Well, there were all those casting-couch stories in the '50s and '60s. I was a struggling actress in those days. We used to say to each other very bravely, "Yeah, women who screw get screwed."

How many years did you spend trying to be an actress?

Oh, my dog years, in my early 20s. I was always politically minded. I don't come from a red diaper family, but I found my way to the left very early because I was a rebel. But I was studying acting. I was in a couple of off-Broadway shows. I was a terrible actress -- and still involved trying to be political, because those were always the two things in my life. I didn't dare think I could write. Of course that was the deep dream. But by the time I was 28, I got a job at Newsweek as a researcher, and it really was the time when I understood that there were other paths that I could take in life.

I was at Newsweek from '63 to '64 as a researcher in the National Affairs department. And I quit to join the civil rights movement in Mississippi. And that was the time when Betty Friedan's book ["The Feminine Mystique"] came out in paperback. I read it just before I went to Mississippi. And I said, "Oh my God, it's me; she's talking about me." That was probably my crucial turning point.

The FBI tried to infiltrate the civil rights movement. Did they care about "women's libbers"?

Well this is a debate I had with other movement women. As far as I could see, any of the craziness of the women's movement was due to individual women who were a little crazy. Now other women, and they still argue with me, feel that the FBI was infiltrating the movement with provocateurs. I have never seen hard proof of this. I'm sure some agents attended some meetings, but they were looking for communists. They didn't see feminists themselves as any threat.

That's sort of insulting, isn't it?

[Laughs.] I never thought of it that way. Well, I guess they really didn't think that talking about sexual satisfaction and orgasms was dangerous. They were there to report on who was going to blow up a building.

Were you ever tempted to blow up Hugh Hefner or something?

No. I must say, though, there were a couple of earlier incidents where people had actions at draft registration centers, when I'd say to myself, boy, if somebody gave me some of this plastique, would I have been tempted? Yes.

My anger at my country and at this war was tremendous. But I've just never thought that violence was the way to go, particularly in America. I can't speak for other countries where conditions were more extreme and they had to do what they did. But no, we in our movement had so many imaginative things to try that violence was just not on our agenda.

So, in the end, did the good "guys" win?

I once heard a Marxist historian give a speech where he said, "Capitalism has an extraordinary ability to co-opt its enemies. And you will have to pardon me from celebrating this, because I cannot." That has resonated in my head all my life as an adult political activist. It is astonishing how the "establishment" manages to co-opt all ideas and give the people who created them a little piece of it. And then change it around. Mellow it out. So that it's no longer got its cutting edge. And it certainly happened with the rape crisis centers and the battered-women shelters. We created these as brilliant tactics to shock the nation into understanding that rape is a problem, and battery is a problem, and men were the source of the problem because they were doing the raping and battering. Right? And now they're all called "victims' services centers."

So who is really running things in America?

Is anybody? Probably not. I don't want to get paranoid about it. But having lived through a time when -- as I say in the end of the book -- you could have a part-time job, a cheap apartment and have plenty of time for social activism, then boom! Ronald Reagan, rise of the fundamentalist right, and all of a sudden everybody's working just to pay the rent like mice on treadmills. And that's what young people are today -- they're mice on treadmills and they don't even know it. Or if they do know it, they don't know that once it was different. Someone once said so plaintively to me the other day, "I hear there was a time when you could get a cheap apartment in New York and work part time and work on your novel. Ha-ha-ha." Yeah. "Work on your novel." "Work on political activism." Yes. Once upon a time there were cheap apartments in New York.

Come on, historians have to appreciate irony ...

Isn't that funny, the things that life does to you? I am a historian, aren't I? I became one when I wrote "Against Our Will" because I saw that rape had a history, and nobody had ever said that before. Let me tell you, to be my age and to suddenly be a historian of a life that you lived, it makes you feel old.

What I think is great about your book is that it's about a time when intelligent people took ideology seriously. It seems like for the past 20 years the only people with ideology are the nuts that blow up buildings in Waco -- I mean, Oklahoma.

Yes. But even the nuts who blew things up -- the Weatherpeople in the '70s, the '60s -- they're much more famous than my women's movement heroines. Everyone seems to know about Bernardine Dohrn, right? Because it's very sexy to the American public, that a good-looking young woman blows things up and goes underground.

That's true in a way. But I think Americans have always been crackpots hungry for ideology.

[Laughs] Yeah, we're ripe for crackpots at least.

A little while ago I had a vision about the relation between the civil rights movement and the women's rights movement that will sound crackpot, but I believe it's true.

Tell it.

Last month I interviewed a female dominatrix. Among other things, I learned that there are private clubs in New York City where successful female executives -- powerful women like Tina Brown -- can go and get whipped by men. Whatever that says about the hidden desires of certain women, I know that there are not secret clubs in New York where successful African-Americans can go to be subservient to some "Massah."

You know I stopped going out to look at the [Greenwich Village] Halloween parade because a couple of years ago I watched a white man with a leash, and the collar was around a black man. They were bravely walking through the street. And my inner voice was saying "No, no, no." And they thought they were being very brave.

And once on the radio, a hundred years ago, when gay liberation was just happening, I'll never forget hearing a Jewish gay man say, "I will admit this, I will admit this, I grew up during the Holocaust, and yes, my sexuality includes being handcuffed." [Laughs.] You know, how can you deal with people's sexuality and fetishes? This was a big stumbling block for us in the women's movement. We ran up against a lot of crazy people's crazy sexuality.

You think nothing can surprise you, but then ... [Both laugh.] It's like Mrs. Patrick Campbell, the great British actress, said: "I don't care what they do as long as they don't do it in the streets and frighten the horses."

You have to accept that. Because otherwise you're put in the position of being the moral censor. And that's what happened in the anti-pornography movement. The pro-porn women said, "You are censoring our minds. You are censoring our behavior. This is who we are. And the end of the road goes no further. The road stops right here."

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"