When Men Were the Only Models We Had

by Carolyn G. Heilbrun

""Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another - as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals....Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become....Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being."" "With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins an account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Remembering