SOURCE: Gornick, Vivian. “What Feminism Looks Like.” Nation 261, no. 15 (6 November 1995): 544-46.

In the following review, Gornick maintains that one of the major thematic concerns of The Education of a Woman is the impact of Steinem's beauty and femininity on her life and career.

The first woman astronaut went up into space and, standing on the ground, her mother cried, “God bless Gloria Steinem!”

The women's movement, in a moment of disarray, needed an enemy within, and it cried, “Gloria Steinem!”

Asked in a small city why she had never married, Steinem said for the television cameras, “I wanted women to see that you could not marry, and still have an interesting life.” In the studio people applauded wildly.

A few years ago, watching her drift through a roomful of intellectual women—it was not her crowd, she could find no easy place to touch down—I heard a...