That so-called feminine ardor for clothes shopping had been flagging for some time. Between 1980 and 1986, at the same time that women were buying more houses, cars, restaurant dinners, and health care services, they were buying fewer pieces of clothing-from dresses to underwear.

In place of equal respect, the nation offered women the Miss America beauty pageant, established in 1920-the same year women won the vote.

As women began to challenge their own internalized views of a woman's proper place, their desire and demand for equal status and free choice began to grow exponentially.

Women who had discovered pants, low-heeled shoes, and loose sweaters during World War II were reluctant to give them up in peacetime.

Having whipped single women into high marital panic-or "nuptialitis," as one columnist called it- the press hastened to soothe fretted brows with conjugal tonic.

To be unwed and female was to succumb to an illness with only one known cure: marriage.

Keeping the peace with the particular man in one's life becomes more essential than battling the mass male culture.

The economic victims of the era are men who who know someone has made off with their future- and they suspect the thief is a woman.

An accurate charting of American women's progress through history might look more like a corkscrew tilted slightly to one side, its loops inching closer to the line of freedom with the passage of time-but, like a mathematical curve approaching infinity, never touching its goal.

For some high-profile men in trouble, women, especially feminist women, became the all-purpose scapegoats-charged with crimes that often descended into the absurd.