There's a smart, rather wistful essay in Carolyn Heilbrun's influential book on feminism and biography, "Writing a Woman's Life," in which she confesses she once hoped to write the authorized life of Dorothy Sayers. The peerless British detective novelist, who died in 1957, would have been an ideal subject for Heilbrun, who taught literature at Columbia for many years and herself writes sophisticated feminist mysteries under the pseudonym Amanda Cross. Alas, the Sayers project went to a British biographer. But a few years ago, when Gloria Steinem decided to select an official biographer--in part because she feared that unofficial versions of her life were about to pop up--she invited Heilbrun to do the book. So now we have The Education of a Woman (451 pages. Dial. $24.95), and it's hard for an admirer of both Heilbrun and Steinem to feel anything but regret. Too bad it couldn't have been Sayers! Heilbrun is a fine writer and Steinem a to-die-for subject, but what this project needed most was simply not possible: an invigorating distance between the two. Steinem's ideal biographer will be born in another 40 years or so.
It's not that Steinem and Heilbrun were lifelong friends--Heilbrun says right at the outset that she didn't even meet Steinem until two weeks before starting work on the book. And according to Heilbrun, Steinem exerted no control over the manuscript, despite the fact that the two of them sometimes disagreed. But Steinem never comes to life in these pages: this is feminist hagiography. High-minded and adoring, it harks back in spirit to a book written nearly a hundred years ago, about a beloved leader of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union: "The Beautiful life of Frances E. Willard."
Going glamorous: There's no question that Steinem's life merits a book-length study. Raised in the Midwest by a ne'er-do-well father and a mentally unstable mother, Steinem grew up loved but poorly cared for. She went to Smith on money her family scraped up, lived in India, then moved to New York to become a journalist. An activist from the early '60s on, she worked for Cesar Chavez, the anti-war movement and the Democrats. Later in her career Steinem would be accused of going glamorous, but in fact she was glamorous from the start. Always terrific looking, often photographed and written about, she had a string of high-profile lovers including Robert Benton, Mike Nichols, Ted Sorenson, Stanley Pottinger and Mort Zuckerman. As the '70s began, she decided to put all her energies into working for women, and helped found Ms. Magazine. Keeping it alive consumed most of the next two decades. Now 61, Steinem remains the nation's most visible and articulate spokeswoman for unapologetic feminism.
Heilbrun adds detail and analysis to this sketch, especially about Steinem's childhood, but it's impossible to create a three-dimensional life without unequivocally creating a character, and that Heilbrun won't do. Instead we learn that Steinem's friends love her, that her ex-lovers speak warmly of her, that her only flaws are an excess of generosity and a desire to avoid conflict, that if she stumbles into a quarrel it's invariably the other person's fault. To sum up Steinem as Frances Willard was summed up--"the spotless, sainted queen of womankind"--may be entirely accurate, but in the end it doesn't make for much of a read.
Uncommon Knowledge
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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