Carolyn G. Heilbrun has devoted her life to the study of female destiny. In her now-classic Writing a Woman's Life, she eloquently revealed that those who have written about women's lives throughout the centuries have suppressed the truth of the female experience in order to make the written life conform to society's expectations of what a woman's life should be.

In that book Heilbrun drew on the experiences of celebrated literary women - George Sand, Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich - to invite all women to write their own scripts, without inhibition. Now, in The Education of a Woman, Heilbrun draws on the life of one of the most controversial women of our time, a woman who most definitely, in word and in deed, wrote her own script.

According to Heilbrun, Steinem "searched within her own gender for a destiny unconstrained and unprescribed - for herself, and for other women less unambiguously at home in their bodies."