Gloria Steinem, whose resentment of “the patriarchy” has not abated in thirty years, has aptly chosen her authorized biographer. Three years ago Carolyn Heilbrun noisily resigned her chair in Columbia University’s English department because, as a woman, she felt herself targeted. “In life, as in fiction,” Ms. Heilbrun told The New York Times, “women who speak out usually end up punished or dead. I’m lucky to escape with my pension and a year of leave.” The Times reporter ventured to remark that things were no longer so bad. Thirty-two years ago when Heilbrun had first come to Columbia there were no tenured female professors in the English department. Now eight of its thirty-two tenured professors and a majority of its junior professors are women. Heilbrun was not impressed. “Female doesn’t mean feminist,” she snapped. Having “survived” her long tenure at Columbia, Heilbrun planned to devote herself full-time to writing and “speaking out.” One of her first projects would be the writing of The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem.

In her mystery stories (written under the name Amanda Cross) Heilbrun has parodied several women more academically distinguished than herself (among them Wellesley College’s Mary Lefkowitz and Harvard University’s Helen Vendler) who are not her kind of feminist. By contrast, Heilbrun is remarkably protective of Gloria Steinem, who is very much her kind of feminist and who does not threaten her professionally. Even so, Steinem is physically attractive and that provokes and disconcerts Heilbrun.

Heilbrun tells of her initial fascination with the idea of writing a biography of a woman “simultaneously the epitome of female beauty and the quintessence of female revolution” who “confronted all the shibboleths of a patriarchal culture.” Calling her the most famous feminist in the country, Heilbrun is at pains to persuade readers that Steinem is a “boundary-crossing feminist” fully deserving of her renown. This undertaking requires her to fend off attacks by Steinem’s feminist detractors, many of whom dismiss her as a pseudo-intellectual bimbo who would never have been famous were she not, in Heilbrun’s phrase, “a feminist in a miniskirt.”

Betty Friedan, whom Heilbrun portrays as ever envious of Steinem’s good looks and ever unforgiving of Steinem for having superseded her as Ms. Feminist, has said: “Gloria has not advanced any new ideas in the women’s movement—but she is an outstanding publicist.” Friedan believes that the path Steinem has chosen is neither original with her nor the way to go: “The women’s liberation movement has had enough of sexual politics.” Heilbrun does not take seriously the suggestion that the movement can get too much of sexual politics, for she agrees with Steinem that the dismantling of patriarchy is the feminist imperative.

The Education of a Woman gets passing grades as narrative. Heilbrun gives the facts of Steinem’s life in an engaging manner: a difficult childhood in Toledo, Ohio; the “patriarchal” education at Smith College, which, Steinem says, demoralized her until she found her true vocation in advancing the cause of women; an idealistic year in India; an abortion in England; her early forays into journalism in New York and her work for Cesar Chavez, followed by her alliance with Norman Mailer in his mayoral campaign (she accepted the nomination to run for comptroller and later defected); “the great blinding lightbulb” that went off in her head at a Redstocking “speakout” on abortion; the brave decision to go on the road to preach her newly learned feminist gospel. Then there was the founding of Ms. magazine and the struggle to keep it afloat, the media fame, the fear of writing books, the “wise” therapy culminating in the publication of the best-selling Revolution from Within.

Despite all the assurances that Friedan never lays a glove on Steinem, The Education of a Woman signally fails to refute Friedan’s charge that Steinem contributed no new ideas. Such a charge can be met in only one convincing way: by providing a systematic account of Steinem’s “boundary-crossing” contributions. Heilbrun’s considerable credentials as a scholar and literary critic are never engaged to provide a coherent outline of Steinem’s views, let alone an explanation of their significance and influence or, failing that, an honest critical evaluation of their insignificance.

Indeed, the reader finally realizes that it is Heilbrun who remains fixated on Steinem as “the pretty one.” I counted more than a dozen voyeuristic comments on Steinem as a “looker,” on how paradoxical this was for a feminist, and how nevertheless it gave Steinem confidence and cachet. Heilbrun sees emblematic significance in the contrast between Steinem’s “father’s obesity and her own eternal slimness.” We learn over and over again of the various ways that the revolutionary feminist embodied in the slim attractive figure presented “a living contradiction [that] worried the pigeonholers.” According to Heilbrun, the media punished Steinem for presenting them with this contradiction. “Since she could not easily be caricatured as ugly, the press and many of her detractors trivialized Steinem as glamorous and sexy.”

The topic of Steinem’s incongruous attractiveness is banal, but Heilbrun clearly feels that its significance has not yet been plumbed. She delicately suggests that Steinem unknowingly paid a high price for being so good-looking a feminist:

There are questions she had never asked herself: What would her life have been had she been homely, however spirited and brave? Perhaps in that case she would have evolved into the writer she seemed always to have wished to be… . What would her life have been if she had inherited, as her sister did, their father’s weight problem, which no amount of discipline and dieting could ever reduce to slimness?

Here one can almost hear Heilbrun asking, “Would she then have been capable of becoming the writer and thinker I have become?” It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Heilbrun’s constant fussing over Steinem’s looks and slimness is both a way of indulging her obsessive bemusement with the “paradoxical” idea that a genuine feminist can be so glamorous as well as a way of beclouding and finally skirting the distressing issues concerning Steinem’s importance that had been raised by Friedan on the Right and the radical feminists on the Left.

Three-quarters into the book, Heilbrun suddenly concedes that Steinem’s effectiveness as a speaker and writer was confined to her being “ever ready to expound first principles” to those who were just discovering feminism. And she says that even Steinem’s most devoted friends found it difficult to understand how she was able to repeat the same ideas without subjecting them to criticism.

She had a way of sticking to fundamentals that was beyond the comprehension of some of those who worked with her on the magazine and wanted to refine and question those fundamentals. Paradoxically, her talent for tolerating restatement and for making it exciting would, by the time she reached her sixties, run the risk of imprisoning her in concepts too little reconsidered.

Friedan had merely said that Steinem was unoriginal. Now Heilbrun indicts her more severely by expressing reservations about Steinem’s ability to take a critical look at the “first principles” she keeps repeating and repeating. One might add that nothing in Steinem’s oeuvre confines such reservations to the period of Steinem’s seventh decade. Except for her forays into the warm, murky shoals of the self-esteem movement, Steinem has been a indefatigable feminist activist whose line hasn’t changed in twenty-five years. Nor is there anything “paradoxical” in this. For as Heilbrun herself finally comes around to suggesting, Steinem is an attractive, resourceful, and loyal party hack, to whom the gender feminists are immeasurably indebted for her immense political labors. Though Heilbrun’s private views about Steinem’s intellectual limitations are not altogether suppressed, the biography lacks integrity for Heilbrun had earlier given the reader the impression that Steinem was a bold and innovative thinker. She never expressly disavows these intimations.

Having dealt at length with the complaints of critics like Friedan and the Redstockings (the latter complained that Steinem was promoting a “watered-down,” bourgeois kind of feminism and even accused her of being a CIA operative), Heilbrun scornfully makes short shrift of a third, more recent, group of adversaries. These, says Heilbrun, are women

who call themselves feminists but who do not in fact like women. It is always in defense of men that such women speak, and it is by this defense that they can be identified. Their accusations that women like Steinem hate men are a neat reversal of their own hatred of women, unconscious though it may sometimes be. Never mind them, Steinem now says… . What we have is one another—and it is to one another that we must speak and offer encouragement and support.

Who are these male-defending misogynist women that “trash” Steinem? They are, says Heilbrun, “self-declared feminists who apparently ached for the publicity Steinem seemed able so easily to evoke … women [like] Christina Hoff Sommers [and] Katie Roiphe … [who] seemed to base their assaults on their defense of men against the hatred feminists of Steinem’s generation supposedly felt for men.”

Later on Heilbrun adds the redoubtable Camille Paglia to the enemies list. But neither I nor Roiphe had ever said of Steinem that she hates men; nor had Paglia. Heilbrun cites Paglia’s remark that she herself is “a better role model for women today than all these sex-phobic women.” When I asked Paglia whom she meant, she told me that the sex-phobic women she had in mind did not include Gloria Steinem but did include Robin Morgan and Carolyn Heilbrun! “Steinem always exploited her sexuality to attract men… . She has used men as a social escort service for her entire life. She is a party animal. There isn’t a rich-bitch table that woman has not sat at.”

Heilbrun misses the point of the quarrel that Paglia, Roiphe, and I have with the kind of feminism that Steinem purveys. We are not much interested in whether Steinem “really likes” men. Nor are we centrally concerned with defending men. We strongly feel it is women—far more than men— who need to be defended from feminists like Steinem and Heilbrun. Steinem and Heilbrun and their sisters-in-arms may have one another, but in all their talk of sisterhood we cannot help hearing how condescending they are to all the women who “fail” to have achieved the level of feminist consciousness they regard as appropriate and necessary.

At a 1973 League of Women Voters convention Steinem referred to married women as “part-time prostitutes” exploited by their husbands for their labors and sexual attentions. League members were shocked and offended. Steinem explains, “I never said married women were prostitutes, but I did compare traditional marriage to prostitution.” Heilbrun offers assurances that Steinem “always did take great care never to accuse women, but to the listener at that convention, the distinction was a delicate one.” To me, to Paglia, and to a growing number of feminists who are not in the business of “critiquing” women for being dupes of the patriarchy, it is no distinction at all. And why should Steinem be taking “great care never to accuse women” unless she is striving not to betray an attitude that many women would find patronizing and hurtful? Disdain for the average woman routinely surfaces despite all the care taken not to accuse women—putting the lie to all the cozy talk of sisterhood. Consider Steinem’s unsisterly verdict on the millions of evangelical Christian women. Steinem sees them as women who have chosen security over authenticity: “the promise is safety in return for obedience, respectability in return for self-respect and freedom—a sad bargain.”

Steinem herself knows a thing or two about how to recruit adherents by promises of safety and self-respect. The feminist religious orthodoxy she preaches promises safety in a sisterhood that offers unhappy women a venue where they can build their self-esteem and attain an “authenticity” enjoyed by no other group of women. Heilbrun conscientiously spreads the gospel by telling readers of the “many thousands” of lost souls Steinem has “rescued.”

If we discount collections of articles, the one serious book Steinem has written is Revolution from Within, a best seller that was panned by feminist intellectuals as distracting from sexual politics but even more for its pop psychology and platitudinous self-help nostrums. To these criticisms Heilbrun adds her own doubts that “searching for the inner child is the best way to go about remaking one’s life.” Heilbrun tells us that Steinem found these insider reviews carping, but she was “most disturbed” by them.

Despite her own strong reservations about Revolution from Within, Heilbrun calls it “wholly a feminist book.” She defends its crassness by saying that Steinem “had chosen never to be an ‘intellectual.’” She excuses its lack of cogency by noting that by the 1990s Steinem had decided that her writing would follow the maxim: “Express, don’t persuade.”

Steinem posted “Express, don’t persuade” on her bulletin board, and Heilbrun seems not to worry that with this Steinem has arrogated to herself an illegitimate license to speak out without having to present arguments. The motto announces a principled romantic abandonment of “establishment” masculinist logic. To consider that as “wholly feminist” is to accede to the old German thinkers like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who said: “Man reduces all that is in and for him to clear conceptions, and discovers it only through reasoning … Woman, on the other hand, has a natural sentiment of what is good, true and proper.” Fichte offers this left-handed compliment to women in the course of arguing against ever granting them the right to vote. In her latest book, appropriately titled Moving Beyond Words, a defiant Gloria Steinem takes pride in abjuring persuasive reason. She boasts of an increased rebelliousness and expressiveness, a “healthy anger that … loosens my tongue, leaves me ever more impatient and energized… . At last I’m beginning to ignore the rules altogether … messages I once heard only with my head go straight to my heart.”

So what in the final analysis is Gloria Steinem’s philosophy? Heilbrun could have summed it up for us by quoting from a Steinem poem included in her very recent essay “Doing Sixty.”

Women on campus
Wear “masculine” thoughts
And look to daddy for
Good grades.

Married women
Give their bodies away
And wear their husbands’
Wishes.

Religious women
Cover sinful bodies
And ask redemption from god
Not knowing
She is within them.

* * *

Dear Goddess: I pray for the courage
To walk naked
At any age.
To wear red and purple,
To be unladylike,
Inappropriate,
Scandalous and
Incorrect
To the very end.

One may applaud this or find it acutely embarrassing, but one cannot deny its triteness. Steinem’s essay would be more aptly titled “Keeping On Doing the Sixties.”

Heilbrun’s mainly adulatory biography ends by comparing Steinem to Kilroy. “She is, like the mythical Kilroy of World War II, essential and ubiquitous: Steinem was here.”

The more than four hundred pages that precede that breezy final sentence certainly attest to Gloria Steinem’s “ubiquity,” but nothing in them warrants calling her “essential.” Despite all her best efforts, Heilbrun could not prevent herself from demonstrating that Friedan was right about Steinem all along. Camille Paglia is fond of quoting her friend Heidi Schmidt, who said: “Once we needed her, and now we’re stuck with her.” After reading Carolyn Heilbrun’s life of Gloria Steinem, not a few readers will be asking themselves, “Did we ever need her?”

Notes
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1. The Education of a Woman: The Life of Gloria Steinem, by Carolyn G. Heilbrun; The Dial Press, 451 pages, $24.95. Go back to the text.