Abstract
The chapter highlights the central function storytelling plays in the modern feminist project by studying two biographies of Gloria Steinem, whose authors have departed from the realist form in favor of a “sympathetic” approach to their subject’s life. In this chapter, Lidström Brock demonstrates that sympathetic feminist biography of Steinem depends on a vacillating definition of autobiography as both authentic and fictional, which highlights the fictional aspects of all auto/biography. Lidström Brock goes on to show that when Steinem’s two biographers present their subject as an exemplary feminist, they are making their respective claims in terms that correspond with an already established feminist emancipation narrative. Examining the biographies’ resemblance to feminist storytelling allows Lidström Brock to clearly identify the respective ideological dimensions of the two works.
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Notes
- 1.
Rupp, “Women Worthies and Women’s History,” 409.
- 2.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 127. Although Steedman argues that the “isolated and individual female figure” threatens to undermine the universality of feminist historians’ claims, she acknowledges that the figure remains a compelling character in the modern feminist imagination. Steedman, “La Theorie qui n’en est pas une,” 38.
- 3.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 126.
- 4.
Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), 23.
- 5.
Castro, American Feminism, 147.
- 6.
Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 24.
- 7.
As expected, Millett did not find any female emancipation stories in the novels that she studied.
- 8.
Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics, 24.
- 9.
Ibid., 50.
- 10.
Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, xii.
- 11.
Ibid., 53.
- 12.
Elaine Showalter, “Toward a Feminist Poetics,” in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature and Theory, ed. Elaine Showalter (1986; repr. New York: Virago, 1996), 137–139.
- 13.
In 2009, Showalter identified a “fourth” stage in women’s writing, by which she refers to a situation in which the woman writer is free to define and express herself “as an individual.” Elaine Showalter, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx (London: Virago Press, 2009), 511.
- 14.
Showalter acknowledges the eventual influence of the biological, the linguistic and the psychological on women’s writing, yet identifies the primary influence as cultural. She views women as a muted group, “the boundaries of whose culture and reality overlap, but are not wholly contained by the dominant (male) group” (Showalter’s italics). It is the trace of this “non-contained” part of women’s culture that she seeks in women’s writing. Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” 259.
- 15.
Showalter believes that “one of the great advantages of the women-culture model is that it shows how the female tradition can be a positive source of strength and solidarity as well as a negative source of powerlessness; it can generate its own experiences and symbols which are not simply the obverse of the male tradition.” Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” 265.
- 16.
Ibid., 266.
- 17.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 122.
- 18.
Ibid., 125.
- 19.
Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine’s Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722–1782 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), xi, qt. in Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 124.
- 20.
Miller, The Heroine’s Text, xi, qt. in Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 124.
- 21.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 126–127.
- 22.
See also Carol Pearson and Katherine Rope, who identify a similar plot in contemporary women’s writing. Carol Pearson and Katherine Rope, The Female Hero in American and British Literature (New York: R. R. Bowker Company, 1981).
- 23.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 128.
- 24.
Ibid., 130.
- 25.
Ibid., 131, 143.
- 26.
Ibid., 143.
- 27.
Ibid., 131.
- 28.
Ibid., 131–132.
- 29.
Ibid., 132.
- 30.
Ibid., 127.
- 31.
Ibid., 132.
- 32.
Ibid., 127.
- 33.
Ibid., 133.
- 34.
Ibid., 135.
- 35.
Ibid., 135, 140.
- 36.
Ibid., 138–139.
- 37.
Ibid., 139.
- 38.
Ibid., 136.
- 39.
Ibid., 135.
- 40.
Ibid., 140.
- 41.
Ibid., 141.
- 42.
Ibid., 127.
- 43.
Ibid., 141.
- 44.
Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 143; Rosen, The World Split Open, 208–209.
- 45.
Sheelah Kolhatkar, “Gloria Steinem,” Observer.com, December 18, 2005, http://observer.com/2005/12/gloria-steinem-2/. See also Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 149.
- 46.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 160.
- 47.
Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (New York: Owl, 1995), 21; Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 152.
- 48.
Of the twenty-eight articles in the collection Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, twenty were first published in Ms. magazine.
- 49.
Bradley observes that in Steinem’s writing, “[p]ersonal references are always in service to a larger point.” Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 162.
- 50.
Steinem, Revolution from Within, 68, 10.
- 51.
For example, see Sharon Doyle Driedger, “The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem,” Maclean’s Toronto Ed. 109, no. 8 (February 19, 1996): 61.
- 52.
Ibid., 66.
- 53.
Ibid., 67.
- 54.
Ibid., 262.
- 55.
Ibid., 264.
- 56.
Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, 144–146.
- 57.
Steinem, Revolution from Within, 287–288.
- 58.
See Schnall, “Interview with Gloria Steinem.”
- 59.
Castro, Feminism, 54.
- 60.
Steinem, Revolution from Within, 66–68.
- 61.
Ibid., 290–291.
- 62.
Rosen, The World Split Open, 216–217.
- 63.
In 1964, Steinem’s “role in [the magazine Glamour] began to shift from freelancer to subject matter.” Glamour magazine was the first to identify her as a style icon and featured Steinem’s “look” in a six-page spread. Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 150.
- 64.
Ibid., 144.
- 65.
“Reporters: Thinking Man’s Shrimpton,” Time.com, January 3, 1969, http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,900508,00.html. See also Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 150.
- 66.
Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 157.
- 67.
Redstockings also accused Steinem of being a CIA infiltrator of the women’s movement. Rosen, The World Split Open, 235–236.
- 68.
Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 178–179; Rosen, The World Split Open, 215–216.
- 69.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 425.
- 70.
Bradley suggests that Steinem’s talent for shaping (possibly to the point of “trivializing”) her feminist message according to the tenets of the medium that carried it contributed to her public role as a feminist spokesperson: “Steinem came to represent the only ground on which Americans were ready to consider feminism.” Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 144.
- 71.
In Cohen’s words, “the media, with their hunger for conflict and sex appeal, had indeed created [feminist] stars.” Cohen, The Sisterhood, 366.
- 72.
Bradley argues that “[Steinem’s] writing may seem self-revelatory, but in fact her writing, as in her responses to interviews, has relied on a selected number of stories from her childhood.” Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 148.
- 73.
Ibid., 517.
- 74.
According to Bradley, somewhat unusually Steinem also “appeared in the book marketing [of the biography], even providing interviews on its behalf” (ibid., 157).
- 75.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 447.
- 76.
Ibid., 442.
- 77.
Ibid.
- 78.
Ibid. Bradley comes to a similar conclusion: “Steinem’s contradictions are writ larger than life.” Bradley, Mass Media and the Shaping of American Feminism, 442.
- 79.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 136.
- 80.
Ibid.
- 81.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 210.
- 82.
Ibid., 424.
- 83.
Ibid., 147.
- 84.
Ibid., 43–44.
- 85.
Ibid., 61.
- 86.
Ibid., 134.
- 87.
Ibid., 147.
- 88.
Ibid., 191.
- 89.
Ibid., 233.
- 90.
Ibid.
- 91.
Ibid., 227.
- 92.
In My Life on the Road, published almost two decades after Stern’s biography, Steinem offers an example of how her role in the women’s movement was shaped, at least partly, by the movement’s demands on her person: “[In 1972,] the NWPC [National Women’s Political Caucus] had elected one spokesperson for each party’s convention so the press and other outsiders would know who to go to…I had asked to not be nominated…but I was elected in absentia.” Gloria Steinem, My Life on the Road (New York: Random House, 2015), 151.
- 93.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 223.
- 94.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 135.
- 95.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 222.
- 96.
Ibid., 223.
- 97.
Ibid.
- 98.
Showalter, “Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness,” 263.
- 99.
Ibid.
- 100.
Leonard Levitt, “She,” Esquire (October 1971), 215, qt. in Stern, Gloria Steinem, 230.
- 101.
According to Stern, Steinem “refused to concede that she derived any ego gratification from her role as a leader or that ambition played any part in her renown.” However, the “pressure on women to deny ambition was great and remains so. Selflessness is still idealized in women.” Stern, Gloria Steinem, 234.
- 102.
Ibid., 223.
- 103.
Ibid., 224.
- 104.
Ibid., 388.
- 105.
Ibid., 227.
- 106.
Ibid., 303.
- 107.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 139.
- 108.
Ibid., 127.
- 109.
As Felski explains further, “external exploration…requires some recognition of the contingency and uncertainty of experience; this form of knowledge is counterposed to the deceptive mythology of romance…an already written script without space for the articulation of dissent. The heroine’s move into society thus functions as an entry into historical time.” Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 136.
- 110.
See Howard Gardner and Emma Laskin, Leading Minds: An Anatomy of Leadership (New York: Basic, 1995).
- 111.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 228.
- 112.
Ibid.
- 113.
Ibid., 229.
- 114.
Ibid.
- 115.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 140.
- 116.
Ibid., 137.
- 117.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 444.
- 118.
Ibid., 301–302.
- 119.
“In addition to the struggles over issues,” Stern writes, “the power struggle among the leaders was obvious” (ibid., 240).
- 120.
Ibid., 240.
- 121.
Feit is also quoted as saying that Steinem “was defending an ideologically narrower viewpoint” than Friedan. Stern, Gloria Steinem, 240.
- 122.
Ibid., 240–241.
- 123.
According to Stern, “Revolution from Within offered standard recovery-movement advice and generally followed the recovery-movement format” (ibid., 384).
- 124.
Ibid., 402.
- 125.
Ibid., 403.
- 126.
Epstein explains further: “For Mailer treats [Monroe] as if she were Miller’s property…as if meeting and stealing her were situational possibilities determined by men—in this case, by ‘the playwright and the writer,’ a phrase [referring]…to writers in general, to professional identities associated with the cultural production and distribution of literary texts,” and “Mailer is unable to grant Monroe’s insanity…the status of a viable cultural product. It is as if her insanity is, to quote a Robert Graves poem, ‘dumb to say.’” Epstein, “(Post)Modern Lives,” 218, 227.
- 127.
Stern, Gloria Steinem, 388.
- 128.
In 1992, Heilbrun left Columbia University, supposedly in protest of what she perceived as sexual discrimination in the University’s English department, thereby expressing her commitment to women’s rights not just in words, but in actions. Ann Matthews, “Rage in a Tenured Position,” New York Times, November 8, 1992, 47.
- 129.
Grace Lichtenstein, “Glorious Gloria: Bio Does Justice to Steinem,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 29, 1995, 15.
- 130.
For Heilbrun, then, telling Steinem’s life is motivated, at least in part, by a suspicion that second-wave feminists were already on the verge of being forgotten: “Katie Roiphe, writing as one of the younger generation of feminists in the early 1990s, found those of Steinem’s generation to be antiman and antisex. Steinem’s life indicates that this is youth ignorant of its predecessors, whose history is just beginning to be written.” Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, xx.
- 131.
Ibid., xviii.
- 132.
Biography studies whose authors credit Heilbrun as their influence include Paula Backscheider, Reflections on Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Judy Long, Telling Women’s Lives: Subject/Narrator/Reader/Text (New York: New York University Press, 1999); and Linda Wagner-Martin, Telling Women’s Lives: The New Biography (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994).
- 133.
Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 11.
- 134.
Ibid., 18.
- 135.
Ibid., 21.
- 136.
Ibid., 29.
- 137.
Ibid., 30.
- 138.
Ibid., 28.
- 139.
Ibid. Heilbrun references Roland Barthes, “Réponses,” Tel Quel 47 (1971): 89.
- 140.
Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 50.
- 141.
Women’s lives, Heilbrun insists, must be “considered in the absence of a structure of critical or biographical commonplaces. It all needs to be invented, or discovered, or resaid.” She is suspicious of many feminist scholars who, she believes, tend to “ get lost in the intellectual ramifications of their disciplines and fail to reach out to the women whose lives must be rewritten” (ibid., 20).
- 142.
Ibid., 37.
- 143.
Ibid., 50.
- 144.
Ibid., 27.
- 145.
Heilbrun makes explicit reference to lie writing’s relationship to consciousness-raising in Writing a Woman’s Life: “Women must turn to one another for stories; they must shape the stories of their lives and their hopes and their unacceptable fantasies…Consciousness raising is the original critical instrument that women have developed towards such understanding, the analysis of social reality, and its critical revision.” Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 44–45.
- 146.
Or perhaps Heilbrun means “unlearning,” to use Steinem’s term, as Steinem’s “education” involves discarding existing “social myths.”
- 147.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, xxiii.
- 148.
Ibid., 32.
- 149.
Ibid., 40.
- 150.
Ibid., 39.
- 151.
Ibid., xvii.
- 152.
Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 38–39.
- 153.
Steinem, Revolution from Within, 66–67.
- 154.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 41.
- 155.
Ibid., 42.
- 156.
Ibid., 62.
- 157.
Heilbrun calls Steinem and the artist Barbara Nessim, with whom Steinem shared an apartment in the 1960s, “feminists before that word was again current.” Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 98.
- 158.
Ibid., 58.
- 159.
Ibid., 112.
- 160.
Ibid., 361; Steinem, Revolution from Within, 261–262.
- 161.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 362; Steinem, Revolution from Within, 264.
- 162.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, xvii.
- 163.
Ibid., 413.
- 164.
Ibid., 403.
- 165.
According to Nadel, “metaphor [in biography] simultaneously acts as the guiding or controlling trope of the subject’s life while also embodying or projecting the biographer’s conception of that life.” Nadel, Biography, 158.
- 166.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 294.
- 167.
Heilbrun relies on Steinem’s definition of the term “trashing” when she explains the term by referring to “those women who, because of a basic lack of self-esteem, cannot achieve the recognition they crave must make sure that no other woman can have it either.” Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 295.
- 168.
Ibid., 309.
- 169.
Heilbrun, Toward a Recognition of Androgyny (New York: Harper, 1973), x. Heilbrun’s definition of androgyny does not refer to a biological condition. Rather, it involves the pursuit of an ideal “unlimited personality,” where human traits are not linked to biological sex (ibid., xi).
- 170.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 384–385.
- 171.
Ibid., 347.
- 172.
Ibid.
- 173.
For example, Heilbrun mentions Steinem’s “recognition of the necessity of unity with African-American women and lesbians in the [women’s] movement” (ibid., 192).
- 174.
Ibid., 170.
- 175.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 143.
- 176.
Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellion, 21.
- 177.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, 174–175.
- 178.
Ibid., 172–174.
- 179.
Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, 129.
- 180.
Heilbrun, The Education of a Woman, xvii.
- 181.
Ibid., 404.
- 182.
The original statement appears in Jean-Paul Sartre, Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Gallimard, 1951), 645. The statement is translated in Christina Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” in Mapping Lives: The Uses of Biography, ed. Peter France and William St. Clair (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 274. “Yet, women geniuses and their biographers,” Heilbrun continues, “have not generally retraced their liberation history.” Usually, she argues, women’s efforts have not been interpreted as “inventions in desperate situations” in the first place. Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 44.
- 183.
Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 44. Here Heilbrun once again paraphrases Sartre. See Sartre, Saint Genet, 645, transl. in Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 274.
- 184.
Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 270.
- 185.
Ibid.
- 186.
Ibid.
- 187.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Baudelaire (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), in Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 271.
- 188.
See Jean-Paul Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), qt. in Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 272.
- 189.
Ibid. In this respect, Heilbrun’s biography of Steinem resembles Kathleen Barry’s definition of “feminist-critical biography.” In a feminist-critical biography the self “is knowable through its doings and actions, that is, through intentionality.” Kathleen Barry, “The New Historical Synthesis: Women’s Biography,” Journal of Women’s History 1, no. 3 (Winter 1990): 76. “When intentionality is marked by consciousness,” Barry explains further, “women’s subjectivity is political” (ibid., 85).
- 190.
Sartre, Baudelaire, 18, qt. in Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 272.
- 191.
Sartre, L’être et le néant, 563, qt. in Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 272.
- 192.
Ibid.
- 193.
Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 273.
- 194.
Howells expresses this sentiment thus: “Life does not so much explain art, as art reveals and explains life.” Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 274.
- 195.
Ibid.
- 196.
Sartre, Saint Genet, 645, qt. in Howells, “Sartre’s Existentialist Biographies,” 274.
- 197.
See, for example, Suzanne Fields, “Biographer Too Dazzled to See Beyond Steinem’s Halo,” Washington Times, October 15, 1995, B8; Marion Winik, “Then & Now: What Could Have Been a Lively Account of a Racy Life Comes Out More Like a Dry Tale,” Sun-Sentinel, Fort Lauderdale, FL, October 29, 1995, 8F; Katie Donovan, “Feminist Enigma,” Irish Times, April 9, 1996, 9. See also Joan Mellen, “Heilbrun’s ‘Gloria Steinem’: A Wall of Aloofness,” The Sun, Baltimore, MD, September 3, 1995, 4F and Laura Shapiro, “Saint Gloria,” Newsweek USA Edition, October 2, 1995, 90.
- 198.
Penelope Mesic, “Steinem’s Lives: Exploring the Growth of a Celebrated Feminist,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 1995, 3C.
- 199.
Ibid.
- 200.
See also Barry, who emphasizes the need for the feminist biographer to “sympathize” with her female subject: “Placing oneself in the situation of the other through subjective interaction…takes on feminist meaning as a woman-centered approach.” Barry, “The New Historical Synthesis,” 78. She continues: “But it is the biographer who must be conscious of male power sufficiently to pursue its varied potential manifestations” (ibid., 84). Applied to Heilbrun, her biographical approach differs from Sartre’s, whose approach does not take into account the possibility that gender might have an (adverse) effect on the biographical subject’s freedom of choice.
- 201.
Olney, Autobiography, 13.
- 202.
Driedger, “The Education of a Woman,” 61.
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Lidström Brock, M. (2016). Breaking New Ground—Feminist Exemplary Biography. In: Writing Feminist Lives. Breaking Feminist Waves. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47178-5_4
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