ABSTRACT
Feminist theorists have emphasized the underlying family dynamics that may sustain our gendered stories. As Nancy Chodorow, Dorothy Dinnerstein, Jane Flax, Evelyn Fox Keller, Carol Gilligan, and others have suggested, boys and girls are raised to regard their life trajectories differently. All children have as their first love object their mothering figure. They remain embedded in their relations and do not learn the solitary hero role. But they must bear the burden of shame that the androcentered culture assigns to their gender. In critical works concerning autobiography, women's narratives have been almost totally neglected. Yeager is the autobiography of the quintessential American hero, the pilot with the "right stuff". Yeager's story is intensively focused on his career in the Air Force. Richard Feynman, autobiographer and Nobel prize-winning physicist, was married to a woman who had been stricken with tuberculosis for seven years.
