So some slept around to prove that they could be women and liberated at the same time; and they choked back any cheap taste that filtered through their insides. Women tripped from bed to bed as if to proclaim to the world, "My sex is my freedom." But this sort of man-hopping denied any roots at all, and rootlessness loosens the grip on the self. These feverish sexual experiments were born out of a headlong rush into a new found feminism; sex was leaping out of the self to escape it.

For others, anti-'femininity' meant anti-sex. Sex gaged in the old market exchange, where you sold yourself to guarantee that you got from men the security you paid for, was intolerable. Revolt against traditional masculine expectations often went hand in hand with rejection of the men who couldn't see it happening any differently. Jeans and workshirts like the men's were like battle flags worn to advertise defiance, "Take me now, I just dare you to try." Here, revolt against one form of maladjustment carried women into another neurotic adjustment, neurotic simply because nobody wanted to deny her sexuality. She needed men, but the old language of male attention was poison to her feminism.

Four years later, I still don't feel that I have grown out of this dilemma. I have put a priority on my independence because I still believe that I am unable to fight a sexist system while I am tied to a man. His vocabulary has for too long structured the way I think, and his values are built into my head like enemy signposts. Feminism, for me, is a total sensibility. It is inside the head, and, for now, personal.

I think of this personalized feminism as a parlor form of guerilla warfare that uses an artillery of intuitive language--mime, gesture, silence--to sabotage the enemy. It is rather like a revolution of manners, something felt rather than articulated. You can't structure a sensibility, you can only recognize it. And you recognize it not in action but in the reverberations of an action, like watching drops of water distilled from the air, or learning to hear the unspoken associations in the grooves of a sentence. My feminism works rather like an inner eye that registers the other side of the surface caught by the retina. I watch it in the way I feel about getting ogled in the street. My body used to go taut with suppressed fury, and now I bristle ironically--"that puffy red-faced one there with the beery swollen jowls and lecherous look is a cracker, don't even try to meet his leer because his head is so far away that he's going to play any response you make by his rules." I watch its progression in the fact that I have stopped going back to first causes when I put on eyeliner in the morning, or in the way that I have stopped reading cop-outs into the way I dress.

FEMINISM HAS bred in me a hyper-self-consciousness, as if a sentry had been planted in my brain double-thinking me. It is most alert in conversation with men. I used to busy myself scenting out the most insignificant of sexisms and flying off the handle when I found them. And then I'd lapse into defensive raps to explain myself.

Today I would balk before having the conversation at all because I have begun to feel that the language of the man's world orbits inexorably in its neat Ptolemaic system. The guy says, "So you want respect?" and I shut up because as soon as I try to redefine the word I lose my case. The difference is that four years ago a feminist defined herself in opposition to the square sexist world. She was a naysayer to a tradition of role playing grown dyspeptic, practicing toughness instead of timidity, sloth instead of chic, either anti-sex or sexually liberated. Today the trap is complicity.

My contemporaries wonder where the collective anger that fed their faith in 1969 went. They think that the dream of '69 died with the action, and they miss the high feeling of Happening. One of their biggest depressants is a whole new crop of freshmen and sophomores who simply aren't having any of it.

These younger women have brought back a more tailored look, and they are cleaner. You can't categorize them by any group style, however, because there doesn't seem to be any. The Look has diffused and the Role along with it. They have largely abandoned collective political action for more individualized pursuits, study, pre-med, pre-law, etc. Neither can you stamp a personality according to political affiliation any more because so many cliques have spintered or meshed with each other. There are sexists in the Socialist camp and militants among the sexists; you find Feminists who won't vote, and more and more who won't stand on any ideology at all.

THIS DIVERSITY in style and the dearth of collectivism proclaims an "each woman out for herself" attitude. It is an individualism that shapes a generation different from the one that cut loose in 1969, and there is something like a generation gap in between. The older radical Feminists that I know are so jaded about this new generation that they read 'lowered consciousness' into trendy clothes, 'straightness' into studiousness, and all that looks vain as 'all was in vain.'

Perhaps, though, this pessimism is a bit fiercer than the situation deserves. If I could generalize about this new generation at all, I would call them the New Professionals. And I think it was precisely the changes brought by '69 that made this new professionalism possible. It is simply carrying on the personal business of Feminism that '69 outlined politically.

1969 sighted the enemy and legitimized Feminism for them. We were 19 or 20 when the only definition of womanhood that we knew was being smashed and the rigid lines of sexual demarcation eroded, and they were just coming out of adolescence. They could feel the protest of '69 tug at the roots of the system that wouldn't budge for us in our formative years. And they could watch sexism gruelled on a vast public witness stand. All this means is that this later generation could inherit Feminism as a personal guideline, because it was established for them publicly four years ago. They could internalize the political legacy of '69 as a given.

I don't see much of that old worshipful respect for masculine power in this new generation. I don't see younger women copping out with coy giggles in intellectual bouts because it is more attractive to be charming, and easier to let the man think he is smarter. I don't hear as much abrasive yelling of "Chauvinist pig! Male supremacist!" etc. But I do hear a lot of cool ironic hissing. Three years ago I felt practically traumatized before the picture of Dustin Hoffman in "Straw Dogs" wreaking bloody havoc on the men who had raped his wife when she asked for it. To me, Hoffman's pose epitomized the sort of sexual fascism that sanctifies itself by the territorial imperative. I saw the movie again this year with my younger sister, and her only reaction was a bemused "Where does he get off?" Where I found poignant contradiction in the film, my sister found mostly irrelevance. She is firmer footed than I could be, and more tough assed. Hers has always been a personalized form of Feminism.

Perhaps the biggest difference four years has made lies in the fact that nobody can venture to say with any authority what it means to be a woman. In 1969 we suffered from a footlose uncertainty about the goals of Women's Liberation, so we clutched at the movement for self-definition. And we used that political identity as a crutch for a queasy feeling personal identity to hang on to and steer by. We felt plagued by our inability to define 'woman,' frustrated by the fact that we could say only what 'woman' was not. But definition limits prematurely, and I think it was precisely the de-definition that prevented Women's Liberation from solidifying into a staple. It rendered the movement into a form with enough give and take that each could outfit her own style.

IT TAKES a long time for someone who was trained by a sexist system to digest the implications of '69 in the head. After four years I am weary of hard hitting, but I am still angry. And I live with that anger as the one unyielding signpost in my head. I still feel torn like an inbetween--I have my education in how to win a man and keep him built into me, and I often want to turn it on because it is less troublesome. But I feel sick when I do, as if caught in the act of lying for something you don't give a damn about. I still feel com- promised when I acknowledge my need for love of a man because I am not sure that I can protect my human independence from the sexual dependence I was trained to need.

They say in politics that purists never win. But for now Women's Liberation is inside the head, and compromising your head is a futile form of dishonesty. It hurts me to be hard, but I have to defend myself against the old needs so damaging to my feminist self-respect. The security the old needs brought is known and safe; the integrity I have to piece together as a feminist is 'out there' and not so safe. I waver between these two pulls trying to root out the sensibility that shaped me.

The political outbursts of Feminism in 1969 made possible the experiment in understanding the female consciousness. It has become a very personal experiment, and a difficult one. It means trying to separate your human needs from the needs of your sex role. It means trying to grapple with a sensibility, and a sensibility is a very slippery thing. It means picking yourself up by your gutstrings to inch yourself forward