SOURCE: Breines, Wini. “Career Feminist.” Women's Review of Books 13, no. 3 (December 1995): 8-9.

In the following review, Breines criticizes The Education of a Woman, arguing that the biography is “strangely transparent, an unmessy narrative of Steinem's admirable life with little attention to depth, complications, or contradictions.”

Carolyn Heilbrun writes Gloria Steinem's life [in The Education of a Woman], as an uncomplicated story. Steinem was born into a white lower-middle-class family in 1934 in Toledo, Ohio. She spent many years parenting her seriously troubled mother, eventually went to Smith College, traveled in India and returned to the US to become a journalist. She is independent, has had many lovers but never married or had children; as Heilbrun points out, she is an uncommon woman whose life has been determined only by herself. (Heilbrun argues that in this Steinem is more radical than many feminists who have chosen the security of marriage...