WHAT SOME WOMEN WANT

In her book What Women Want (Dutton, 323 pages, $ 23.95), Ireland explains how her personal metamorphosis from airline stewardess to bisexual professional feminist provides instruction to millions of women — a grandiose undertaking, maybe, but perfectly sensible if you assume, as the author does, that your every experience is fraught with social significance and must be interpreted as a mandate for feminism.

And it is not only Ireland’s experiences: She manages to turn her family tree into a feminist tablet. Early in the book, readers are introduced to her grandmother, a feminist who didn’t realize it. It seems that the lady shocked neighbors during her two pregnancies by exercising in public and flaunting her swollen belly, at a time when “decent women did not parade it around for others to witness.” This, Ireland says, may have been dismissed “as individual eccentricity” but was actually a blow for female self- determination. Throughout history, “small statements of desire for individual freedom” have been made “defiantly by women . . . and dismissed by neighbors as mere displays of quirkiness.” And there you have it: Neighborhood weirdos down the ages were, if women, the Simone de Beauvoirs of their times.

Despite her grandmother’s clarion call, Ireland enjoyed a rather conventional girlhood. Raised Catholic in a relatively conservative Indiana household, she went through a tomboy phase but quickly shed her mannish accouterments “to wear skirts again, to follow the traditional path laid out for a schoolgirl in the late 1950s.” A cheerleader, she “embraced the external formalities of femininity, its appearances, behaviors, look, and feel.”

Nevertheless, social convention made young Patricia uneasy. And her objections were more than intellectual: She was apparently a bit free- spirited about sex and resented the “double standard” under which her male equivalents were admired while she was “socially trashed.”

This budding sensibility aside, she was essentially a 50s girl — even marrying a high-school football player at age 17. The two attended the University of Tennessee together, but the marriage quickly unraveled and ended in divorce. Ireland finished her undergraduate degree and did graduate work for a teaching career. Eventually she decided it wasn’t for her and in 1967 dropped out.

With her career options limited, she took a job as a stewardess with Pan Am. Forced to endure “everything from whistles to virtual molestation [by] airline employees and passengers alike,” she felt powerless in the face of blatant sexual harassment. Yet she managed to grin and bear it, accepting these indignities as the price of the “economic independence denied to our mothers and grandmothers.”

There were occasional acts of rebellion — baby steps. She complained to management (unsuccessfully) that stewardesses, when on the ground, were required to wear pillbox hats — “utterly useless hats [that] invariably mashed our hair into a rat’s nest of tangles.” But the real turning point came when her new husband needed his wisdom teeth pulled. The airline’s dental insurance did not cover the spouses of female employees.

With a quick call to NOW, Ireland learned that, as a federal contractor, Pan Am was “bound by . . . equal employment laws to cover you.” The company succumbed — and Ireland was flush with victory over the “power establishment. ”

But hadn’t the “power establishment,” in the form of the federal government, taken her side? Hadn’t it obligated a private company to cough up dental coverage for her husband? Nuances like this — which don’t fit Ireland’s view of women as perpetual underdogs and victims — get lost in the epiphanies.

After years of not rocking the boat, Ireland began to see herself “as someone who could actually be part of making a difference — not just for myself but for other women as well.” The Pan Am/tooth caper “had been my first and only real incursion into the legal battlefield, but I was hooked.” So off she went to Florida State University Law School, from which she graduated in 1975. With the help of a male professor, she landed a job at a top Miami firm, Paul, Landy.

There, if you believe Ireland, virtually every male lawyer was either insensitive, sexist, or harassing. Given such an environment, you might suppose that Ireland’s tenure at the firm was nasty, brutish, and short. But somehow she managed to carve out a comfortable niche for herself. (The old- boys network is maybe less powerful than she likes to believe.)

Soon she emerged as the firm’s gender-equity czarina, and her “feminist views were repeatedly challenged and tested against reality.” Sometimes, though, reality scores a victory. Consider what happened when a paralegal complained to Ireland about a partner’s unwanted sexual entreaties. Ireland personally warned the guy off. But the clod insisted that the paralegal was flirting with him.

“Less than a month later,” Ireland spotted the two making out at a dance. Her assumption is that the paralegal couldn’t possibly have liked the guy — she had fallen prey, not to his charm, but to his abusive power. In the feminist lexicon, it is not only “no” that means no.

Gradually Ireland became sucked into the vortex of feminist politics, working with the local NOW chapter for state passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Insider by day, outsider by night, she made partner (at a different firm) in 1984. Three years later, she left Miami to become NOW’s official treasurer in Washington, D.C., and later vice president.

In 1991, NOW’s president Molly Yard, who had been expected to step down so that Ireland could replace her, suffered a stroke; Ireland was ready to take the reins. Yet there was one other matter: Ireland, who in the 1970s played softball in a women lawyers’ league, was forced to confront rumors that she batted from both sides of the plate. In an interview with the Advocate, a gay publication, Ireland owned up to having a female “companion” in Washington.

With this kink out of the way, it was onward and upward. The Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991 energized feminists, as did a march “for women’s lives” the following year. In addition, Congress passed the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (which aborted the free-speech rights of pro-life demonstrators) and legislation allowing “women to sue for damages in cases of harassment in school.”

Says Ireland, “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.” This statement and other hackneyed slogans — “The conservative onslaught in Congress and the states threatens all the progress we have made” — ensure that no one will mistake her for a philosopher-queen.

The advice littering What Women Want is equally cliched: “Consciousness is the predecessor of transformation”; “Every positive transformation . . . takes plenty of time.” And to what purpose these pearls?

Why, to make little feminist foot soldiers. Women can enjoy the ” satisfaction of expanding our personal power” through collective action. “Not everyone wants to join in demonstrations or picketing or direct confrontations outside an abortion clinic. Some people may participate by joining in a boycott of a business that gives money to antiabortion groups. Some of us may be more focused on issues like getting our daughter’s soccer team the same quality coaching and equipment as our son’s.”

Ireland’s “choices” — more like edicts — are reminiscent of the career advice my father, a doctor, gave me: “I’m not pressuring you about careers: You can choose any sub-specialty of medicine you want.” My father, of course, was half-joking. But it fails to occur to Patricia Ireland, when she delineates the “choices” available to women, that not all women share her worldview. Some women may wish to “expand their personal power” by working to ban abortions, fighting overly broad sexual-harassment codes that imperil free speech, or advocating welfare reform. But don’t look for these women in Ireland’s book. In her universe, all women are rigorously adherent to feminist politics and leading a fairly grim existence.

Indeed, this tract, which purports to empower, actually infantilizes women. They’re always mired in some uphill struggle against social ills, locked in lopsided battles against men. Ireland completely ignores the power that women often hold over men and the fact that many women are capable of securing husbands who are loving and devoted.

Even more irritating than the book’s dippy feminist perspective is its assumption not just that the personal is political but that everything that is personal is political. According to Ireland, every experience is politically relevant, rife with meaning about some sin of society that she and her feminist cohorts hope to eliminate.

You have to wonder: Has she ever enjoyed a night out with friends (or even a romance, of any variety) that didn’t turn on liberating women from the yoke of patriarchal oppression? She urges women to adopt the “life full of meaning and purpose” — but this life is defined solely in political terms.

Here again, Ireland assumes too much: The topic of motherhood, for example, is virtually absent from What Women Want. It may surprise Ireland to learn that many women find motherhood far more exhilarating than trying to ramrod the Equal Rights Amendment through the Florida legislature.

And whatever these women and many others want, Patricia Ireland and NOW aren’t offering it.

Evan Gahr, a columnist for the New York Post, last wrote for THE WEEKLY STANDARD about Phil Donahue.