The book “Writing a Women’s Life”: Author: Carolyn G. Heilbrun is a classic feminist text. First published in 1988 it discusses what it means to be a woman in a male-dominated society, and the way this impacts the biographies that have been written, along with how women write as authors.
Carolyn G. Heilbrun was a prolific feminist author of both academic studies and popular mystery novels using the pen name Amanda Cross. Heilbrun taught English at Columbia University from 1960 to 1992, becoming the first woman to receive tenure in the English Department. She specialized in British modern literature. Heilbrun was also the co-founder and editor of the Columbia University Press series; Gender and Culture. She committed suicide, October, 2003 after deciding that she had contributed enough to the world and that there was no longer any reason to live.

 
Writing a Women’s Life begins by “There are four ways to write a woman’s life: The women herself may tell it, in what she chooses to call an autobiography; she may tell it in what she chooses to call fiction; a biographer, woman or man, may write the woman’s life in what is called a biography; or the woman may write her own live in advance of living it, unconsciously and without recognizing or naming the process.” Heilbrun examines each of these types of telling the story of a woman’s life except the format of fiction. Although, her main focus seems to be on convincing women how they have been oppressed and unable to write their own truthful stories. “Biographies of women, if they have been written at all, have been written under the constraints of acceptable discussion, of agreement about what can be left out”

 
One way of writing a woman’s life is with an autobiography. Using the true story of George Sand, she describes a “woman who was a great man.” All accounts of her life describe her as both a man and a woman. She was a woman who sometimes dressed as a man, and often acted like one; in that she was forthright and direct, “with a masculine nature. ” As a writer George Sand had a tremendous effect on the writers of her time. Dostoyevsky, Whitman, Hawthorne, and George Eliot were all authors who were influenced by her work. Yet, the author claims that because she was a woman, her stories have disappeared from the canons of French and American Literature courses with “scarcely a trace” This disappearance results in her not becoming an available narrative for women to use within their own lives and writing.She says “It is precisely such a safety net that is absent from women’s lives, let alone their writings,. How are they to imagine forms and language they have never heard? How are they to live to write, and to write that other woman may live?… For women, that response has almost always been to the poetry of men, to a point of view not theirs.” The claim is that without female examples, women can only write from the viewpoint of man. The only acceptable tone is one of the white; middle-class , and so when they write, “they do not represent themselves as women”

 
What are the consequences for a woman who is determined to tell a story without the constraints of the assigned script? Traumatic consequences are described: death and suicide, a more confined marriage and the story of “Cousin Lewis’, where a woman who donned male clothing to tell her children stories of adventure is declared unfit to raise her children ” The author encourages women to begin to tell the truth of their lives even with the threat of these consequences, to groups, to one another, to promote modern feminism.

 
Throughout this text the theme of female oppression prevails, cumulating in a chapter of women in old age where she describes “ It is perhaps only in old age, certainly past fifty, that women can stop being female impersonators, can grasp the opportunity to reverse their most cherished principles of ‘femininity’…perhaps can profoundly change their lives” This final chapter talks about the freedom of being an old woman; that after the loss of her beauty and feminine usefulness, perhaps she can become powerful.” When they are old enough to have done with the business of being women, and can let loose their strength, they become the most powerful creatures in the world. The old woman must be glimpsed through all her disguises which seem to preclude her right to be called woman. She may well for the first time be woman herself.”

 
While this text is dated, the fundamental message remain somewhat relevant despite the fact that today’s women have far more socially legitimate options than those who provide Heilbrun’s examples. Today many women still hide themselves to conform to ideals that don’t ultimately benefit them.

Heilbrun, Carolyn G. Writing a Woman’s Life. 1st Ballantine Books ed. Ballantine Reader’s
Circle. New York: Ballantine Books, 1988..