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."