A recent poll of Americans indicated that women voters were evaluating the presidential candidates according to their policy positions, while the men were principally concerned with the issues of "leadership" and "character" (the kind of vague emotional thinking behind the belief that a record of war heroism is excellent preparation for a term in the Senate). In the totemic world of the male political imagination, to zero in on a leader's personality and on the struggles for power within a group is to treat both leader and group as players, that is, like men. It may be irrational, but it isn't patronizing; it's a kind of compliment.

The women's movement's phobia about airing its conflicts was as misplaced as its dislike of stars. Though Steinem has said she scrupulously avoids challenging or rebuking other feminists for fear of offering the media a "catfight," in truth, the women's movement's intercine struggles weren't locker-room tussles over who stole who's boyfriend -- they were about crucial questions concerning the movement's goals and future. Pretending that those arguments weren't happening only served to compromise feminism's reputation for common sense, candor and realism, a reputation now at an all-time low. And it locked the movement's constituency out of the debate.

Lastly, the character and even the personal lives of women's movement leaders are exceptionally relevant to followers and potential followers precisely because (unlike, say, the civil rights movement) feminism called for fundamental and intimate changes in everybody's everyday life. This sort of thing is frigging hard, and people understandably sought examples, demonstrations, proof that it could be done and, ultimately, acknowledgment that the revolution didn't come as easily as the movement's recommendations, ranging from chirpy to furious, suggested it would.

Take, for example, feminism's most famous rivalry, the one between Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Friedan shrugs it off in "Life So Far," but the biographers of both women rightly note that it shook the women's movement to its core. When Steinem eventually "won," becoming feminism's primary spokeswoman, that victory shaped the course of the movement. These two complicated women embodied a fascinating mixture of flaws and strengths, and each clung to some of the traits of traditional femininity while jettisoning others. Both were Jews from the Midwest who attended and adored Smith College, but there the similarities end. Few historians of Second Wave feminism can resist attempting to chart the uncanny symmetry of their differences.

Friedan -- in her later years called, much to her annoyance, "the mother of us all" -- published the enormously successful and influential "The Feminine Mystique" in 1963 and followed it up by co-founding the National Organization for Women (NOW), the National Abortion Rights Action League (NARAL) and the National Women's Political Caucus (NWPC), but she was eventually pushed out of the leadership of all three groups. A charismatic public speaker, Friedan had a remarkable talent for stirring people into action; her lecture tours left NOW chapters in their wake like the breadcrumbs scattered behind Hansel and Gretel. But Friedan was also, by her own admission, "a bad-tempered bitch." She is less willing to admit that she also abused and betrayed some of her most loyal followers, expected to be waited on hand and foot, was prone to paranoia and vengefulness, and hated to share the spotlight.

A housewife and mother of three with a freelance writing career on the side when "The Feminist Mystique" came out, Friedan always saw herself as the voice of mainstream feminism. NOW, to her mind, was "not about sex, but about equal opportunity in jobs" and, eventually, passing the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Though she always supported abortion rights, she eventually became disgusted with what she saw as NOW's growing "preoccupation with lesbian rights, the disconnect from the majority of women who supported equality ... the overemphasis on racism, poverty and rape, everything and anything but the problems of white and black middle-class women." In short, Friedan's positions were as politically unfashionable in the mid-1970s as they are fashionable now.

If Friedan was the pragmatist, Gloria Steinem was an ideologue, a coiner of such slogans as "A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle" -- the kind of glib "female chauvinism" that made Friedan apoplectic. But in an upset of all the stereotypes about pragmatists and ideologues, Friedan was impossible, bossy, bombastic, intolerant -- she pissed people off -- while Steinem was the consummate peacemaker, capable of pulling together the anarchic NWPC, whose first organizing conference included women ranging from former sharecropper Fannie Lou Hamer to white-glove ladies like Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson's former press secretary. Hennessee, Friedan's biographer, writes that "the caucus had the impossible task of trying to unify all these disparate interests virtually overnight -- a job tailor-made for Gloria's talents."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"