Life & Wisdom Quote by Carolyn Heilbrun

Heilbrun’s line refuses a bait-and-switch that still haunts mainstream “equality” talk: the idea that liberation means swapping one template for another. “Simple reversal” is a razor phrase. It calls out how quickly feminist ambition can get misread as an aesthetic of masculinity - women “winning” by performing the values and behaviors already crowned as serious, rational, powerful. That’s not progress; it’s the same hierarchy with the costumes flipped.

The subtext is a critique of assimilation. If the only legible form of success is coded male, then urging women to become “identical to men” doesn’t dismantle patriarchy; it validates it. Heilbrun’s insistence on androgyny isn’t a mushy middle, but a strategic widening of the repertoire: a culture where traits aren’t policed by gender, where tenderness isn’t a downgrade and ambition isn’t a trespass.

Context matters. Heilbrun wrote across the second-wave era’s arguments about difference vs. sameness, and before today’s language around gender performance and nonbinary identity became common currency. Her framing anticipates a later insight: the goal isn’t to choose masculinity over femininity, but to make both available without punishment. “Choice” here isn’t the consumerist version - pick your brand of empowerment and move on. It’s structural. Choice only exists when the costs are removed: when careers don’t penalize pregnancy, when caregiving doesn’t erase status, when gender expression doesn’t invite violence or mockery. Heilbrun makes feminism’s endgame sound deceptively modest. That’s the point: it’s radical precisely because it demands the world stop charging people for being whole.