Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage

Showalter begins and ends her account of the lives of famous women with Mary Wollstonecraft and Princess Di, both of them ""rule-breakers who followed their own path, who were determined to experience love, achievement, and fame, and who wanted their life to matter."" In short, they were ""feminist icons,"" and along with a long list of American and British women (plus Simone de Beauvoir), their life stories make up Showalter's idea of a feminist inheritance. Hers is an idiosyncratic list, as notable for who is out as who is in: Rebecca West, but not Virginia Woolf; Hillary Clinton, not Eleanor Roosevelt; Camille Paglia, not Mary Daly; Princess Di, not Jackie O. The women she highlights were hardly monuments of either invulnerability or consistency, and the book invites us to identify with their wounds and scars as well as with their heroic search for autonomy. Although those familiar with the field of women's studies will discover relatively little that is new here, the general reader will find Showalter's vigorous retelling of the lives of these feminist foremothers engaging and blessedly free of both academic jargon and the weight of theory. Though readers may find her choices occasionally bewildering, they will also discover in them rich material for lively argument. Agent, Geri Thoma. (Mar. 20) Forecast: While this book will be required reading for countless introductory women's studies courses, it should also become a popular present from feminists from the 1960s and '70s to their daughters and sons.