What happened afterwards -- feminism's descent into the sinkholes of essentialism (the notion that women are inherently morally superior to men), victimology and doctrinaire self-righteousness -- has its roots, actual and symbolic, in the personalities and feuds of the '60s and '70s. Gloria Steinem was a role model who supposedly short-circuited the can't-get-a-man stereotypes about "women's libbers," but her life had nothing in common with that of the average American woman, rich, poor or middle-class. Friedan's populist instincts and vision were mostly sound, but she had a tragic, Lear-like inability to handle her own power, so she lost much of it.

In "Life So Far," Friedan doesn't show any sign of recognizing that weakness. But at 79, she's still writing frankly about her own life in ways that many will find refreshing. Remember that when she conceived of "The Feminine Mystique," it was a widely held conventional belief that any woman not content to limit her life to the domestic sphere was emotionally maladjusted. Part of Friedan's genius is her stubborn, unfeminine assertion of her own truth in the face of truisms -- even when they're feminist truisms. Writing today of her sometimes violent 22-year marriage to Carl Friedan, she admits to being caught up in a destructive dynamic in which "I taunted him into finally beating me up" as a way of venting marital pressures. While some battering relationships are simple tyrannies, the reality is that others, like the Freidans' marriage, are more complex dances in which each party willfully torments the other. (Her husband, incensed by the new memoir, insists that he never "gratuitously hit anyone," which, to the extent that it refutes "Life So Far," does so only obliquely.)

Likewise, Freidan is honest about her worries that her fame and success hampered her marriage and made it hard for her to form another lasting romantic relationship. The more conventional feminist position would be to deny those fears, or to toss off the old "fish without a bicycle" line, or to castigate men for their failure of nerve -- all of which tend to make similar women feel guilty for being weak enough to suffer from such anxieties to begin with.

It's also a cruel betrayal because the conundrum of how women can reconcile the tremendous changes in their social role with their perfectly human desires for love and family is perhaps feminism's biggest challenge. It's certainly a problem that merits more than facile slogans. At the very least, a forthright acknowledgment of the situation is a good start, and good starts are a Friedan speciality.

It was only natural that the women who flocked to the resurgence of feminism in the '60s should be flamboyant and ambitious -- in fact it's remarkable, reading "The Sisterhood," to discover how many of them once dreamed of becoming actresses. These were all the girls who couldn't fit into the demure role ordained for women in the '50s, people who wanted to run things, to be the center of attention, often at any cost. There ought to be room in the world for women like that, though there don't seem to be many included in the ranks of feminism anymore. Perhaps that's because of the more cautious and centrist tenor of our times or perhaps it's because feminism eventually developed its own form of rigid good-girlism, but a little personality wouldn't hurt right now.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"