Ronnie Feit, who coordinated that first NWPC conference, deftly defined the two women's political skills for Steinem's biographer, Sydney Ladensohn Stern: "Betty had a clearer sense of political groundedness. She cares about issues and is a big thinker. I didn't think of Gloria in the same league. She's a good consensus builder, but was defending an ideologically narrower viewpoint -- political correctness -- and she seemed insecure about how much she was willing to stand up and say what she really stood for ... she was a careful operator. Betty was a sloppy operator. She had raw energy and showed her flaws. Gloria was much more image-conscious."

Because Steinem never had much of an internal political lodestar beyond an instinctive sympathy for anyone she saw as victimized, she tended to reflect the ideas of the urban intelligentsia who surrounded her, which in the 1970s leaned pretty far left. In their view, Friedan's achievements could be minimized as (in the words of an NWPC statement) "reporting the then little-known dilemma of the well-educated white middle-class housewife," because she hadn't devoted herself to championing oppressed minorities or devising elaborate critiques of patriarchy. However, middle-class white women were and always have been feminism's core political base, a fact Friedan never forgot. Whatever the worthiness of Steinem's causes (it varied), in the end her leadership contributed to making the movement seem irrelevant to that base.

In a cascading series of ironies, Steinem's classically feminine personal style led her to adopt some of the movement's most radical ideas. Single and childless, she was the quintessential independent "career woman," but with the enviable style and boyfriend options of Jacqueline Onassis. Her "smashing looks" both thrilled and deeply confused the media. Hennessee and others relate a telling anecdote: "In 1972, Kingman Brewster, then president of Yale, told an audience of graduate women that he could accept the part of the movement represented by Gloria -- the part that included men," but not the supposedly man-hating philosophy of Friedan. He had, of course, completely transposed the two women's positions.

Meanwhile, Friedan's jealousy and frustration diverted her energy. She got shamefully involved in an attempt by some of the movement's early radicals to insinuate that Steinem was a CIA agent. And while she recognized that the integration of work and family had become the primary concern of her constituency, her 1981 book addressing that anxiety, "The Second Stage," was too muddily conceived and reactive to rally them. Some of the decisions both women faced were true quandaries. Friedan was politically shrewd in trying to keep the issue of lesbian rights off the feminist agenda, while Steinem was morally right to stand up for them.

This perpetually intriguing rivalry unfolded against an hyperactive and colorful social backdrop in which anything could happen. Radical groups formed and in a few months began fissioning into factions that savagely denounced each other. Jill Johnston "rebutted" a Norman Mailer assertion at a public debate by making out with two other women onstage at New York's Town Hall. Susan Brownmiller led a nine-hour sit-in in the offices of Ladies Home Journal during which Shulamith Firestone had to be restrained from throwing the editor-in-chief out a window. Pat Buckley sprang from the audience at a Ti-Grace Atkinson lecture and belted the speaker for bad-mouthing the Catholic Church.

Atkinson herself was a veritable cottage industry of political high jinks. Handpicked by Friedan, who thought her elegant looks and breeding would help make the movement respectable, Atkinson, as president of New York NOW, horrified her sponsor by first coming out in support of the violently insane Valerie Solanas (the woman who shot Andy Warhol) and her one-woman Society for Cutting Up Men (S.C.U.M.), then calling for the abolition of the nuclear family, urging feminists to forgo sex with men. Finally, she had a passionate affair with a Mafia don whom she took to calling "Sister Joseph Columbo" at rallies called to protest violence against women.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"