SOURCE: Mintz, Lawrence E. “Review Essays.” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 1 (summer 1992): 165-71.

In the following review of Writing a Woman's Life, Mintz compliments Heilbrun as an astute and provocative feminist scholar.

In the 1960s and 1970s feminist scholars voiced a concerted objection to the patriarchal bias in western intellectual thought. Because scholarship has been dominated by male voices, telling all stories from a male point of view, they argued, women's experience has been ignored, devalued, or wrongly interpreted. Feminist scholars insisted that we listen to women as they tell their own stories, so that we would have a balanced view of human experience. It sounded reasonable enough, but for almost three decades, feminist scholars have been wrestling with an intellectual puzzle: if we accept the argument that western knowledge is flawed by a fundamental patriarchal bias, how can we find informants who will have resisted the patriarchal...