active, a self, will I not cease, in some profound way, to be a woman? The answer must be: imagine, and the old idea of womanhood be damned. . . . Let us imagine ourselves as selves, as at once striving and female. Womanhood can be what we say it is, not what they have always told us it was."

"Occasionally a book comes along that forces one to re-examine a familiar issue from a fresh perspective. . . . Carolyn Heilbrun's Reinventing Womanhood is that rare book. . . . Passionate and trenchant in its observations and recommendations, it is essential reading for anyone interested not only in the future of womanhood but in the stimulating possibilities for liberation of both sexes." —Chicago Tribune