The women's movement. . . has proved women's own worst enemy.

the last decade has seen a powerful counterassault on women's rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women. This counterassault is largely insidious: in a kind of pop-culture version of the Big Lie, it stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's position have actually led to their downfall.

My goal is to be accused of being strident.

Feminism's agenda is basic: it asks that women not be forced to "choose" between public justice and private happiness. It asks that women be free to define themselves-instead of having their identity defined for them, time and again, by their culture and their men.

When the enemy has no face, society will invent one.

The piles of makeup and the insistence on frills and ribbons and bows was not at all attuned to my feminist views.

the central argument of the backlash - that women's equality is responsible for women's unhappiness.