Yet this updraft of spirit, this collective move toward liberating the consciousness of woman, didn't last. So much was happening at once that it is hard to pinpoint an exact cause. One factor surely had to do with the vociferousness of men's response. To the women's utter surprise and shock, their demand for “personhood and dignity” was met by “violence and hatred” from their husbands, lovers, colleagues, and peers, “men who,” as Dana Densmore recounts, “until then appeared normal.” Densmore, one of the founders of an early feminist journal called No More Fun & Games, says, “We felt we were girding for an apocalypse in male-female relations.” For some, this threat proved to be too much. Another factor had to do with women themselves. The promise of sisterhood proved to be elusive. Black women wanted to fight for racial equality beside their brothers—not for gender equality beside white women with whom they shared no positive history and whom they had little reason to trust. Radical lesbians charged that true liberation meant freedom from heterosexuality. Differences along the lines of race, class, and sexuality began to rip the movement apart. And something more sinister began to happen. Conflicts erupted that rarely came to any positive resolution. Groups splintered, often shunning each other. And those women who were seen as leaders—the highest-achieving, most competent, and most outspoken—were “trashed” and purged from the movement. “Sisterhood is powerful,” Ti-Grace Atkinson is credited with saying. “It kills sisters.” The movement ate its leaders. In eliminating those women who were pushing the edge, the upward surge of woman rising slowed almost to a halt. This dark unsisterhood has little to do with helping or caring for others—at least not other women. Differences are tolerated as long as they make no difference—in other words, as long as they do not reveal differences in power, ability, or status. And power operates covertly: unacknowledged rather than unused.

Every woman who has lived through seventh grade has in some way experienced these frightening dynamics that enforce a profound and perhaps even pre-rational conformity between women. Stay within the bounds and you can find care, connection, and mutuality. Push beyond and . . . well, watch your back. According to the teen girls with whom I work, this inclusion-exclusion drama that we first played out in girlhood hasn't really changed. No wonder. The roots of this behavior go further back than seventh grade or the sixties. Research on female primates suggests that many of our evolutionary foresisters spend their time grooming others to avoid being picked on and holding grudges against each other that make reconciliation impossible, all to gain an advantage in sexual reproduction.

The evidence seems to be mounting to support the view that women are deeply driven not to lead—so much so that we will stop other women from leading. It seems, in fact, to be not simply an individual preference but a collective one that dates back to the origins of the human species. But I would argue that we can learn something from what happened in the women's movement that could be even more powerful than the momentum of a million years of competition between women to secure a mate. The women's liberation movement had an effect so far beyond those relatively few heroic women who were directly involved. Why? Because they were working to change consciousness itself. Women, compelled to change themselves and the world, decided to evolve consciously for the sake of freedom and equality. And something was liberated that transformed almost every aspect of social life. Yes, we have settled back in, created a new status quo that falls short of full equality and partnership between the sexes. However, it was an extraordinary first step: an attempt to create systemic change at a scale that had never happened before—led by women. We faltered in leaping further because the ideology of the time said that all differences between the sexes came from cultural conditioning, which could be changed. But in fact, there was something more fundamental, more primitive, operating in us at an instinctual level. A deeply rooted, biologically driven impulse to compete against each other not only destroyed the movement's leadership, but it sabotaged sisterhood—and any hope for further collective transformation.

Radical sisterhood was necessary to create a collective change in consciousness. The next step for women's liberation would have been to explore those primitive dynamics of competition and betrayal together. But at the time, this must have been unthinkable. Women were already risking so much, in terms of their relationships with men and all that had given them any kind of security in the world. This radical bid for both autonomy and equality “couldn't last,” notes Wendy Kaminer in her incisive 1993 Atlantic Monthly essay “Feminism's Identity Crisis.” Why? “It was profoundly disruptive for women as well as men. By questioning long-cherished notions about sex, it posed unsettling questions about selfhood. It challenged men and women to shape their own identities without resort to stereotypes. It posed particular existential challenges to women who were accustomed to knowing themselves through the web of familial relations.” Questioning the most fundamental conditioning in ourselves, without the ground of real sisterhood, was too overwhelming. We pulled back. And the wave of transformation that women had unleashed began to lap more and more gently at the shores of the status quo.

The slogan “the personal is political” lost its edge. A new “feminine feminism” became popular, one that celebrated rather than challenged our traditional caretaking roles. By placing the greatest value on our capacity to care, the entire momentum of the movement shifted inward—focusing on women's personal qualities rather than on the sociopolitical mechanisms that imprisoned our minds and spirits. No longer meeting others in the positive intent to raise consciousness, each woman was left on her own to deal with the victimizing forces of oppression and limitation. This feminine feminism created another kind of sisterhood; one not born of shared struggle but rooted in the age-old collusive bond between women—our sense of emotional and moral superiority to men. In this collusive sisterhood, heterosexual women's primary identity involves caring for men and children, and our relationships with other women are too often used to let off steam or kvetch. This sisterhood is two-faced: smiling as the good girl who is selfless and caring when she gets what she wants, but underneath simmering with rage as the angry victim when she doesn't. No longer calling women to rise up in rebellion, this new feminine feminism invited women to lie down—on the therapist's couch. The vertical movement of a new consciousness became dispersed in the self-reflective world of the postmodern self.

Feminism opened the door to untold choices for women, and for men. This was the postmodern revolution: a fracturing of the universal into the particular, the dissolution of Truth into truths, the breaking down of absolutes into relatives, and the one-way-to-be-a-woman into the many. In today's “whatever” world of instant celebrity and a dizzying array of consumer goods catering to every desire, young women find themselves in a free-for-all that is touted as freedom. And this has given rise to the latest incarnation of feminism. “Personal choice seems to be the only [feminist] value,” writes Nation columnist Katha Pollitt. “There are no politics, and no society.” This generation has adopted the key takeaways from the emerging field of evolutionary psychology: women manipulate to get power and seek status through powerful men. Armed with the last decade's research and six years of Sex and the City, young feministas have turned their backs on the good-girl victim to adopt her mirror image: the bad-girl temptress. Sexuality is the coin of the realm for the self-proclaimed “girlie feminists” of Gen X and Gen Y. However, the embrace of sexuality as a source of individual power is ironically just as traditional and limited a landscape for a woman's life as that of the good and caring woman. Both good-girl and bad-girlie feminism are related to our ancestral past, our primate desires to reproduce. Thus, neither liberates us from the deepest part of our conditioning so that we can find new ways of being powerful in the world.

So thank you, Ken Wilber, for raising the question: Where are the women? The female half of the leading edge cannot opt out of the further shift in consciousness that is so desperately needed to meet the crises of our globalizing world. Too many of us progressive women have been seduced by the endless stimulation of the contemporary social scene, held captive by our own primitive desires for sex or safety, and are still fearfully avoidant of the deadly competition that blocks us from being a collective force for change. It's a truism that those who have benefited most from an evolutionary advance are most reluctant to move forward because it requires moving beyond what has been to their advantage. Women benefited immeasurably from this last shift in consciousness. And now we are stuck in the postmodern status quo—too nice or too infatuated with our own desires and feelings to reach beyond it. We don't want to reckon with the fact that, on this planet, the gift of choice is not a narcissistic entitlement to pleasure but a responsibility through which we meet the increasingly high stakes of being human.

Let me ask the question anew: Where are the women who want to evolve consciousness? Who want to find out what it means to be women, not good girls or bad girlies? Who will take the hard-won lessons of feminism's last forty years and consciously choose to evolve, to once again risk placing our hearts in each other's hands and dare to lead? Where are those who will grapple with our primitive drive to compete with each other so that we can realize a higher collective potential? This is what faces us, as women and as human beings. It's a choice that each of us has to reckon with. Only then can we create the new world that has always been the promise of women's liberation.