Interestingly, a look to the left reveals a similar disavowal of the need for collective change. Karen Lehrman, a liberal feminist, concurs with Hymowitz that “the contemporary women's movement [has] outlived its usefulness.” Lehrman's reasoning is that feminist ideology has become too restrictive. Because women have been freed from the code of femininity that kept us in the kitchen, she believes that we are now each making our own individual conscious choices. She, along with other feminist writers, claims that women are no longer victims of society, no longer held down. In fact, she argues that a monolithic feminism—that sees women's oppression everywhere—is now oppressive to women's full and varied expression of who we are. As she writes in The Lipstick Proviso, “Women don't have to sacrifice their individuality, or even their femininity—whatever that means to each of them—in order to be equal.” While Lehrman believes feminism is critical for women's lives, she asserts that any collective movement that claims to represent the good of women as a whole is obsolete. She upholds each woman's right to seek success and security as she sees fit. Lehrman does suggest that the fact that so many women still seem to be freely choosing the security of home life means that we need to question more deeply what it truly means to make autonomous choices. For Lehrman, this deeper questioning will not come from participation in an organized movement but only through personal choice. In essence, she argues that it is now up to each individual woman to work out her own relationship with a divided world. Ironically, choice, the mantra of the feminist movement, has proven to be a double-edged sword—at first cutting through rigid restrictions on what women can do and now, through an emphasis on individualism, cutting off continued collective change.

It's the emphasis on personal choice without any larger context that marks the new postmodern, liberal status quo expressed by Lehrman and other Gen-X and Gen-Y feminists. “Do what you want, when you want” is the motto of a glitzily packaged feminism that attempts to move beyond victimization to a celebration of power. In Manifesta, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards deplore the fact that the feminist slogan “the personal is political” has been “misinterpreted to mean that what an individual woman does in her personal life (like watching porn, wearing garter belts, dyeing her hair, having an affair, earning money, shaving her legs) undermines her feminist credibility.” In other words, because personal choice has become the core liberal feminist value, what those choices are don't matter. All is fair and feminist as long as you feel free and powerful. Lehrman goes so far as to suggest that it doesn't really matter what motivates a woman to exercise power as long as the choice is in her hands: “While. . . some women may not want too much power in the public sphere . . . many women want a great deal of it. And many women want power for reasons that don't always suit everyone's tastes. Some women want power solely to be able to buy expensive clothes, big houses, and elegant cars. Others want power to make political decisions that don't exactly chime with the reigning politically correct agenda. And many women (even some outspoken feminists) don't always acquire power or wield it in the nicest way.” The new feminist freedom simply comes down to doing—and getting—what you want.

These statements express no sense of right or wrong, better or worse—no moral claims—just a sense of entitlement to do as one pleases. Thus, while feminism has been harshly critiqued for creating an ideal of woman-as-victim, continually entitled to redress and special treatment, these recent approaches to feminism, ironically enough, express the entitlement of the postmodern narcissist that is the victim's alter ego. Both the position of victimization and the position of narcissistic entitlement are liberated from any sense of responsibility to anything other than the self. Moreover, doing what you want when you want it may not be freedom at all, but simply bondage to compulsively narcissistic cravings for sex, affirmation, pleasure, and power. In fact, the avowed amorality of postmodernism (which, for example, may sound like, “I have no right to judge anyone else's truth” or even “Before you say anything judgmental, walk a mile in that person's shoes”) is part of the reason that there has been such an extreme backlash against organized feminism from classic conservatives and fundamentalists. Feminism—as one aspect of postmodernity—is condemned for having led to the dissolution of the family, irresponsible parenting, and self-destructive promiscuity among girls. This is only true if one equates “feminism” with the entirety of the pluralist postmodernism that has eroded the moral consensus of the culture, which would be a vast oversimplification.

Postmodern feminism, regardless of its guise, is what we need to move beyond. The Janus-faced woman—simultaneously victimized and entitled—has trapped us in a narcissism that keeps us from working for the collective evolution of woman. And I would agree with many critics, such as Hymowitz and Lehrman, that feminism as an ideology has become strange—and estranged from women's lives. (The oft-cited, albeit distorted, position of the late pioneer Andrea Dworkin, who declared that all heterosexual sex is rape, is but one example.)

I have a suggestion: Why don't we abandon feminism as a postmodern ideology and instead embrace women's liberation as an evolutionary process? This could be the place from which to move forward. The willingness of the sixties activist women to open their own minds and evolve their own consciousness was considered extreme and even crazy, but today even conservatives can calmly note that the movement is over because it has succeeded so well in giving women options in life. This capacity to make real choices has been a true gift of feminism, specifically, and of postmodernity, in general. The next task is far more overwhelming: to move beyond the mere recognition and acceptance of pluralism's many perspectives and attempt to bring a higher integration to our fractured world. And whether or not we can reach that goal will depend on our ability to liberate ourselves from the deeper conditioning that rules our choices, the conditioning that compels us toward safety and self-satisfaction. Gaining freedom of choice is only the first step to becoming a conscious moral agent. After that, the nature of the choices that we make is critical—we can either support the status quo or we can reach for a higher perspective, a new moral ground, an evolution in women's consciousness.

There are some women who have pointed beyond the endless self-seeking of postmodernism. Interestingly (at the risk of alienating my younger sisters), they come from the old guard of the women's liberation movement. Their insights, taken together, call for us to move in a very different direction and, perhaps, can provide starting principles for the next phase of women's liberation.

1. We have to judge—starting with a good look in the mirror. In a poignant reckoning with the actions of Pfc. Lynndie England in Abu Ghraib prison, author Barbara Ehrenreich acknowledges that simply allowing women to have choices—to be in the military, for example—will not change the world. Why? Because “women can do the unthinkable,” the morally repugnant and downright evil. Her response pulls on us to give up the nineteenth-century belief that we women have less violence and more care in our hearts than men and to reckon with the reality of what we are truly capable of. Even as Ehrenreich appreciates England's predicament, her willingness to judge the young woman's actions invites us to make the critical distinction between, on the one hand, supporting the status quo and, on the other, transforming ourselves and society. All choices are not equal.

2. We need to create a higher moral ground beyond the self. Moral choices are the basis of our relationships with each other, and they cannot simply be based on what feels good or right to the individual. Nor can we move back to the rule-based personal morality of the religious traditions. Those moral codes were created for an ordered feudal society, not for an individualistic consumer culture. Carol Gilligan, in her groundbreaking work, In a Different Voice, discovered that men and women often use very different criteria for making moral choices—which is to be expected, given that both traditional and modern societies place men and women in very different roles. Yet, at the end of her book, she suggests that the next stage in moral evolution will demand that we move beyond this polarity of masculine and feminine ways of thinking and being. “In . . . maturity,” she says, “both perspectives converge.”

3. We have to reach beyond gender. To find our way to a new moral ground, we need to question our compulsive choices—the desire for sexual power, the pull toward security—and to seek something new beyond woman as we have known her. Gloria Steinem has been speaking for a few years about moving “beyond gender,” yet what that means remains vague. No wonder. It demands an extraordinary effort to find out who we are, beyond the victim, the entitled narcissist, the sexual provocateur, or any of the many faces of Eve. The transformation of consciousness that would be unleashed by women making choices for something beyond either personal success/power or the security of the hearth could transform society “once and for all” in ways we cannot imagine now.

4. Hierarchy is essential. Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice and the Blade, argues against the postmodern credo that disavows vertical hierarchy in human relationship. “There is so much unreality about what we should move towards,” she observes. “People need structure. The issue is what kind of structure. We do need hierarchy. Hierarchy is an actualization where accountability doesn't just flow from the bottom up, it also flows from the top down.” If we place a value on the development of consciousness, we automatically create a hierarchy: those with a more evolved and inclusive perspective have a greater responsibility to work for the development of the whole. That means that we privileged postmoderns have to take the responsibility of being the elite to push the leading edge further.

What I hear in these women's voices is a call for a new kind of elite. The continuing liberation of the consciousness of woman will only come from those at the edge who feel an urgent need to move forward for the sake of humankind. The success of women's liberation thus far did not come about through simply seeking what I want. It came about through reaching for change far beyond the individual. As Susan Estrich, in her latest book, Sex and Power, asks the generations who have chosen postmodern self-satisfaction, “What about the sense of power and possibility that comes with the realization that what is is not inevitable, that the struggle is larger than you, that change is possible?” Right, what about that? Isn't women's liberation about the transformation of the world as ourselves? This is perhaps the most critical step toward something new. No longer can the context for our lives be the postmodern pursuit of pleasure and power or even the modernist desire for worldly success and homebound security. Without our eyes on something far greater than ourselves, we will never intervene “once and for all” on our own behalf. And if we don't, as Wolf warns us, “the future is ours to lose.”