Let’s imagine this book’s concept—30 well-known women writers talk about how they “feel” about Hillary Clinton—applied to 30 male writers and a male presidential candidate. Adjusting for gender, the essay titles would now read: “Barack’s Underpants,” “Elect Brother Frigidaire,” “Mephistopheles for President,” “The Road to Codpiece-Gate,” and so on. Inside, we would find ruminations on the male candidate’s doggy looks and flabby pectorals; musings on such “revealing” traits as the candidate’s lack of interest in backyard grilling, industrial arts and pets; and mocking remarks about his lack of popularity with the cool boys on the playground (i.e., the writers and their “friends”). We would hear a great deal of speculation about whether the candidate was really manly or just “faking it.” We would hear a great deal about how the candidate made them feel about themselves as men and whether they could see their manhood reflected in the politician’s testosterone displays. … And we would hear virtually nothing about the candidate’s stand on political issues.

Susan Morrison, the editor of Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary (who’s also the articles editor of The New Yorker, and former editor in chief of this newspaper), defends the absence of political analysis in the book thusly: “There’s plenty of Hillary Studies literature out there that parses the candidate’s stands on policy issues, her Senate votes, and her track record as first lady. This book isn’t aiming at that kind of op-ed territory. Rather, it’s an attempt to look at the ways in which women think about Hillary (and why they think so much about Hillary), how they make their judgments about her, which buttons she pushes in them and why.”

Actually, the op-ed territory is awash with exactly the same sort of trivializing dissection. Hillary Studies pundits are obsessed with the candidate’s hairdos, outfits, cookie-baking comments, supposedly “cold” personality and even, most recently, her failure to apply “The Rules” style of dating in her politics. The ratio of trenchant political commentary to personal pot-shotting on the subject of Hillary Clinton in the larger media realm is precisely echoed in the pages of this book, which seems intended to reprise the op-ed fixations, not to bury them. The result is a good deal of convenient psychologizing, self-absorbed meanderings and unearned snipes—and a handful of efforts to take a respectable step back from how-do-I-personally-feel-about-Hillary thumb-suckery.

MANY OF THE writers in Thirty Ways are busy reviewing their own lives and taking their own temperatures, some with notable self-regard. Others are preoccupied with such pressing questions as, is Hillary a dog or cat person? Does she like olive burgers or Boca burgers? If she did have a hobby, what would it be?

Thanks to its more insightful contributors, Thirty Ways does provide grist for thought. Among those writers who thankfully manage not to dwell on themselves are Katha Pollitt, who considers what the torrent of sexualized epithets about Hillary Clinton suggests about male hysteria; Deborah Tannen, who draws on actual interviews she conducted with actual women to diagnose the double bind that all female professionals face; and Leslie Bennetts, who argues that Clinton’s many self-appointed psychoanalysts have woefully “missed the point” by asking all the wrong questions: “The real problem is our own schizoid relationship with female gender roles—and the fact that we don’t even recognize the true nature of what’s bothering us.”

Nor does the first-person perspective that prevails in this book always dead-end in easy self-congratulation. Jane Kramer turns her fixation on Hillary back on herself for a moment of self-examination. (“None of this answers the question of why I continue to subject Hillary Rodham Clinton to the kind of scrutiny I would never think to apply to men,” she writes. “In matters of sweet and steely, I also disappoint myself. Maybe I have not evolved.”) Amy Wilentz uses her own experience as a springboard to empathy. (“What if you had to operate in a universe where you were never allowed to say what you really felt?... Could you, as I often do, miss three consecutive appointments to get your hair cut? And really: what if you had to wear pantsuits or a turquoise jacket with a turquoise necklace and turquoise earrings?”)

THE VERY PREMISE of Thirty Ways invites us to disparage Hillary Clinton as a political candidate and induct her instead into a reality show pageant. More often than not, the contributors take the bait, passing judgment on Clinton’s femininity (“unnatural” and “contrived”), looks (“passably attractive”) and sensuality (“it is difficult for me to imagine her in an embrace, motherly or otherwise,” Susanna Moore writes). Reading through these pages, I wished for a companion volume, Thirty Ways of Looking at Women Looking at Hillary, which answered this question: Why do so many of these women writers—who have shown themselves to be graceful essayists and well-reasoned analysts in other contexts—resort to unfactual and illogical thinking and, in many cases, downright 13-year-old cattiness when the topic is Hillary?

After I’d finished Thirty Ways, I picked up a New Yorker article by one of the contributors, Lauren Collins, about a Missouri teenager driven to suicide by the taunts of mean girls on MySpace. I felt as though I were still reading Thirty Ways: The essayists’ reasons for their rancor at Hillary are as immaturely nonspecific as those of that poor girl’s adolescent tormentors. “I have yet to meet a woman who likes Hillary Clinton,” Ms. Roiphe sniffs. “We just don’t like her,” she says, channeling the women she has met. “We like her husband, but we don’t like her.”

Nyah, nyah!

It’s been noted that many men seem to have a problem with Hillary Clinton that revolves around their perception of her being “mom”—the smothering, devouring American Mom whose power male writers have been shuddering under since at least the 1950’s. But reading this book, I began to wonder if these women’s problem with Clinton also has to do with mom—and a mom’s lack of power.

For all the hosannas over young women advancing in competitive sports or Katie Couric snagging the CBS News anchor slot, we continue to have no tradition and no real image of public female authority. As Ms. Bennetts observes in her essay, “A woman can become Speaker of the House, but Nancy Pelosi has to cloak her authority in gender mufti by describing her ability to order congressmen around as using her ‘mother-of-five voice.’ A female can’t just be strong and forceful and direct in her decision making; she has to revert to being a mom, which we all know is her primary role anyway.”

This masquerade induces suspicion and mistrust, particularly in female observers. Does Hillary really just want power and is only pretend
ing to be driven by maternal instinct? If she really is “just a mom,” why would she be chasing the presidency? For all the tributes, mothers are just not powerful in this country, and women know it. Ms. Kramer notes in Thirty Ways: “It has been said ad nauseam that motherhood could be considered the most demanding form of leadership, calling for skills in salesmanship and negotiation and persuasion that are arguably beyond most of the backroom boys in Washington. The problem is that this is invariably said with condescension.” And said, by the daughters, with eye-rolling contempt. Recalling Hillary’s speech about protecting citizen privacy, in which the candidate jokingly referred to the lack of her own, Dahlia Lithwick concludes: “I have had no privacy but I will fight to protect yours. Oy. Who else but a mother could say such a thing?”

If any female demographic exerts force in American culture, it’s not moms, it’s girls—and it’s been that way since the possessed teens and ’tweens of the Salem witch trials were trotted out to attack the society’s independent matrons. The American girl’s power, of course, is limited, derived from powerful daddy sponsors, aimed typically at other women, especially those whose 30-years-old freshness date has expired. Grown women, so often without patriarchal backing, are out of luck—there’s no matriarchy to step in to offer wisdom and hand over the reins. We have no female establishment invested with the power to bestow authority, to pass clout from “mothers” to “daughters.” The only clout comes from attacking mothers to establishment applause in the public square.

Reading this book, I’m reminded that we’re essentially a distaff nation of motherless daughters, who operate on a marriage metaphor of power. Only one woman gets the prize, and the others must be knocked out of the ring so that she alone can grab the ring. With no real foundation for female strength, the much-vaunted “sisterhood” is destined to degenerate into a Lady of the Flies scrum—with, in this case, Hillary as Piggy.

In that regard, what’s objectionable about Thirty Ways is not what’s contained between its covers, which is at times canny and thoughtful, even if at other times it’s juvenile and mean. The very nature of the project is prejudicial. Underlying the summons to female writers to share their “feelings” about Hillary is a sly invitation—to demonstrate that when it comes to America’s consideration of a female candidate, the political is only personal.

Susan Faludi most recent book is The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan Books). She can be reached at books@observer.com.

It can be a mistake to judge a career by its covers, but Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s book jackets tell a curious story.

Her most famous work, A Midwife’s Tale (1990), is adorned with the labored script of an obscure 18th-century female diarist. The cover of Good Wives (1982) features an ordinary colonial woman’s gravestone. The Age of Homespun (2001) showcases an embroidered chimney piece, stitched by an unknown Boston woman.

And then there’s her latest book. On the cover, a modern woman models a mass-produced shirt that advertises her bad-girl intentions—and the title—in Day-Glo orange letters: Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History.

It’s hard to say what generates the greater whiplash: the time travel from colonial to 21st-century America or the identity makeover it seems to signal for the writer. Ms. Ulrich, an early-American scholar and a pioneering member of the first feminist generation of women’s historians, is distinguished for her penetrating insights, painstaking research—she read midwife Martha Ballard’s 27 years’ worth of diaries on negative microfilm, white handwriting on black background—and prodigious forensic skills (she has pieced together teeming and interconnected landscapes of domestic life, Revolutionary politics, interracial trade and industrialization’s first stirrings from such objects as a tiny Indian basket, an unfinished stocking and a “niddy-noddy”—a yarn winder— unearthed in museum storage lockers). In A Midwife’s Tale, which won the Pulitzer Prize and a host of other richly deserved honors, she decoded Ballard’s dauntingly circumspect journals by sifting for years through thousands of court records, medical texts, account books and town-hall minutes. Ms. Ulrich is the historian as indefatigable detective, an academic Agatha Christie who approaches the most unassuming of artifacts, as she put it in The Age of Homespun, “like clues in a mystery.”

Her new book, by contrast, is a breezier and wider ranging consideration of women’s history, pivoting around three classic works in three different eras by feminist authors who “turned to history as a way of making sense of their own lives.” Ms. Ulrich uses these texts—Christine de Pizan’s early 15th-century Book of the City of Ladies; Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Eighty Years and More (1898); and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929)—to champion three prime achievements in women’s history in the past 30 years: respectively, challenging the historical record with the examples of nontraditional women; chronicling and contributing to women’s efforts to change their own circumstances (“making history,” in both senses); and excavating the lives of ordinary women ignored in prefeminist texts.

Pizan’s descriptions of women warriors, for example, become Ms. Ulrich’s springboard for exploring a trove of new historical research about the Amazon myth. Stanton’s account of the 19th-century suffrage campaign serves as her portal into fascinating glimpses of American slave women’s pursuit of their own emancipation. Woolf’s musings on Shakespeare’s sisters provide her cue to inspect recent eye-opening archival finds on the social conditions of ordinary Renaissance women.

Readers who expected to find Ms. Ulrich’s usual density will be disconcerted, even discomforted, at this island-hopping approach; she shares a very little about a very lot of work by feminist-inspired historians. As we’re whisked from a Brazilian anthropologist’s conversations with indigenous women to Renaissance scholars’ studies of sexual-assault cases in ecclesiastical court records to a picture researcher’s compilation of medieval illustrations of female blacksmiths and miners, those familiar with Ms. Ulrich’s earlier books may yearn for her earlier, more deliberate pace.

But the author has her reasons. One of them is plainly stated: She writes that she intended the book as a “celebration” of the immense scholarship generated by women’s history, a field that did not even exist before the early 1970’s: “This book is my gift to all of those who continue to make history—through action, through record-keeping, and through remembering.” But there may be another, less celebratory reason hidden in the text. Expose the book to forensics such as Ms. Ulrich applied to midwife Ballard’s tale, and you may begin to see the faint outlines of frustration, inscribed in invisible ink. The first clue is on the cover. As much as anything, Ms. Ulrich’s book is about that shirt with the hot orange letters, as becomes evident in her introduction, “The Slogan,” a 34-page rumination on the title’s provenance and progression.

LAUREL ULRICH ORIGINALLY PENNED the line “well-behaved women seldom make history” in 1976, in the opening paragraph of an American Quarterly article on Puritan funeral sermons. She was lamenting the failure to record “well-behaved” women’s lives, and declaring her desire to reverse that invisibility, to make “a commitment to help recover the lives of otherwise obscure women.” But in 1995, her sentence escaped its obscure venue and, after being slightly misquoted as an epigraph in Kay Mills’ popular history of American women, From Pocahontas to Power Suits, morphed into a commercial motto expressive of a bad-as-you-can-be pseudofeminist ethic. That ethic precisely upends Ms. Ulrich’s meaning: She had argued for restoring the average woman to historical prominence, but her entreaty was adopted to imply that well-behaved women deserve no attention, which belongs only to the obstreperous.

Much to Ms. Ulrich’s bewilderment, she soon found herself receiving royalties from “one angry girl designs,” a fashion line generating runaway sales from a T-shirt featuring Ms. Ulrich’s sentence. The slogan migrated to bumper stickers, coffee mugs and refrigerator magnets—like the one Ms. Ulrich spotted on an impulse-buy store counter, “embellished with one leopard-print stiletto-heeled shoe above a smoldering cigarette in a long black holder.” The phrase got billing everywhere from CosmoGirl to the Christian Science Monitor to Creative Keepsake Scrapbooking Magazine. It became the “official maxim” of the Sweet Potato Queens (alongside the band’s other axiom, “Never Wear Panties to a Party”), and the rallying cry for both a Massachusetts nursing home’s “Wild Women’s Group” and the text of Cool Women: The Thinking Girl’s Guide to the Hippest Women in History, a book that spends as much time on fictional babes as on real women.

Leafing through the pages of that last artifact, Ms. Ulrich considers its insistent message: What is this formula, she wonders, by which “‘empowered’ women are by definition ‘wild’ women”? She notes, “When deviance isn’t apparent, the prose creates it. Georgia O’Keeffe was a ‘renegade artist.’ Martha Graham was the ‘ultimate wild girl of dance.’ Marie Curie ‘walked into the boys’ club of the science world and basically tore the place apart.’” But is that really how women make history? “Obviously, Marie Curie didn’t win two Nobel Prizes by throwing tantrums in the lab,” Ms. Ulrich writes. “She isn’t remembered today because she was ‘bad’ but because she was ‘very, very good’ at what she did.” And what’s wrong with being very, very good at your work? Why the compulsion to turn scholars into Spice Girls? Must Marie Curie play Madonna to claim the feminist mantle? Although Ulrich says she “applauds” these amateur efforts “to make history,” her words betray an underlying uneasiness. “It is hard to tell whether this is about feminism, post-feminism, or something much older,” Ms. Ulrich writes. “One thing it doesn’t appear to have a lot to do with is history.”

Or the practice of women’s history. These gingerly phrased misgivings appear to suggest a deeper alarm—over the future of the profession and the wild-woman practitioners who have rampaged through the lecture halls.

Ms. Ulrich couldn’t have decoded Ballard’s elusive journal entries until she looked at the world its author inhabited. I want to propose—and I of course have no more right than the editors of CosmoGirl to presume to know Ms. Ulrich’s personal intentions—that you can’t fathom her latest work until you look at the poststructuralist waters in which she and every feminist academic have had to swim in the past 15 years.

Why did she feel it necessary to remind her readers that history is about “creating meaning” and “tracing change over time”? Or that historical research is pertinent to political transformation? Or that the advance of women’s history depends on the study of “concrete” details in actual women’s lives? “Details matter,” she feels compelled to underscore: “Details let us out of boxes created by slogans.” This contention is especially cautionary coming from a woman whose careful scholarship has been warped into slogan.

Ms. Ulrich is not just addressing the buyers of refrigerator magnets. In her typically uncarping way, she seems to be sending a discreet message to her own profession—and its many denizens who, these days, often seem more intent on “transgressive” readings of pop lyrics and disquisitions on sexual deviance than on archival research. Poststructuralism notoriously spurns the concrete in favor of abstruse theory and linguistic gymnastics; it eschews creating meaning (everything’s a “performance” or a “discourse” to be deconstructed), and it doubts the very possibility of political change—or even the existence of history. In her much-read 1994 essay, “Gender as a Postmodern Category of Paralysis,” feminist historian Joan Hoff observed that “history, according to postmodern theory, is at best chaos, and, at worst, does not exist at all in the sense that there is no truth about human actions, human thought, or human experience to be revealed through research.”

Laurel Ulrich’s book contains none of this direct critique and spends the bulk of its pages in a complimentary mode. But between the lines, one can discern the shadow of a lament. Longtime Ulrich lovers will love her current book all the more if they understand that behind the “celebration,” it’s not so well-behaved at all.

Susan Faludi’s The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America (Metropolitan) will be published in October.

In the foreword to Political Fictions , Joan Didion's latest collection of essays, she recalls an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole escapade searching for Jesse Jackson's plane at the Newark Airport during the 1988 Presidential campaign. She queries agents who send her to other agents who know nothing; she shimmies under a corrugated fire door, only to find an empty hangar; she entreats a mechanic to pick a lock, but the four young Jackson campaign workers on the tarmac have no clue who she is, and the Secret Service has no record of her clearance. At last, unsure what else to do with her, they stick her on the empty plane. And there she sits, alone, quarantined, a tiny figure peering out a porthole at an incomprehensible political landscape.

The recidivist reader of Joan Didion will recognize the scene at once and settle in for the familiar ride. How many times have we met this woman? Detached, alienated, an outsider recoiling with dismay and professed bafflement from the chaos of the political realm. She is the same woman who appeared on the back jacket of Slouching Towards Bethlehem , armored in a buttoned-up raincoat and Chanel scarf, pointedly looking away from the mob of scruffy longhairs congregated in Golden Gate Park for the Summer of Love. She is the same woman who, while throngs marched on Washington, found herself "paralyzed," "aphasic," compelled to make lists of clothes to pack because nothing else made sense to her anymore. She is the same woman who, in The White Album , quoted a psychiatric report that described her as dwelling in a state of "dependent, passive withdrawal" from a world she perceived as mystifying and sinister.

While Ms. Didion pioneered and exemplified a certain kind of tough-minded journalism, she herself came off as a bewildered onlooker, a pint-sized stranger shrinking from the clash of shadowy social forces, unable to function without gin and hot water, Dexedrine and prolonged retreats to shuttered rooms.

So as we open her new anthology, are we again to hear from this tremulous Thumbelina? Ms. Didion begins by recalling her befuddlement with topics political: Back in 1988, she couldn't seem to get herself to read the press clips her editor sent or to attend the Presidential campaign events; she confides that she nearly abandoned the whole project because "I could clearly bring no access, no knowledge, no understanding."

But this initial self-portrait is misleading, a remnant of her ghost self. The new Didion–the one who has been keenly dissecting Presidential politics for the last dozen years in the pages of The New York Review of Books –has dropped the desultory, disoriented tone and has been writing with a muscular directness. But more than that, she has taken a new approach to politics itself. Here is a writer who famously chose Yeats to express her vision of an anarchic, unfathomable political world–the best lacking all conviction, the worst full of passionate intensity (and herself receiving points for belonging to the former category)–who is now wading into the chop, writing with newly discovered conviction, passion and intensity and, blessed consequence, writing at her very best.

Joan Didion has always held a solitary status as a modern American essayist, her prose defining erudition and cool elegance. While she gained prominence in the era of New Journalism, her first-person approach had little in common with the sweaty showmanship of its chest-thumping bards. Not for her the Tom Wolfe pop of exclamatory pyrotechnics, nor the faux outlaw chic of the Esquire boys on the bus. Her style always belonged more to noir than to hip: It suggested a singular integrity, a private struggle with ominous depths. She showed a generation of young American journalists how to make reporting moodily stylish, a personal expression. In so doing, she inspired a legion of imitators, for better and often for worse: Many a reporter has striven for High Didion and wound up with low navel-gazing.

But a certain dissatisfaction has always lurked within her work, between the polished sentences of even her best essays–a dissatisfaction connected with the timorous aspect of her aloof image on a jacket cover, a feeling that the person who could say everything so exquisitely well couldn't quite say what she thought, at least in political terms. She has long rather sniffily maintained that politics don't interest her, that they are a distracting sideshow to the personal. "I never had faith that the answers to human problems lay in anything that could be called political," she told an interviewer in 1977. "I thought the answers, if there were answers, lay someplace in man's soul." Indeed, she admitted that she has only bothered to vote twice since she cast her first ballot in 1964–for Goldwater.

The essays in this book are a record of her emergence as a forthright and adamant diagnostician. The remarkable bonus is that, as Ms. Didion has dropped the pretense of her early essays–the pose of elliptical indirection at the heart of her style–her style has only improved. In Political Fictions , she's come out from undercover. (It's a small signal of the difference that she has chosen for her author photo a straightforward head-and-shoulders shot, minus the trademark big sunglasses, eyes looking directly into the camera.)

The political, it turns out, matters very much to Ms. Didion. Her awakening came as she watched with increasing distress the operations of a political mechanism wholly committed to "disenfranchising America." By the dawn of the 21st century, she writes with newfound force and anger, "half the nation's citizens had only a vassal relationship to the government under which they lived," a catastrophe that galls her all the more for having gone largely unobserved.

There is a reason, she says, why a quarter of all adult Americans are either "alienated" or "disenchanted" with U.S. politics, and it's not, as the press would have it, just "apathy." There is a reason why the parties court only a narrow band of unrepresentative "target" voters, and the rest of the public be damned. What Ms. Didion perceives–and reviles–is the systematic expulsion of the citizenry from the political process, and its replacement by a few oligarchs who live in a bubble world "in which they themselves were the principal players, and for which they themselves were the principal audience." This exclusionary process, she concludes, has not only "left most voters with no reason to come to the polls"; worse, that was the intent –what "had even come to be spoken about, by less wary professionals, as the beauty part, the bonus that would render the process finally and perpetually impenetrable."

What has particularly got her gorge up is the way an insular political class in the last decade not only robbed the electorate of authentic participation but invoked "the personal" to obscure that highway robbery. A right-wing-dominated Republican Party seeking a return to power by narrowing its pitch to a tiny group of "family values" supporters; a weak-kneed Democratic party eagerly going along with the values game at the expense of its longtime working-class constituency; and a passive Washington punditry and press corps eager to sign on to whatever character-and-values script gets handed them without considering the source–this is the triumvirate whose combined machinations and docility, Ms. Didion observes, have reduced American democracy to a movie set. On that set, a bogus morality play gets staged in which "character" is used to cloak the real drama underway: a political coup in progress.

The coup of which she speaks began with Jones v. Clinton , continued through Ken Starr's referral and culminated in the Supreme Court's anointment of George the Second. It's the coup that happened while the pundits busied themselves with what Ms. Didion wonderfully dubs "rhetorical autointoxication," a circle jerk of pseudo-moralists panting to convince their audience–and, in the end, convincing only themselves–that the real story, the only story, was the one which had unfolded in that steamy little room off the Oval Office. "By reducing the matter to the personal," Ms. Didion writes, "it was possible to divest what had taken place of its potentially disruptive gravity, possible to avoid all consideration of whether or not a move on the presidency had been covertly run, of whether or not the intent of such a move had been to legitimize a minority ideological agenda, and of whether or not–most disruptive of all–such a move was ongoing."

She is at her most nervy blowing the whistle on that peerlessly dedicated self-protection racket, the contemporary Washington press corps, laying out just how implicated the talking heads have been in the takedown of the Clinton White House, in the breeding of a "casual contempt" for the electorate's will. What was new in this latest right-wing putsch, she observes, was not the putsch's disdain for the rights of voters–it was the way the political media and punditry "aided and abetted" the right-wing crusaders in their effort "to save America from its citizens." If the citizens didn't go along with the story, if they didn't join the media's tantrum over Clinton's carnal high jinks, if they in fact were far more outraged by stiff-necked Ken than hot-pants Bill, well, then they must be part of the problem. As Mona Charen huffed on Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer , "This casts shame on the entire country, because he behaved that way and all of the nation seems to be complicit now because they aren't rising up in righteous indignation." Or, as Ms. Didion succinctly puts it, "The public, in fact, became the unindicted coconspirator."

She sharply punctures the hot-air balloonery of such media celebrities as the Washington Post 's Bob Woodward and Newsweek 's Michael Isikoff, whose "investigative" brio she shows up as so much dutiful dictation of phony narratives concocted by political operatives. "What 'fairness' has often come to mean," she writes in a take-no-prisoners critique of Mr. Woodward's lumbering tomes, "is a scrupulous passivity, an agreement to cover the story not as it is occurring but as it is presented, which is to say as it is manufactured."

She turns a particularly jaundiced eye on Michael Isikoff's coy claims in Uncovering Clinton , his rehash of his own coverage of the Monica follies, that he had no idea he was being manipulated by Lucianne Goldberg and company. Over and over, Ms. Didion shows us how this self-described "aggressive reporter" (a phrase she reinvokes to delicious ironic effect) was only too happy to be the passive receptacle of the right, only too willing to ignore the myriad signals that he was a useful stooge. Given all he knew about the players and their relationships, Ms. Didion observes acidly, how could he not suspect that Mr. Starr's office and the Paula Jones team and the Linda Tripp crew were all in cahoots? "Did he now suspect it?" Ms. Didion bores in. "If he suspected it, why did he not pursue it? Could it have been because he already knew it? This is an area that Uncovering Clinton was cannily designed, by virtue of the way its author chose to present himself, to leave safely uncharted."

Ms. Didion's insistence on charting such territory is all the gutsier for coming at a time when fellow brand-name correspondents maintain a self-interested stony silence. Of all people, here is the writer who remained stubbornly "personal" in the political 60's, now projecting a politically passionate voice into the infotainment vacuum of 00's journalism. Perhaps her metamorphosis constitutes not so much a break from an apolitical past as a marker of her consistency. She has consistently been suspicious of people who would misuse personal confusion for political ends, whether it's the acid peddlers on Haight Street or Ann Coulter on MSNBC. Beneath the political dogma spouted by runaways in San Francisco, she divined personal pain and abandonment. Beneath the personal attacks on a philandering President, she divined a political machine.

The beast slouching in that machine poses a far greater threat to American democracy than Haight-Ashbury's lost souls ever did; those kids belonged to the fringe even in the 60's. What Joan Didion is tackling now is more treacherous for being at the center. That one of the most preeminent voices of journalism has stepped into the ring to contest that center is a gift. That she stands so nearly alone is a disgrace.

Susan Faludi is the author of Backlash (Anchor) and Stiffed (HarperCollins).

It's a line we've heard since Paula Jones sidled up to the microphone to "clear her name"-a name that no one knew until then. Her mouthpiece Susan Carpenter McMillan claimed Ms. Jones was manifesting "a Susan B. Anthony-type feminism," which by Ms. McMillan's lights meant a Victorian lady-avenger policing the behavior of sexually voracious men. "If Paula Corbin Jones goes down," she declared, "men of power have gotten the upper hand."

But that's not the real divide here. The real divide is not even between men and women. The critical split is the one between girls and grown-ups. And it is a desperately important battle. Because the winners of that struggle will determine, far more than the sexual behavior of Mr. Clinton or of any politician, what kind of role women are going to carve out for themselves in the future of this country.

On the one side we have "feminism" as channeled through the Spice Girls and Fiona Apple. This is "Girl Power," which is derived only by celebrating yourself, ideally via your injuries; gaining power by talking about what was done to you. It is, by definition, only a destructive power, aimed at bringing down the bogeyman by having a sulk 'n' sob in front of the adults. It's the power available to a girl whose only recourse is tattle. The many plaintiffs of the Clinton scandals are cast, or cast themselves, as girls. Ms. Jones has referred to herself as "a little girl from Arkansas," as does Ms. McMillan, who, when in the presence of the media, makes a point of talking baby-talk to her 31-year-old charge over the cell phone. In a Jan. 23 appearance on Larry King Live , 47-year-old Gennifer Flowers leaned forward across the desk and, suddenly going all tremulous, described herself as … "a little girl from Arkansas" who got swallowed up by the big bad wolves. "I was very scared," Ms. Flowers said. Monica Lewinsky is presented by her lawyer, William Ginsburg, and a media admiring of his oratory, as a "24-year-old doe in the headlights of a major international scandal." Newsweek calls her "a flirty girl in a beret," and Time quotes Pentagon sources who describe her as "a rich Beverly Hills teen" and "an attractive girl, but a girl." Admittedly, Ms. Lewinsky is young and naïve, but she is legally well into adulthood.

On the other side, which is ever more sparsely populated these days, are the grown-ups. And here's where authentic feminism resides. Because if feminism is about anything, it's about women growing up. It's about becoming mature and equal players in public life. It's about seeing what happened to you in proportion, and about knowing when the public good outweighs your having a temper tantrum in public over a personal offense.

As Exhibit A of such a woman, I would offer Hillary Clinton. Here's the one woman of all women in the country who has a right to be in a "cold fury" over this matter. And, for all I know, she is. But the point is, she isn't sharing it with every daddy figure on television. (Some father confessors, those network male anchors! Talk about the chickens confiding their story to the foxes.) And when Mrs. Clinton does choose to go before the cameras, as she did so memorably on the Jan. 27 Today show, it is to try to inject some perspective from a woman who knows what's at stake. "Everybody ought to just stop a minute here and think about what we're doing," Mrs. Clinton said. She emphasized that "we need to put all of this into context," and by that she meant considering the political context, not prying into private relationships. Pressed by the interviewer to admit that Mr. Clinton "again has caused pain in this marriage," Mrs. Clinton replied, "You know, we've been married for 22 years … and I have learned a long time ago that the only people who count in any marriage are the two that are in it."

Likewise, contrast Anita Hill's performance with that of Paula Jones. Ms. Hill never defined what happened to her as the central drama; she saw her experience in the employ of Clarence Thomas as a factor to be weighed in considering his eligibility for the United States Supreme Court. She did not make her claim her raison d'être . Also in the category of grown-ups I would put the many women Mr. Clinton has appointed to high-level staff and Cabinet and judicial appointments, all of whom are exercising an adult power-the one in which you have a voice in setting public policy, pursuing social justice and even making a difference in the lives of large numbers of other women. A grown-up who has power uses it to participate in the public world, rather than to capitalize on her own private grievances.

Which brings me to the other defining trait of feminism: sisterhood. If Linda Tripp gave a damn about women's rights, she wouldn't have led her "friend" Monica Lewinsky to the lions without batting an eye. If Susan Carpenter McMillan gave a damn about women's rights, she wouldn't be treating Paula Jones like some dress-up Barbie doll she can grab off the playroom floor whenever the whim strikes her, rearranging her hair and traipsing her off to her latest dream date at the right-wing Rutherford Institute. These women are not considering the advancement of their sex. They are not thinking about freeing women from stereotyped boxes that traditional society has placed them in. They are looking merely to convert that stereotyped box, temporarily, to a soapbox they can stand on. They know that the dancing girl in the cage draws the media's attention. And they would rather be the girl's keeper than offer her the key to the cage.

In the end, what the McMillans and the Flowerses have discovered is not women's power, but the power of the trembling-lipped girl to lure the eye of the camera.

In Ms. Flowers' Larry King performance, she spoke indignantly about Mr. Clinton's alleged adultery as a violation of "God's laws. And I don't think it's something he should have been doing"-as if somehow she hadn't participated, or as if she didn't happily make hay of it three days later in the Jan. 26 New York Post , where she boasted that Mr. Clinton "particularly liked it when I looked young and sexy in my cheerleader's outfit."

This is the advantage of playing the girl. You never do anything, it's all done to you, and so you never have to take responsibility for anything. This is a popular and easy role for women to slip into because, ultimately, Girl Power is all about women staying in that most traditional of feminine roles: enforcers of the public morality, whose power as social conscience derives directly from their political powerlessness.

The right wing is having great fun co-opting the language of women's rights to bring down a Democratic President. But it is hardly acting on women's behalf. Girl fury may destroy Mr. Clinton's Presidency, but in doing so it will only reinforce the old status quo, where Daddy still knows best, and hell hath no wrath like a victim on TV.