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

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.

My goal is to be accused of being strident.

All of women's aspirations--whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination--ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas--and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.

In the '30s and '40s, the search for Hungarian national identity led famously to an alliance with Hitler and the destruction of more than a half million of the nation's Jews. And here we are now, more than 70 years later, witnessing a resurgence of xenophobia and authoritarianism, and not just in Eastern Europe.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" program trumpets a national identity built on scapegoating, self-pity and grandiosity, and the promise of a strongman.

It's fine to dress in polka dots and pink crinoline if you want. What I recoil from is the idea that that alone is the only way to be female.