ABSTRACT
A year and a half ago, when Columbia University Press decided to publish a new edition of my 1982 book, Becoming a Heroine, the editor proposed that I write a new introduction. The idea appealed to me: teaching feminist graduate students at the City University, I was thinking about the difference between current concerns and those of seventies feminism, in the climate of which that book had been written; I was even doing a little reminiscing in class. The first chapter of Becoming a Heroine looked back at my passionate, girlish reading in the 1950s from the standpoint of the seventies; what could be more appropriate than placing a second lens in front of the first one?
