Betty Friedan.

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—‘Is this all?’”

This is the opening paragraph of The Feminine Mystique (W.W. Norton, 592 pp., $25.95), which the late Betty Friedan published 50 years ago this month. The feminine mystique, she wrote, “says that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity.” This was, Friedan argued, what kept a generation of educated women at home, raising children in the suburbs, endlessly cleaning house, tranquilizing themselves with new kitchen appliances, alcohol and affairs in order to kill the existential dread this emptiness brought on. It was, according to Friedan, propagated by psychologists, sociologists, ad men, magazine editors, religious leaders and college presidents. And, if her interviews with women were to be believed, it was widespread and suffocating. Rise up and throw it over, Friedan said. Get to work, and stop viewing college as a marriage market.

Well, we did. Friedan and the women’s movement of the ’60s and ’70s helped create a world where women see a fulfilling profession as an inalienable right. This book, then, should seem thrillingly, relievedly quaint. It does not. But it is surprisingly boring in spots—there are many moments where you can see the women’s magazine writer in Friedan giving herself over to breathless exhortation—and astoundingly homophobic. At one point Friedan rails against “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene.” Friedan has been criticized for not being as careful a researcher, or as honest a storyteller, or as civil-rights-minded as she could have been. But perhaps these criticisms are somewhat beside the point. There are numerous passages that, if you did not know their provenance, could be mistaken for sentences written in judgment of the present day.

Here is one from the book’s first pages: “Experts told [women] how to catch a man and keep him, how to breastfeed children and handle their toilet training, how to cope with sibling rivalry ... how to buy a dishwasher, bake bread, cook gourmet snails, and build a swimming pool with your own hands ...”

Exchange “building a swimming pool with your own hands” for “building a seven-tier wedding cake with your own hands,” and one may think immediately of the hundreds of blogs that address cooking, mothering, decorating and dressing, and then wonder if, despite these blogs’ cheerful tone, a version of the feminine mystique isn’t now being perpetrated through ostensibly real, ostensibly relatable women soft-focusing their sailor tee’d baby bumps through Instagram.

And here, substitute “an evolutionary purpose” for the mention of Freud: “It was easier to look for Freudian sexual roots in man’s behavior, his ideas and his wars than to look critically at his society and act constructively to right its wrongs.”

When Friedan writes that early feminists “had to prove that women were human,” it is hard not to feel a shock of recognition and indict our own moment as well, especially after the election that just passed. But American women still find themselves struggling against a strangely virulent, insidious misogyny. If our culture truly thought women were human, 19 states would not have enacted provisions to restrict abortion last year. There would be no question whether to renew the Violence Against Women Act. Women would not make 77 cents to every man’s dollar, and make less than our male counterparts even in fields where we dominate. We wouldn’t have terms like “legitimate rape” or “personhood.” Women who decided not to have children would not be called “selfish,” as if they were themselves children who had a problem with sharing. If our culture truly allowed them to have strong, complex, contradictory feelings and believed they were sexual creatures for whom pleasure was a biological right, perhaps adult women would not be escaping en masse into badly written fantasy novels about teenage girls being ravished by vampires.

Friedan called the mystique “the problem with no name.” Fifty years later, we are able to spot a problem, name it and speak up to change it, or stop it. But when a woman broadcasts her dissatisfaction, her yearning, it is now likely to be dismissed as whining, because if she’s eating three meals a day and doesn’t have cancer, what’s her problem? Such is progress.

Even The New York Times’s Gail Collins, in her introduction to this anniversary edition, is guilty of this attitude. Ms. Collins quotes Friedan’s famous first paragraph, and then writes: “It sounds, in retrospect, a little whiny, but at the time it was an earthshaking query.” How disappointing that Ms. Collins, the Times’s eminently sensible resident feminist, reached for the pejorative language so often used when a person not benefiting from the patriarchy or capitalism dares to question the order of things. (“Women are angry,” went a recent column about the “War on Men” on the Fox News website. “They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly.”) In America, there are no systemic problems, just poor choices.

This kind of thinking is doubtless what’s stalling forward movement in addressing the dire need for better family policy. It would be a shame if women—and men—had to wait 50 more years before our capitalist mystique went the way of the feminine mystique. It would be terrible if it required smuggling that idea into a vampire novel for it to go viral.

editorial@observer.com

Here’s the other thing I learned: Your good friends will always be your good friends.

The messages are self-contradictory of course. But, then, this musical—based on Mr. Heifner’s 1976 play of the same title, which ran Off Broadway for more than four years, with new songs by Mr. Kirshenbaum—is full of contradictions, platitudes, and very dated gender politics.

Vanities follows a decade or so in the lives of high-school best friends Kathy, Mary, and Joanne, smalltown Texas gals with accents thick as light, sweet crude. After a brief present-day prologue, we meet them in 1963. (Indeed, the dialogue reveals, we meet them on November 22, 1963—a detail that serves no purpose except, it seems, to get a surprised laugh of recognition from the audience. One does love a Kennedy-assassination joke.) They’re cheerleaders, popular girls with steady boyfriends who are looking ahead to a football game that night, a football dance in a month, and bright futures of casseroles and Jell-O molds. But trouble lurks on that horizon: What if they don’t all get into the same sorority?

Jump forward to senior year of college, and that crisis has been averted. It’s 1968, and the three are—thank God—sharing the same sorority house in Dallas. There’s another throwaway political timestamp: “Oh, let’s not do anything about the war,” says one of the girls, rejecting Bye Bye Birdie for the inter-sorority sing-off because Birdie is set to join the Army. “Let Lyndon Johnson do something about the war.” (One does love a Lyndon Johnson joke.) Joanne is preparing to marry her high-school steady after graduation, achieving her domestic dream. Kathy has lost her boyfriend and is lost. But Mary—well, something is starting to change with Mary. She has discovered feminism, or at least discovered that she can discover feminism, and she’s through with Texas. She’s off to Europe after graduation, to find men, and herself.

Then it’s 1974, and the three are reuniting for a tea party on the terrace of Kathy’s Manhattan penthouse. Joanne, the only one who retains her drawl, has what she’s always wanted: A corporate-lawyer husband, three kids, and a “huge old house” in Greenwich. (Even smalltown Texas girls apparently harbor Fairfield County fantasies. Who knew.) Mary has returned from Europe, opened a high-end erotic-art gallery, and lives a fabulous life of Bendel’s binges and Virginia Slims. Kathy is still lost. (And, we’re informed, irrelevantly, Nixon has just resigned.) This is the scene of epiphanies. Would you believe these once tight-as-a-string-of-pearls sorority sisters have drifted apart and lost touch for years? That Joanne gets a few glasses of champagne in her and starts to reveal—a dozen years post-Friedan—that life as a housewife can be suffocating? That Mary’s working-gal life can feel a bit empty? That Kathy, once the intrepid organizer of pep rallies and spring formals, has had a nervous breakdown? Only one revelation—that Mary has had an abortion—draws a viewer’s gasp, though it’s much less for the fact of the procedure than for amazement that the script reaches to even that ’70s-women’s-libber cliché. But if this is all entirely unshocking to us, the characters are floored, and they leave the scene determined to never see one another again. “Why the hell should it feel so strange?” the three sing. “All relationships rearrange.”

Indeed they do. But wait. Now we’re in an epilogue, set back in that original small Texas town and placed, the Playbill says, “many years later.” There’s a coffin onstage, and one wonders which of the three girls has died, to make the others sad and regretful they never reconnected. But Vanities, of course, would never be such a downer as to kill a main character. (Nor, as goes without saying, would it have the courage of its convictions to admit the three really had grown apart.) No, it’s Mary’s mother in the coffin, Mary alongside the coffin, and Joanne arriving after those “many years” of silence to tell Mary how much she’s missed her. Kathy, naturally, arrives next—no longer lost but now, instead, a successful novelist. (Need more proof of the show’s ’70s-era sensibility? It sees success and financial security in publishing.) Not-so-happy homemaker Joanne is now divorced and back in Texas. (“You opened my eyes, Mary, to something I didn’t want to see,” she says of that early-Ford administration terrace encounter—an offstage ephiphany!) Joanne is dealing old masters, not high-brow porn, and engaged to be married. “Let’s promise to never fight again” may not actually appear in the script, but it’s certainly implied, and the three exit upstage, arm-in-arm, into a sunset. B, as they say, FF.

This is not to say that the book’s dreariness yields an entirely unpleasant evening. The jokes are unambitious but deliver at least a few chuckles. The soft-rock score rarely registers, but a handful of numbers—Joanne’s “I Can’t Imagine,” a funky celebration of their never-ending friendship; Mary’s “Fly Into the Future,” the quasi-psychedelic rejection of a sedate suburban path—pack a punch. And all three actors—Lauren Kennedy as Mary, Sarah Stiles as Joanne, and Anneliese van der Pol as Kathy—give winning, energetic performances, especially Ms. Stiles, blessed with the best jokes and the best voice. Judith Ivey, a much-honored vet onstage, directs; she keeps the plot—such as it is—flowing, and she moves the actresses smoothly through the show’s scene changes, as scenery and costumes transform around them. The sets and lights by Anna Louizos and Paul Miller are cleverly realized and frequently ingenious, easily shifting from a high-school girls’ restroom to a sorority bedroom to—in an especially lovely transition—a grand terrace atop Manhattan. The costumes, too, are impressively constructed, allowing the actresses to pull on entire sixties-college-girl or eighties-businesswoman ensembles in a quick motion onstage, accompanied by a quick zip.

But the good stagecraft can’t overcome the weak book. One can imagine that in 1976, these insights on women’s roles might have been interesting. (Though still less interesting than in a typical episode of Mary Tyler Moore.) In 2009, it all lacks—if you'll permit a Barack Obama joke—the fierce urgency of now.

Then I go home to my baby.

“What was it like when you took your first vacation without your children?” I asked my friend, Dinah Prince Daly, who has two daughters, 17 and 12, and lives in Brooklyn (being a “Manhattan mommy” is a mindset, not geographical).

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t gone yet.”

So what did my fantasy mean? Was I Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer, and would this lead to me peering at my baby from behind a car as his father took him to the Beginnings Nursery School (another fantasy of mine—he hasn’t been accepted yet), or me falling to my knees and sobbing as he runs to me in Central Park? No, it didn’t mean that, because it was just a fantasy. I wasn’t going to do it.

I’d really wanted a baby, and I’d been through a lot to get one. I’d had an abortion during which I’d screamed, “I changed my mind!” over and over again. After that, I’d had abdominal surgery, a miscarriage, filed an application to adopt a Chinese baby, purchased and peed on every ovulation stick on the market (for one year I wouldn’t pee unless it was on something), gone to a fertility specialist and, once pregnant, been on bed rest and a program of constant non-stress tests, and had an emergency C-section due to low amniotic fluid. So I was happy to have him.

But sleep deprivation came as a shock to me. Even though I’d never happily gotten up before 11 in my entire life, I thought that when my baby cried for me at 6 a.m. or 7, or a quarter to 5, love would propel me up out of bed in a beautiful Mexican nightgown, and smiling and singing and “where-is-mommy’s-nose”-ing, I would go to him. I didn’t know that love’s propeller would sometimes take 15 minutes to fly me the three feet to his little bedroom, naked and soaked with breast milk, where it would take everything I had to croak out a curt “Hey.”

Then Christmas brought two surprises. My 13-month-old called me “Mama” for the first time (prior, he’d referred to me only as “Dada” or “Baba,” his word for milk), and my husband presented me with a gift certificate for a night alone at the Algonquin Hotel. Not exactly the Four Seasons, but a hotel with a bed in it and hamburgers and definitely martinis. For two months, I enjoyed just thinking about it tucked away with all the other unused gift certificates he’d given me for things like lingerie and driving lessons. Until, one night, I used it.

Mom Checks Into Mercer

I’m far from the only woman to want—however half-heartedly—a wee respite from my child.

Nele Husmann, 35, a financial columnist living in Greenwich Village, left her 14-month-old daughter Juno for two days. “We were visiting my husband’s sister in Leipzig, Germany, and I’d planned for a long time to go to Berlin after Christmas to meet my girlfriends,” she said. “I was going to go with my husband and Juno. But Juno was getting along so well with her cousins, I decided to leave her there with Thomas and go to Berlin by myself. The first night, we just went out for drinks and I didn’t relax at all. The second night was better, but there is so much anticipation, it wasn’t as fun as it should have been.”

“Did you have any fun?” I asked her.

“Yeeeeaaahhh,” she said, her voice filled with no. “Not that I didn’t have fun, but when I got back, Juno didn’t want to be with me for the first hour. That really hurt. She ignored me and only wanted to be with my husband. I had more fun when I traveled with her to Mexico.”

“Would you go to Berlin without her again?” I asked.

“I’d say yes!” she said, and we both laughed. A strange and nervous laugh.

Danielle Dalton, 37, a veterinarian living on the Upper West Side, went on a belated three-day honeymoon in Las Vegas with her husband of two months, leaving behind her 9-month-old daughter, Olivia. “We left on a Friday and brought the baby to my mother’s house,” she said. “She was in good hands, so I didn’t have to worry. I was all gung-ho, the plane was fine, leaving was fine, but then there was a growing feeling of missing her that was so intense—a physical feeling of missing her—and I started really annoying Pete. It was hard to get her out of my thoughts. It wasn’t like ‘Whoo, I’m in Vegas!’ We actually decided we would never leave her again and cancelled a trip to Bermuda. But now we’re going away on a business thing for six days, so I guess we lied!” Like Nele, Danielle also laughed, but with more surprised abandon. Then she got a hold of herself. “If we hadn’t gone on our honeymoon, I would have felt I’d missed out, but I didn’t expect to miss her as much as I did. It’s good to break away, though—take time to live your life. It’s a healthy thing.”

Julie Weiss, 36, mother of Jake, 5, and Noah, 4, and a graphic designer who owns her own stationery company and lives on the Upper East Side, travels alone every summer. “I leave behind not only my children, but my husband,” she said. “I waited two years because of the guilt associated with leaving your children. My first trip was to Paris and the first two days were miserable; I couldn’t eat or focus or enjoy. I was sure they’d fall down the stairs or someone would give them something they’re allergic to, and it would be my fault. But by the third day, I loved the pleasure of being away—and, more importantly, I loved the pleasure of seeing them again. There is nothing more joyous than seeing your children after you haven’t seen them for a few days. Mike thinks one of us should always be in New York, so now I love traveling by myself—I’ve been to Berlin, St. Petersburg, London. I plan every detail of their life, make a chart for the baby-sitter, book their play dates.”

She and Mike also go away together for “romantic weekends” to the Mark Hotel or the Lowell. “We take a vacation within a five-block radius of home, or for a real adventure we stay in Soho at the Mercer. It’s essential. If you have children, you have to do it. Your priorities drift away from the husband; it’s very easy to fall into this new lifestyle of just focusing on the children.”

“So do all of your friends who have children do this?” I asked.

“No—I’m the only strange person I know who travels alone and gets suites with her husband,” she said.

Alone at the Algonquin

For men, leaving is simply not an issue. Weeks after our baby was born, my husband went on business trips to Austin, to L.A., to France. He never would have dreamed of not going. “Look what I brought the baby,” he said the other day, on one of his returns from L.A. He proudly produced a bathtub rubber ducky wearing sunglasses and holding a surfboard. That rubber ducky was all he had to do to be a great father. Job well done, it screamed. And, of course, the baby loved it.

When I complain, he reminds me that his grandfather, Milton, went to the Hamptons alone to rest for a few days after each of his three children were born.

“Please, just go,” he said, literally pushing me out the door, and I wondered who this had really been a gift for, much like the lingerie and the driving lessons. The baby was taking a nap, so there was no tearful good-bye, and my husband seemed anxious to watch The Forty Year Old Virgin on Pay Per View. I’d felt gung-ho, as Danielle put it, despite a terrible dream I’d had the night before that I’d been captured in a war and placed by soldiers in semi-luxurious accommodations while awaiting certain death.

But I was nervous. Unlike Julie, I had no idea how to make any kind of a chart, and a part of me was sure that the night would end with me, my husband, our baby and our dog, all together at the Algonquin. As much as I used to love traveling alone—I’d even spent the first four days of my honeymoon in Venice solo—now it didn’t feel right. If the trip had involved getting on an airplane instead of taking a cab to West 44th Street, I might not have gone.

“‘How can they tell?’ asked Mrs. Parker, on hearing that Calvin Coolidge was dead” was the quote that met me on my door. I sat on the bed and studied the room-service menus, and then examined the window treatments to make sure the room would be completely dark in the morning. It wasn’t. I slipped the “Privacy Please” sign on the outside door handle.

I tried to enjoy it, but I felt like a man who finally has a ménage à trois and turns on the game. I wanted my gift certificate back in its drawer so I could still anticipate it.

I only finished one martini and the olives of the others. At 10:26, I took two Excedrin PM after calling a few friends to see if they would meet me in the lobby. No one would.

And then, before falling asleep, I turned on CNN. Betty Friedan had died. And I realized that there, in the Algonquin, a small part of me had died, too.

Many of the women I talked to, who had either vacationed without their children or longed to do so, begged me afterwards not to reveal their names, because they felt so guilty about it. One mother who’d gone away for six days—and had no problem telling me about it—called me to say that her husband wouldn’t let her use her name, although he’d just come home from Japan. Betty Friedan obviously had more work to do. Many women simply aren’t honest when it comes to motherhood. Women who will tell you anything about their sex lives are suddenly secretive when it comes to their feelings about their children.

They had many reasons for wanting to get away: sex, sleep, and wanting to remember who they had been before.

But you can’t take a vacation from motherhood. You’re still a mother whether you’re at the Algonquin or in Vegas, or at home making a chart for the baby-sitter. There’s no escaping it. It’s a change of state, like dying. I missed my baby so much when I woke up—his urgent, open-mouthed kiss on my cheek, the heavy feel of him in the crook of my arm. But isn’t that the point of a vacation: to make you miss your regular life? I missed him so much, and yet I sank back down in the feather pillows and called down to the front desk to ask for a late checkout.

Then I go home to my baby.

“What was it like when you took your first vacation without your children?” I asked my friend, Dinah Prince Daly, who has two daughters, 17 and 12, and lives in Brooklyn (being a “Manhattan mommy” is a mindset, not geographical).

“I don’t know,” she said. “I haven’t gone yet.”

So what did my fantasy mean? Was I Meryl Streep in Kramer vs. Kramer, and would this lead to me peering at my baby from behind a car as his father took him to the Beginnings Nursery School (another fantasy of mine—he hasn’t been accepted yet), or me falling to my knees and sobbing as he runs to me in Central Park? No, it didn’t mean that, because it was just a fantasy. I wasn’t going to do it.

I’d really wanted a baby, and I’d been through a lot to get one. I’d had an abortion during which I’d screamed, “I changed my mind!” over and over again. After that, I’d had abdominal surgery, a miscarriage, filed an application to adopt a Chinese baby, purchased and peed on every ovulation stick on the market (for one year I wouldn’t pee unless it was on something), gone to a fertility specialist and, once pregnant, been on bed rest and a program of constant non-stress tests, and had an emergency C-section due to low amniotic fluid. So I was happy to have him.

But sleep deprivation came as a shock to me. Even though I’d never happily gotten up before 11 in my entire life, I thought that when my baby cried for me at 6 a.m. or 7, or a quarter to 5, love would propel me up out of bed in a beautiful Mexican nightgown, and smiling and singing and “where-is-mommy’s-nose”-ing, I would go to him. I didn’t know that love’s propeller would sometimes take 15 minutes to fly me the three feet to his little bedroom, naked and soaked with breast milk, where it would take everything I had to croak out a curt “Hey.”

Then Christmas brought two surprises. My 13-month-old called me “Mama” for the first time (prior, he’d referred to me only as “Dada” or “Baba,” his word for milk), and my husband presented me with a gift certificate for a night alone at the Algonquin Hotel. Not exactly the Four Seasons, but a hotel with a bed in it and hamburgers and definitely martinis. For two months, I enjoyed just thinking about it tucked away with all the other unused gift certificates he’d given me for things like lingerie and driving lessons. Until, one night, I used it.

Mom Checks Into Mercer

I’m far from the only woman to want—however half-heartedly—a wee respite from my child.

Nele Husmann, 35, a financial columnist living in Greenwich Village, left her 14-month-old daughter Juno for two days. “We were visiting my husband’s sister in Leipzig, Germany, and I’d planned for a long time to go to Berlin after Christmas to meet my girlfriends,” she said. “I was going to go with my husband and Juno. But Juno was getting along so well with her cousins, I decided to leave her there with Thomas and go to Berlin by myself. The first night, we just went out for drinks and I didn’t relax at all. The second night was better, but there is so much anticipation, it wasn’t as fun as it should have been.”

“Did you have any fun?” I asked her.

“Yeeeeaaahhh,” she said, her voice filled with no. “Not that I didn’t have fun, but when I got back, Juno didn’t want to be with me for the first hour. That really hurt. She ignored me and only wanted to be with my husband. I had more fun when I traveled with her to Mexico.”

“Would you go to Berlin without her again?” I asked.

“I’d say yes!” she said, and we both laughed. A strange and nervous laugh.

Danielle Dalton, 37, a veterinarian living on the Upper West Side, went on a belated three-day honeymoon in Las Vegas with her husband of two months, leaving behind her 9-month-old daughter, Olivia. “We left on a Friday and brought the baby to my mother’s house,” she said. “She was in good hands, so I didn’t have to worry. I was all gung-ho, the plane was fine, leaving was fine, but then there was a growing feeling of missing her that was so intense—a physical feeling of missing her—and I started really annoying Pete. It was hard to get her out of my thoughts. It wasn’t like ‘Whoo, I’m in Vegas!’ We actually decided we would never leave her again and cancelled a trip to Bermuda. But now we’re going away on a business thing for six days, so I guess we lied!” Like Nele, Danielle also laughed, but with more surprised abandon. Then she got a hold of herself. “If we hadn’t gone on our honeymoon, I would have felt I’d missed out, but I didn’t expect to miss her as much as I did. It’s good to break away, though—take time to live your life. It’s a healthy thing.”

Julie Weiss, 36, mother of Jake, 5, and Noah, 4, and a graphic designer who owns her own stationery company and lives on the Upper East Side, travels alone every summer. “I leave behind not only my children, but my husband,” she said. “I waited two years because of the guilt associated with leaving your children. My first trip was to Paris and the first two days were miserable; I couldn’t eat or focus or enjoy. I was sure they’d fall down the stairs or someone would give them something they’re allergic to, and it would be my fault. But by the third day, I loved the pleasure of being away—and, more importantly, I loved the pleasure of seeing them again. There is nothing more joyous than seeing your children after you haven’t seen them for a few days. Mike thinks one of us should always be in New York, so now I love traveling by myself—I’ve been to Berlin, St. Petersburg, London. I plan every detail of their life, make a chart for the baby-sitter, book their play dates.”

She and Mike also go away together for “romantic weekends” to the Mark Hotel or the Lowell. “We take a vacation within a five-block radius of home, or for a real adventure we stay in Soho at the Mercer. It’s essential. If you have children, you have to do it. Your priorities drift away from the husband; it’s very easy to fall into this new lifestyle of just focusing on the children.”

“So do all of your friends who have children do this?” I asked.

“No—I’m the only strange person I know who travels alone and gets suites with her husband,” she said.

Alone at the Algonquin

For men, leaving is simply not an issue. Weeks after our baby was born, my husband went on business trips to Austin, to L.A., to France. He never would have dreamed of not going. “Look what I brought the baby,” he said the other day, on one of his returns from L.A. He proudly produced a bathtub rubber ducky wearing sunglasses and holding a surfboard. That rubber ducky was all he had to do to be a great father. Job well done, it screamed. And, of course, the baby loved it.

When I complain, he reminds me that his grandfather, Milton, went to the Hamptons alone to rest for a few days after each of his three children were born.

“Please, just go,” he said, literally pushing me out the door, and I wondered who this had really been a gift for, much like the lingerie and the driving lessons. The baby was taking a nap, so there was no tearful good-bye, and my husband seemed anxious to watch The Forty Year Old Virgin on Pay Per View. I’d felt gung-ho, as Danielle put it, despite a terrible dream I’d had the night before that I’d been captured in a war and placed by soldiers in semi-luxurious accommodations while awaiting certain death.

But I was nervous. Unlike Julie, I had no idea how to make any kind of a chart, and a part of me was sure that the night would end with me, my husband, our baby and our dog, all together at the Algonquin. As much as I used to love traveling alone—I’d even spent the first four days of my honeymoon in Venice solo—now it didn’t feel right. If the trip had involved getting on an airplane instead of taking a cab to West 44th Street, I might not have gone.

“‘How can they tell?’ asked Mrs. Parker, on hearing that Calvin Coolidge was dead” was the quote that met me on my door. I sat on the bed and studied the room-service menus, and then examined the window treatments to make sure the room would be completely dark in the morning. It wasn’t. I slipped the “Privacy Please” sign on the outside door handle.

I tried to enjoy it, but I felt like a man who finally has a ménage à trois and turns on the game. I wanted my gift certificate back in its drawer so I could still anticipate it.

I only finished one martini and the olives of the others. At 10:26, I took two Excedrin PM after calling a few friends to see if they would meet me in the lobby. No one would.

And then, before falling asleep, I turned on CNN. Betty Friedan had died. And I realized that there, in the Algonquin, a small part of me had died, too.

Many of the women I talked to, who had either vacationed without their children or longed to do so, begged me afterwards not to reveal their names, because they felt so guilty about it. One mother who’d gone away for six days—and had no problem telling me about it—called me to say that her husband wouldn’t let her use her name, although he’d just come home from Japan. Betty Friedan obviously had more work to do. Many women simply aren’t honest when it comes to motherhood. Women who will tell you anything about their sex lives are suddenly secretive when it comes to their feelings about their children.

They had many reasons for wanting to get away: sex, sleep, and wanting to remember who they had been before.

But you can’t take a vacation from motherhood. You’re still a mother whether you’re at the Algonquin or in Vegas, or at home making a chart for the baby-sitter. There’s no escaping it. It’s a change of state, like dying. I missed my baby so much when I woke up—his urgent, open-mouthed kiss on my cheek, the heavy feel of him in the crook of my arm. But isn’t that the point of a vacation: to make you miss your regular life? I missed him so much, and yet I sank back down in the feather pillows and called down to the front desk to ask for a late checkout.

The irony would not have been lost on Ms. Friedan, who died last Saturday, Feb. 4, on her 85th birthday.

The following Monday, Ms. Friedan’s colleagues from the early days of the women’s movement, her children and grandchildren, and extended family and friends gathered to eulogize a writer and activist who was often described as a mass of contradictions. She was an indulgent grandmother who referred to motherhood as her greatest accomplishment and a fearsome political organizer with strong opinions and a fiery disposition. She was a brilliant strategist prone to feuding with co-workers, and one who held grudges for years. She often provoked terror in those who knew her.

She was, in the words of her daughter Emily Friedan, who spoke at the service, “a force to be reckoned with and a force to bask in.”

Ms. Friedan’s offspring best illustrated the complicated nature of the woman credited with sparking the contemporary feminist movement.

Her grandson, Raphael Friedan, 23, said that he was mostly unaware of his grandmother’s notoriety during the time that he knew her. She had, he pointed out, long since faded from the limelight. But she did bring him along to fabulous dinners and on vacation to Cuba, and she let him throw parties in her beloved house in Sag Harbor during the summers he spent with her there.

“She was five feet tall and walked with a cane, but she could scare a 300-pound busboy so much that he’d hide and refuse to come out,” Raphael said, alluding to Ms. Friedan’s infamous temper. The audience rippled with knowing laughter. “She was always sweet to me, but she just didn’t take any shit. It didn’t really matter who they were—if she thought someone was giving her shit, she gave ’em hell. She just had this fire burning inside of her. It didn’t take much for that to explode.”

“Betty was not the perfect mother,” said one of her two sons, Jonathan. “Daniel, Emily and I ate TV dinners growing up—way beyond the recommended limit.” He made jokes about his mother’s crankiness toward her assistant—“who was fired repeatedly over the last 13 years”—and referred to “those crackpot women” his mom used to hang out with. He recalled a day in Washington, D.C., when he and his friend caught a glimpse of his mother dressed in “suffragette white,” chained to the White House fence in a protest.

“How do you make sense of Betty? You just don’t,” her daughter Emily said, adding that she’d spent her entire life being asked what it was like to be Betty Friedan’s daughter. “If she was the mother of the women’s movement, then I’m the women’s movement.”

At the time that The Feminine Mystique was published, suburbia was filled with educated ladies trapped in their houses, going completely insane with their vacuum cleaners. The book galvanized millions of women of the sort who filled the rows of wooden pews at the memorial: handsomely dressed and educated women who remember a time when want ads were organized by gender. Many of them credited Ms. Friedan for having liberated them from forced domesticity and making their lives as career women possible. One, sitting near the back, said that she hadn’t known Ms. Friedan personally, but that she’d recently retired from teaching law at N.Y.U. “It wouldn’t have been possible without Betty,” she said.

The service was a reunion of sorts for women who had labored together in the trenches of 1960’s and 70’s feminism—some of whom had been involved in battles with Ms. Friedan over the years about where the movement was going and who was getting credit for it. The psychologist Phyllis Chesler; Letty Cottin Pogrebin, one of the founders of Ms. Magazine; Kate Millet, the author of Sexual Politics, the women’s-health expert Barbara Seaman; and Alix Kates Shulman, author of Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen—all greeted one another with recognition and hugs. Some of them had worked with Ms. Friedan in the founding of the National Organization for Women in 1966, while others were from the movement’s more radical wing.

“I truly believe that Betty Friedan was the most influential woman, not only of the 20th century, but of the second millennium,” said Ms. Friedan’s friend, Muriel Fox, one of the founders of N.O.W. and a former executive vice president of the public-relations firm Carl Byoir & Associates.

“She was a great friend and a lot of fun to be with,” said Marlene Sanders, a close friend of Ms. Friedan’s since 1965 and one of the first women anchors on television, with ABC News. “She really enjoyed gossip …. She was also an inveterate shopper. Going shopping with her always cost me money. She loved clothes, family and men. She loved entertaining.” Ms. Sanders explained that Ms. Friedan had enthusiastically attended parties and liked to throw them herself. “Today’s young women don’t understand how it used to be. They assume they can have it all—and they can, thanks to her.”

Ms. Friedan was born in Peoria, Ill., and died in her home in Washington, D.C., but she spent many of her key agitator years in New York City. After she wrote The Feminine Mystique, she bought an apartment in the Dakota building, where she held some of her famous press conferences, including the one announcing the founding of the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws, now known as NARAL Pro-Choice America. She bounced around other abodes in the city, and sometime in the 1970’s bought the house in Sag Harbor, after years of summer rentals.

“She had more energy for going to parties than I think anybody else in all of the Hamptons,” said Ms. Seaman, who started the women’s-health movement with her book The Doctors’ Case Against the Pill in 1969, and who was a protégée of Ms. Friedan’s. “When you were Betty’s houseguest, you had to be prepared to go to six or eight parties in any one night.”

In addition to her activism and heady social life, Ms. Friedan was known for being opinionated and quick to anger. There are numerous tales of her flying into a rage at her husband or incompetent restaurant wait staff.

Ms. Friedan also fought to keep the nascent feminist movement rooted strictly in the mainstream. She was the president of N.O.W. until 1970, and focused on lobbying Congress over issues such as job discrimination and equal pay—alienating some of the more radical women’s groups.

“I think many people were quite mad at Betty for having somewhat demonized lesbians in the movement. She called them the ‘lavender menace,’” said Ms. Shulman. “And I think that probably a lot of people continued to be angry about that through the years, even though she did, at one point, of take it back.”

The New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd interviewed Ms. Friedan many times during her coverage of the Anita Hill–Clarence Thomas hearings, and described her as “a tough broad and an original.”

“In a 1991 issue of Allure magazine, she said she did not think that women should have to give up beauty and sexuality to be feminists,” Ms. Dowd said by e-mail. “’Women could all stop wearing lipstick and blusher, eye shadow and moisturizing cream tomorrow, and I doubt it would help them break through the glass ceiling or get child care or parental leave within the structures of the workplace,’ she wrote, adding: ‘If feminism really meant a war against men—a repudiation of love and beauty and home and children—most women would not want it.’”

Ms. Friedan was famously jealous of the feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who came after her by some 10 or 12 years. According to friends, Ms. Friedan became consumed with resentment when Ms. Steinem was invited to be a graduation speaker at Smith College, both women’s alma mater, before Ms. Friedan ever was.

“I spent many years trying to be their go-between. That was sort of the dark side of working with Betty,” said Ms. Seaman.

Judith Hennessee, author of Betty Friedan: A Life, said she struggled to create a fair portrait of Ms. Friedan’s volatile personality.

“Betty was a kind woman in many ways,” said Ms. Hennessee. “She always supported her friends’ projects and books, and when someone got a bad review, she always managed to say the right thing to them. There was so much that was generous about her.”

Ms. Seaman spent a great deal of time with Ms. Friedan gallivanting around Sag Harbor, getting into “capers” together. She said that Ms. Friedan liked to tear around the North Fork in a decrepit old car, and that her eyesight wasn’t very good, which only added to the thrill. Ms. Seaman recalled one particular incident, which she thought had taken place around 1980, when Ms. Friedan was driving between parties with Nelson Algren—the former lover of Simone de Beauvoir and author of The Man with the Golden Arm—who had recently moved to Sag Harbor.

“She was a very short, elderly woman driving this car in the dark who could barely see, and every time they went over a bump, something would rattle and maybe a piece of the car would fall off,” said Ms. Seaman. “She was in some intense conversation with him, and they went over a bump, but she just kept talking. And then, after another two or three minutes, she realized that he hadn’t answered her, and he was gone! So she went back, and she found him on the roadside—he fell out of the car and she hadn’t noticed.

“It captures something about Betty’s spirit,” Ms. Seaman said. “Do or die, you know?”

Meet Ironic Bridezilla, who questions every aspect of the modern American wedding (rightly so, as they’re almost inevitably overpriced, overblown, tedious affairs) and yet submits willy-nilly to every step of the planning, somehow telling herself that a detached, cynical attitude toward the proceedings makes her less of a victim of feminist backlash, outright commercialism, etc. Meet Hana Schank, founder and president of an eponymous “information-architecture and user-experience consultancy” and the recipient of an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia.

Hana Schank is also a bodacious blonde, as she repeatedly reminds us in this vellum-bound countdown to her nuptials, which totals over 200 pages. “I have … queen-sized pillow breasts, matching hips, and a waist three sizes smaller than the rest of my body, which is great if you’re a porn star but not so practical if you’re trying to look like Carolyn Bessette,” she protests on page 29, in the midst of her search for the perfect slip dress. On page 124, shopping for a chuppah with her fiancé at an Upper West Side Judaica store: “I glanced down at my hip-hugging jeans, my tight low-necked sweater, suddenly feeling overtly slutty and large-breasted.” On page 150, Ms. Schank experiences a traumatic flashback to a bridesmaid dress that “required a major hydraulic system of lingerie to keep my breasts in place.”

At least her ample endowments helped her land a real prince: a grad student in Russian literature named Steven who gives her “my own little chunk of ice,” which she amusedly regards as a “foreign entity” as it twinkles on her hand. She dismisses his proposal as “a slice of American kitsch.” Savvy urban intellectuals that they are, Hana and her guy are absolutely determined not to be one of those nauseating couples who micromanage every last detail of the Big Day, who subject their attendants to color-coordinated outfits and shepherd helpless guests around to activities as if they were teaching a kindergarten class. Instead, they mull strolling down the aisle to the sepulchral strains of Elliott Smith; joke that the theme of their casually Jewish bash will be “Anti-Semitism Through the Ages” (Steven balks at wearing a yarmulke); and proudly refuse to register for the $200-per-setting Wedgwood china service at Bloomie’s. “You promised me we’d be Hip Married Couple!” whines the groom-to-be when his beloved momentarily deviates from the plan by initiating an unsuccessful apartment-shopping trip in suburban Riverdale.

The bride’s reluctance to embrace with open arms a conventional modern wedding has another, more intriguing motivation, which she analyzes all too fleetingly: Her parents have been divorced for years, after being married in a hippie-dippy ceremony (Mom wore a white velvet mini-dress and was too stoned to remember the reception—awwwright!). This union did bequeath to her a large and far-flung cast of “wacky” relatives, including a cousin with a peculiar spectrum of food allergies (capers, chestnuts, aspartame) and an appealingly grumpy grandmother. “It’s a stupid waste of money,” barks “Gammy” upon learning that she’s expected to buy a new frock for Hana and Steven’s event (scheduled for a charming Vermont inn where they first vacationed together and enjoyed the “tangy local cheese”), “but I guess that’s what weddings are about.”

I regret to report that this book, despite occasional flashes of wit, is also a stupid waste of money: a deadly-dull catalog of one bride’s obsessive-compulsive quest for the perfect wedding—and then I caved and went to Kleinfeld, and then I fretted about save-the-date cards, and then I had my big ribbon crisis—with some half-hearted social criticism thrown in, lazy musings floating down the river of the author’s intellect. (This so-called professional information architect consults a mere dozen secondary sources.)

Dare one suggest that she wanted to have her wedding cake and eat it too? (Actually, she eschews wedding cake for a “dessert table,” an example of the pernicious phenomenon she calls “that whole personalizing-your-wedding mania”—a mania to which she is, regrettably, far from immune.) Yes, Hana Schank is right: The chance to be princess for a day turns scads of right-thinking American women into simpering mini–Martha Stewarts. Perhaps interviewing a few of these women—R.I.P., Betty Friedan—might have produced a more radical and interesting treatise; as it is, A More Perfect Union feels like a simple exercise in narcissism.

Alexandra Jacobs is features editor of The Observer.

Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew , by Christine Wallace. Faber and Faber, 333 pages, $27.50.

It's hard to recall or even imagine the relief that my friends and I felt when Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch was published in 1970. Finally, a "liberated" woman who seemed to have a halfway viable sense of humor and some semblance of personal style!

Though we considered ourselves feminists, the awful, nearly inadmissible truth was that, until then, we'd found our most vocal and visible leaders to be less than shatteringly charismatic. Kate Millett was too introverted, weird and academic. For all her tough-minded activism, Gloria Steinem seemed precisely the sort of well-groomed, well-mannered control freak our parents wished we were. And Betty Friedan?

Pugnacious, homely, abrasive, she was, to put it bluntly, our worst nightmare. Burn our bras and be like them? Really, we thought not. We'd much sooner have grown full beards and morphed into Che Guevara. How refreshing it seemed, then, to have the vibrant, larger-than life (6 feet tall!) Germaine Greer reassuring us that liberation was not incompatible with looking good, and sleeping with good-looking men.

Two new books–Judith Hennessee's deliriously hostile life of Betty Friedan and Christine Wallace's more measured but skeptical study of Germaine Greer–suggest that my friends and I were probably right about Ms. Friedan, and probably wrong about Ms. Greer. In Ms. Hennessee's introduction to her unauthorized biography, she characterizes her subject as "rude and nasty, self-serving and imperious," thus giving us fair warning that, to quote Bette Davis, we're in for a bumpy ride. Ms. Hennessee's description of Ms. Friedan's detractors as "more than delighted to talk," turns out to be an understatement. Betty's enemies and "friends" were apparently overjoyed to tell stories that show the celebrated author and political figure in an unflattering light. A typically sympathetic and tactful informant, Ms. Friedan's own brother, sums up her privileged but problematic adolescence in Peoria, Ill.: "When Betty was in high school she was ugly and had no boyfriends."

Her active early career as a radical journalist became, in the Cold War era, a guilty secret that Ms. Friedan, according to Ms. Hennessee, took pains to hide–partly in order to advance the misleading image of herself as an oppressed housewife, mother and frustrated dilettante who eventually came to her senses and wrote a best-selling book, The Feminine Mystique . Not that Betty didn't suffer. Her 22-year marriage to advertising man Carl Friedan was a Grand Guignol horror show involving infidelity, psychodrama, heavy drinking, amphetamine abuse and public violence. Carl was given to introducing himself as "the bitch's husband" and to saying graciously of his wife, "She's kind of doggy, but she's very bright." At one dinner party that Betty gave in Grandview-on-Hudson, N.Y., "The women decided to dress for dinner. It was very pleasant, and Betty brought out the main course, a beautiful fish on a platter. Carl said, 'Jesus, Betty, fish, you know I don't like fish.' He took the platter and threw it at her. Betty picked it up, peeling pieces of fish off the walls. Carl walked out and disappeared upstairs … Betty just served dinner, as if nothing had happened."

Although (as far as we know) no dead fish were flung about during her frequent contretemps with feminist sisters, Ms. Friedan's relationships with other women were anything but amicable. A casual meeting with Andy Warhol superstar Ultra Violet turned into a yelling and shoving match that sent an antique clock flying out their hostess' window, nearly hitting two men dining in the garden below. At the 1972 G.O.P. convention in Miami, Ms. Friedan restricted her pugilistics to wrestling for the microphone with National Women's Political Caucus spokesman Jill Ruckelshaus. She feuded with Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem, and took an instant (and mutual) dislike to Simone de Beauvoir, whom she labeled "self-consciously Bohemian." Indeed, it seems remarkable that Ms. Friedan found time, amid these flying fists and warring egos, to accomplish the considerable feats for which Ms. Hennessee gives her perfunctory credit: "Betty's achievement had been enormous. In those first few years she led NOW from victory to victory."

As Christine Wallace portrays her, Germaine Greer seems to be yet another woman with (to say the least) ambivalent feelings about her own gender, though her attitude toward her fellow feminists was considerably less mixed than Betty Friedan's. "'They want me to wear pants and be unavailable, and carry a jimmy to bash people over the head with if they feel my ass in the street," Ms. Greer complained of her sisters. Like most of us, however, Ms. Greer reserved the lion's share of her animosity for her immediate family; she was particularly bitter toward her harsh, punitive mother. Convent-educated, smart and willful, Germaine evaded her mother's attempts to stunt her prodigious self-esteem, and attended the University of Melbourne. Later, in Sydney, she fell in with a heady crowd of intellectuals who advocated anarchism and free love, especially for men. After leaving Australia, she studied literature at Cambridge University, and found Britain to be a nation of lousy lovers. The Englishman, she wrote, "is always very nice . He has an ideal of nice, gentle, restful, uncomplicated sex ."

Happily for Ms. Greer, she chanced to meet the one virile man on that verdant isle, a hunky carpenter named Paul du Feu, "the heterosexual equivalent of a rough trade fantasy come true," who was "also an occasional columnist and comic-strip writer with a good degree in English literature himself." Their stormy, passionate marriage lasted all of three weeks. Mr. du Feu went on to pose nude for the centerfold in British Cosmopolitan and (displaying an unerringly masochistic taste in women) to marry Maya Angelou.

Ms. Wallace charts the vagaries, switchbacks, contradictions and reverses of Ms. Greer's positions on such topics as her father, menopause, sex and family, and the fate of women artists. She writes: "You cannot make great artists out of egos that have been damaged, with wills that are defective, with libidos that have been driven out of reach and energy diverted into neurotic channels"–a theory that makes it difficult to see how Vincent van Gogh could ever have picked up a paintbrush.

In her most recent work, she has criticized the whole notion of sexual freedom, advocated a shift to the extended family arrangements most often found in the Third World, and suggested that rapists be "outed" on the Internet rather than prosecuted through the criminal justice system. In Ms. Wallace's view, Ms. Greer has often seemed less interested in veracity or consistency than in being entertaining, and in fulfilling a lifelong desire to be a major diva. Nonetheless, claims Ms. Wallace, her theatrical personality has served as an inspiration: "She is the maverick of mavericks, flawed, sometimes flailing, but always fighting."

What both books seem to demonstrate–though neither author appears to know it–is the powerful, almost metaphysical allure of overcompensation. For if, as many of us have observed, our most neurotic friends grow up to be psychiatrists; the shy are attracted to acting or exhibitionism; the sexually confused are most likely to torment homosexuals–then, as the complex careers of Betty Friedan and Germaine Greer would suggest, women who are most uncertain about sisterhood, gender identity, personal ambition, female competition, sex, the body, the meaning and limits of liberation may be naturally drawn, even compelled, to become feminist leaders.

All this P.R. for the virtues of aging makes me grouchy. A positive attitude about life is a fine thing, of course, and for those who can manage it 24 hours a day I have only admiration and chronic envy. But I suspect I'm not alone in thinking that a crock is a crock, and lasting a long time is not an unmitigated good. In fact, it might be one of the very worst things that can happen to you. Which is why when I read that, in the not so distant future, scientists might find a way to prolong our life spans up to 150 or 175 years on average, I did not dance for joy, though I still can. I winced. "Good years," they said, "arthritis-free, brain-clicking years," they said. "Sure," I thought, "a new sucker applies for Social Security every 30 seconds."

My anxiety has nothing to do with wrinkles and sagging or trembling muscles. That's just the book cover. I'm more concerned about the inside pages, the things that are permanently writ on the soul. As we get older, we don't so much get wiser (whatever the sages say) as more adjusted to calamity, more weathered by event, more worn out by things that we wished for and didn't get or things we did get and didn't wish for. Let me be specific. When I was a child and I heard of a flood in the distant Mississippi Delta, I could weep for the homeless and I could see the mud on the living room floor and in my mind's eye I could see the photograph album, the wedding pictures sinking among the rocks, the branches and the rapid current. I felt a kinship, a sharp keen cut, a pain for those who suffered.

However, so many floods later, so many massacres later, so many cattle cars on their way to Auschwitz, so many bodies in the Balkan snow, so many little children with stick arms and big bellies in the Sudan, so many avalanches and terrorists attacks, train derailments and muggings in the park later, so many reports of child abuse and wife-beating and border wars and famine, and my inner skin is thick like the hide of the oldest rhinoceros at the water hole.

I don't linger over images and brood over individual stories. I skip the tears. I give a universal so-what's-it-to-me shrug. I know the score.

Something worse will happen tomorrow. I have retreated inside the border of my private brain. I give what I can, of course, but I imagine as little as possible. Ah, what a loss of the world this is. I balance my checkbook, sort of. I count the worth of my treasury. I mourn the losses of my expectations.

I will be surprised by little except the actual pain of whatever personal disaster comes to me next. I was a sweet child and I am so sweet no longer. This partial closing of the gates of empathy, this too is age, and I would be surprised if I am alone in this.

There was something wonderful in the early days of my motherhood when I thought I could create human beings that would leap from rock to rock, like sturdy mountain goats, and soak in the sunshine and do all the right things and pass my genes like shining gems along to their descendants. I was overconfident. It was harder than I thought, and the process has wised me up.

Whatever I will do from my 100th year to my 150th year will not be as fraught with drama, with real effect, with impact on my heart as this child-birthing, child-raising thing about which the older person can only say, "Ah, well" or "But for" or "If only," or turn on the TV news. The work itself is over. Could I actually bear to visit a grandchild in the hospital with breast cancer? Do I want to see marriages collapse and vows be broken and the poet in the family turn mute and the banker in the family lose his funds? Do I want to be there for the next 1,000 emergencies? Not exactly.

No thanks. Sure I know that graduations, birthdays, celebrations will come, too. Would they be sufficient compensation for the bad days? I doubt it. The thing about getting older is not that the sun can't be enjoyed, or the feel of a thirst-quenching drink on a hot day won't please, or the hand of the person you love in your hand won't always be a good thing, but that the odds begin to swing against you, and no matter how hard you try to brave it out, worse and worser will surely come your way.

I know this is not the right thing to say. It's not the right thing to think. A million self-help books will probably arrive in the mail. But I feel we need a little balance on this age issue before they have us all signing on for double terms, re-enlisting in an army with a track record of sending its troops into battle unprepared and unarmed. Yes to the beginning of each new day … but in proportion, with dignity or clarity, with an honest acceptance of regret that certain things are gone, certain doors are closed. Don't chirp at me about the wonders of age. I would prefer to be born again, a second chance, and if science could actually arrange that, I wouldn't complain. Not me. However, I do not want New Age tracts, so don't send those on, either. I am too tough a bird for primitive magic. I do not mistake fervent wish for truth itself. We don't in fact get better and better as we get older. We just get older.

Men search out younger women. Women daydream. Booksellers sell books. Illusion spinners spin. Me, I believe with Dylan Thomas that we should go out raging, not making nice. But enough is enough, and 150 years is too much.

No small thanks to Time, the consolidation of politics and celebrity is nearly complete. Time-Warner's seating consultants must have had a blast. Should Kelly Flinn be paired with Dick Morris? Donna Rice with William Ginsburg? Evander Holyfield with Betty Friedan? Jack Kevorkian with Jerry Falwell? Flies on the wall must have been staggering with delight. Imagine the table talk if Leni Riefenstahl, the most accomplished Nazi propagandist of all time, had been paired with Louis Farrakhan! Chat about comparative million-man marches! And if the no-shows had showed, imagine the possibilities: Ariel Sharon with Fidel Castro!

If Hitler had only lived to 109, he might have been paired with Saddam Hussein, who didn't show, either, but then again, not every Time cover subject was invited. You had to have made a difference to the century-as if Saddam hasn't! According to Bruce Hallett, the president of Time, "What better way to celebrate every Time than to honor the men and women who have enlivened our pages with their valuable contributions in this century?"

And speaking of no-shows, where was erstwhile cover star O. J. Simpson? Margaret Thatcher? Yasir Arafat? Jimmy Carter? No Newt Gingrich, no George Bush, no Bob Dole, no Dan Quayle. No Oliver North, no Colin Powell. The only Republican pol in sight was Jack Kemp. Perhaps Republicans want to keep their distance from the "liberal media," or they were upset that Bruce Springsteen, Madonna and Tina Turner weren't going to be there.

The tone was gee-whiz and, for the most part, predictably self-serving. Mary Tyler Moore regaled the crowd by recalling how Lucille Ball once graced a young actress with a compliment. Surprise! The recipient of the compliment was Mary Tyler Moore. One notable exception to the self-exaltation was DNA double-helix discoverer James Watson's moving tribute to Linus Pauling, the great chemist whose rival model of DNA was too cumbersome, and whose peacenik activities earned him a salary cut from the proprietors of the California Institute of Technology. Bill Gates, fresh from the Senate Judiciary Committee clutches of Orrin Hatch and Strom Thurmond, delivered himself of a paean to Orville and Wilbur Wright, declaring that "the 20th century has been the American century in large part because of inventors like the Wright Brothers." As if the 20th century has not also been the century when millions of city-dwellers succumbed to aerial bombardment. More fatuous history has not been on display in one place since the night Newt Gingrich dined alone.

In this company, not for the first time, one has to admire Mikhail Gorbachev, given a pulpit again after years in the wilderness. First he had to put up with his seating partner, Kevin Costner, rising to make a miserable joke about the translator who sat at the table with them. ("If you think this evening is long, you should try hearing it in two different languages.") No sympathy there for the man who dissolved an empire-only to find, having just flown all the way from Berlin, that he had to lean away from Sophia Loren, seated to his right, in order to stay close to his translator on his left. Who is it? asked a young woman seated next to me as he was being introduced.

When he got his moment before the microphone, Mr. Gorbachev had the gall to address the full glitz and radiance of Radio City Music Hall and actually say something, clumsy though it was. After lumbering through a tribute to Time for lasting into "a mature middle age," he lionized Mohandas K. Gandhi. Too often, he said, the leadership of the 20th century had realized its potential through force and deception. He called V.I. Lenin "grandiose" while still honoring him (I think) for utopian labors in behalf of "social justice," and tempering the Soviet state with the market, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt would later do the opposite. To a fidgeting crowd, he declared that the world needed "leadership of a new type," fusing "politics and morality" into a "new humanism" that would "put an end forever to the geopolitics of force" and "treat all humankind with compassion."

And now, the envelopes, please. Best (or possibly the only intentional) joke of the evening: Sharon Stone, toasting Betty Friedan: "Two guys go out shopping for a brain … The male brain is $100,000, and the female brain is $25,000. Why is the female so inexpensive? It's used." Most desperate Hail Mary attempt at a metaphor: Kevin Costner, reading from notes, on Joe DiMaggio: "He is a man who speaks to us … about how to wear defeat and disappointment as if it were just a passing storm." Most effusive obsequity toward the hosts: Steven Spielberg called Time "an institution that has always strived to tell the truth." Subtlest rebuke of the hosts: Toni Morrison crooning (a bit effusively) over the "vivid and intelligent" prose style of the magazine in the 50's and 60's, but noting that back then it lacked "a hint of jaundice." Boldest rebuke of the hosts: James Watson, speaking about Linus Pauling, the great chemist who won a second Nobel Prize, this one for peace, pointed out that Time once ran this caption under Pauling's photo: "Defender of the unborn or dupe of the enemies of liberty?"

"On this most painful day when I feel at once so young and so old, when I am filled with memories of him both as boy and man, I realize how much more courageous he was than even those of us who thought we knew him well ever realized," Mr. Halberstam said, then stumbled away.

Courageous was an odd word choice, for it is not usually assigned to suicide, the manner of Lukas' death. On June 4, the writer had strangled himself in his Upper West Side apartment after reading page proofs of his new book, Big Trouble.

Now the book is out, and courageous is the word. The official line, put forward by Lukas' friends and duly promulgated in the press (notably in The New Yorker by the Commissar of Safe Opinion, David Remnick), is that Lukas suffered from a disease and his book is brilliant. The line is convenient for a community that, like Mr. Halberstam, is suffering survivors' guilt. But it doesn't help. It excuses the flaws in a problematic book and excuses a ruthless community of its role in Lukas' suffering.

Big Trouble is tedious, a good story undermined by the author's inability to discriminate important historical incident from nonimportant. Episodes that should be footnotes occupy long passages. The fact that the actress Ethel Barrymore played Boise during the 1907 murder trial that is at the heart of the book is a good morsel, yes, but Lukas uses it as a jumping-off point to describe Barrymore's work, family and that period of American theater for a dozen pages. A slender connection to the pitcher Walter Johnson is summons to another noisy dump truck. Such arbitrary choices would be entertaining in a novelistic writer. But this narrator lacks wit and grace, and wants to hold your lapels for 750 pages.

The author of Big Trouble never seriously asked himself the question that all good self-involved writers are forced to wrestle with: Why should anyone else care about my obsession-in this case a 90-year-old story, and an assignment that Jack London and Upton Sinclair turned down? In his author's note, Lukas states that the narrative illuminates the widening gap between rich and poor in modern America, and Simon & Schuster duly trumpets this claim in its jacket copy and bills the book as a "struggle for the soul of America." But there is just one line in the book about the American soul, and the book does nothing to earn its claim that the class war it examines has shaped the society we live in.

Lukas demonstrates a splendid historical gift in this book-supple and brilliant treatments of Western radicals, the invention of dynamite, and the rise of the private eye. But he rarely lifts his nose from the events at the turn of the century to analyze the trends he claims to be interested in. No, this author is a tyrannical grind. (And the editors of this book failed writer and reader by not pruning his headstrong choices.)

As for Lukas' depression, any sensitive person who dealt with him glimpsed great torment, great unhappiness. He was so self-involved that he once put his friend the critic Jonathan Yardley in purdah for eight years because of a negative comment in a review of a book. There was a history of mental illness in the family. "Last week, he died of his illness as we all will from our own," his editor Alice Mayhew said at his memorial service.

The problem with such post-mortems is that they deprive signal events like Lukas' death of larger meaning by medicalizing them. How little resonance would the Medea story have if the narrator insisted that she was a paranoid schizophrenic? How flat would King Lear be if (as Jane Smiley contends) Regan and Goneril's rage sprang from sexual abuse?

Lukas' story is a resonant one not because of his serotonin level but because it exposes the suffocating values of the community he lived in. He was inhabitant, and yes, prisoner, of two hermetic writers' villages, the Upper West Side and Sag Harbor, and the judgment of his work by his peers was always too meaningful to him. Indeed, a heightened consciousness of status mars this book: The bibliography contains an absurd 800-plus titles, the author's bio is a list of the prizes he won. What was he trying to prove? And to whom? Let me tell you, the people who filled the Society for Ethical Culture last June are smooth, but they are one tough, unsympathetic crowd. They want you to fail, and if Lukas were still alive, they would today judge this work harshly. Were these people really his friends? Courageous writers seek distance from such judges.

"We were each other's friends and fierce rivals," David Halberstam said that day.

Three times in his speech that day, Mr. Halberstam used the word "fierce" to characterize the competition that had begun at The Harvard Crimson newspaper. Fierce is a strong, good word; and I cried through Mr. Halberstam's speech because the cruelty of boyhood rivalry in the elite proving grounds is something that shaped and misshaped my life.

A generation after David Halberstam and Tony Lukas, I also found a fierce rival at The Harvard Crimson in someone who is a close friend to this day, the writer Nicholas Lemann. Nick was president and I was executive editor of that bloodstained rat pit, and Nick was by far the better journalist-more clear-thinking, insightful, mature, recognized. After Harvard, the rivalry continued (at least in my mind, but unspoken), and again and again Nick won. He earned a brilliant reputation as an author. I had trouble finding my way. It upset me to see that my father had more respect for Nick's work than mine. But I knew that he should! Once when Nick helped me to get a job offer, I turned it down. "You couldn't have taken that job because Nick did it years before," Michael Kinsley quipped at the time, and he was right.

Worst of all, I felt trapped by the rivalry: that over and over in some psychic nightmare, I was condemned to run the same journalistic race I'd begun running and losing when I was only 17, but that it was a choice I'd made for compulsive, statusy reasons. I imagine that Tony Lukas suffered related feelings: I can never be as glib or appealing as Halberstam! Why am I trying to write best sellers when I'm a historian at heart? Lukas' last book, which falls between the stools of popular history and scholarship, suggests to me the deep pathos of his experience: that he never did figure out what he really wanted.

The wisest speaker at the memorial service was Betty Friedan. Later I heard that she'd pushed herself onto the program, incurring resentment. No matter. With dark circles under her eyes and hands held up in the air spread-fingered, and a half-spinning half-davening rhythm to her body, she was the strongest feminine presence on that masculine stage. To the Society for Ethical Culture-which, as Lukas' brother Christopher said, disdains the metaphysical in Jewish religion-Friedan brought her feminine metaphysic, and brought it as an incantation.

"It's no good to say to Tony now: In writing Common Ground, even if you had never won the Pulitzer Prize, it would have been enough. Or in writing Big Trouble, even if it never gets near the best seller list, it's enough. I think we can say to ourselves now, this taking of his life was a terrible, terrible thing and we do have to take depression more seriously … But we have to say to ourselves and each other, It's the doing of it that's important. Not the measure. Not the measure. Not the measure. It's the doing of it."

Dancing and keening around a stage occupied that afternoon by high-status men, men like me, men of Harvard, men of The New York Times, men of the elite who constantly measure themselves and one another and who are now putting out the appropriate line on Lukas' book, Ms. Friedan got at the living meaning of Lukas' death in a Zen Jewish way. Compete so fiercely and you will never learn where your true heart lies.