Reinventing Womanhood - Couverture rigide

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."

Carolyn G. Heilbrun (1926? 2003) was a professor of English at Columbia University. A force in literary and feminist theory, she also wrote mysteries under the pen name Amanda Cross.