Token Females

In the first chapter of Reinventing Womanhood, Heilbrun not only explores the essence of female autonomy but the essence of female achievement:

women who did have the courage, self-confidence, and autonomy to make their way in the male-dominated world did so by identifying themselves with male ideals and role models.

She does not exactly condemn this behavior, admitting that women are forced to become honorary men in order to obtain the male respect required to consolidate power. Ironically, however, the same women who internalize male values are also required to temper their ambition with ‘femininity’, avoiding aggressive behavior. Female aggression is often defined in negative terms, a characterization that would undermine her efforts to assimilate.

These women, Heilbrun argues, serve as token females for the male establishment:

Tokenism allows males to use one woman, or a few, to protect themselves against the claims for equal representation in their ranks. Established males discover, moreover, that they can count on the token women of achievement to isolate themselves from other women, from the causes of women, and from identification with women.

Heilbrun makes this sound as if it is a conscious decision by the male establishment. I doubt that much is true. After all, if token women have adapted masculine ideals in order to succeed, then would it not give men a false impression about the true value of women.

Past incarnations of feminism have only served to allow women to gain advantages within a patriarchal structure. It has not elevated female values to the level of masculine ones. Evidence of this lies in role reversal. A woman who succeeds in a traditionally male environment is often admired by members of both sexes. A man who succeeds in a traditionally female environment is often the subject of ridicule or admired by only a small subset of individuals.

What Heilbrun suggests is that women:

while not denying to themselves the male lessons of achievement that almost all our literature and history can afford, recognize the importance of taking these examples to themselves as women, supporting other women, identifying with them, and imagining the achievement of women generally.

Unfortunately, when women seek to empower other women within a traditionally masculine enviornment, they are often accused of “having an agenda.” While women who attempt to form exclusively female communities (where women can explore their empowerment with less retribution) are often accused of being separatists.

Heilbrun seeks to reconcile these descrepencies through the redefinition of what it is to be a woman:

I shall move on a winding path between life and literature, refusing to seperate them, to confine myself, as a woman, to one or the other . . . I shall turn over many pieces and test many connections in the hope, finally, of assembling a possible new definition.