GOLDEN WOMEN: Career Women Who Did What They Wanted To

by Carli Laklan ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 7, 1983

Old-fashioned YA fodder, except that some of the 14 ""career women""--Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Gloria Vanderbilt, Shirley Temple Black--wouldn't qualify by old-fashioned standards. (Julie Nixon Eisenhower's #1 achievement is standing up for her father, Gloria Vanderbilt's is outgrowing Little Gloria. As for the erstwhile Shirley Temple: ""I'm a born volunteer worker."") Selections like these might indeed make feminists boil--if the smooth, romanticized, ten-page (or so) profiles were worth taking seriously at all. The group also starts off with Amelia Earhart, for goodness sakes, and ends with Mother Theresa--whose career, Laklan twice tells us, was chosen for her by God. There is one woman here whose accomplishment isn't a human-interest story--and yet touches a nerve: Geraldine Stutz, head (and now owner) of Henri Bendel, the N.Y. specialty store she transformed (via twelve years in analysis). But Barbara Jordan is a poor black with determination; Rya Weickert Zobel is a parentless refugee who became ""the first woman federal judge in all New England""; Rabbi Deborah Prinz is one of the first women rabbis; Eileen Ford, Bess Myerson, and Barbara Walters are Eileen Ford, Bess Myerson, and Barbara Walters. (Prinz, we do hear relevantly, was a self-tester--and Walters' roller-coaster childhood made her security-minded.) Then there's Mary Leakey, whose work is most of the story, and an unknown non-success, Barbara Angle--who fought to be a coal miner and chose to be an unwed mother, was seriously injured and isn't giving up. A peculiar assortment, and 90 percent pap.

Pub Date: March 7, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: McGraw-Hill

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION