MENTION "PARIS '68" to any French student and watch his face cloud with regret for a dream in defeat. The failed promise of Paris '68 has punctured his idealism, depressed his beliefs, and most likely by now put a permanent crease into his posture.

If 1968 was the big year for radical student revolt, 1969 was the heyday for militant Feminism. Mention "'69" to anyone who participated and watch the lines in her face tighten with nostalgia. She too looks as if the phrase were but an echo, or a ghost of an activism that passed away somewhere, she's not sure where.

The analogy is significant. Feminism can be as compelling a tool for her generation as Marxism has been for a century of radicals. But where the student revolt was geared by an ideology, programmed toward a solid goal, Feminism, at least for the time being, is more fluidly formed; it founds itself on faith more than anything else, faith in the possibility of an independent female identity. Feminist activism could fire away for all it was worth at external targets like job inequality and economic dependency. But it hasn't directly touched the deepest impulse of Feminism; it hasn't rescued the female sensibility. Activism is on its way to getting what it asked for, but, going only so far as the men's world, it hasn't given Feminism what it really needs.

It is difficult not to miss '69, however. For '69 meant bursting loose, breaking out of traditional sex roles, and finding a public voice. And that voice was yelling loud and brazen in raucous rebellion against all that 'femininity' had once connoted. The Feminist anger, for many, was the single most powerful emotion in their lives. It made them buoyant. Female strangers on the street went out of their way to give each other "everybody's a sister" smiles, and collective meetings warmed their faith with the feeling of an all female togetherness. Everybody's blood was running high in the temples, and the talk was feverish with urgency and purpose. Womanhood, nothing less, was to be salvaged from its historical oppression, and women burned like pioneer refugees out to rescue it.

They threw away their bras as a symbolic breaking loose, they foreswore make-up in revolt against the Look, and donned shapeless Indian prints that defied the Hollywood wasp-waisted ideal. They sat with legs widespread in mockery of Propriety and wore tattered jeans to taunt Ladylike Deportment. And they stopped shaving and stopped bathing to exult in the smells they trailed in the air. Rebellion against the Look was merely the easiest way to protest the Role, since the Look, be it slickfigured or heavy-breasted, was primed for seduction, for capitalizing on your assigned status as a sex object. It was this objecthood, having one's identity consigned to the status of an object, that Feminism reared up against. Because objecthood meant being a member of a psychologically subordinate class, it meant dependence on men for self-definition, and crippling your identity to fit the shape of the one already cut out for you.

THEN, A FEMINIST could scream out against what she knew was wrong. But that didn't make anything else right. And nobody knew for sure just what was right. Moreover, nobody really knew how to go about finding it out. Robbed of a relevant past and in rebellion against it a feminist lacked any model by which to structure her future. Activism was the only tool she had. But after four years, when that activism has aroused significant political change, the personal problem of self-definition, the question "What does it mean to be a woman?" remains.

That question triggers off reverberations that sound in the core of any feminist's personality. She has only her own experience to measure its extent. I became a feminist when I realized that I lacked the answer, and that I had grown up trained to believe the wrong one. My parents made a persuasive model for the idea that men were stronger than women, hence better. My father had power over my mother economically, intellectually, etc. He could demolish her verbally; their arguments ran like a Thurber parody of The Battle Between the Sexes. He could think more precisely and analytically than she could. His infallible logic made her look clumsy and irrational, and she failed ever to muster as clean a logic when pitted against him. He would retreat to a citadel of rationality and leave her flailing outside with futile goading and gadfly jabbing. Frustrated by her powerlessness, she could only shout. And I'd blame her as peacebreaker when it was his cool male aplomb that had subtly rendered her so.

Then my mother's economic dependence upon my father seemed pitiful to me. She lived for her family, he for work, for a life outside that would take care of the family. The priorities tell you that theirs was a relationship couched in power.

This naturally bred in me the sense of feminine powerlessness. Consciously my mother's dependence frightened me. I thought my father had the better life. So I emulated his independence. I became a tournament tennis player and traveled the national circuit for nine years. But the feeling of impotence and submission vis-a-vis the world breeds a guilt for any form of success achieved in that world. I would go to bed each night with a knot in my gut, sick with the pressure of having to sin the next day. Winning itself was rarely more than a breath-catcher en route to new pressures and more anxiety. I had wrought winning into an ultimatum whose fulfillment made me guilty not just because the life style put a premium on success, but because I had been educated to feel that independent success was meant for men. For women it had to be a by-product of a male-centered life, like a sideshow they could be proud of as long as it stayed in the wings. When my body began to get big and muscled and hard in a way I thought unfeminine I stopped playing altogether. My athlete's walk was making me feel like I had gone over to the other sex in betrayal of my own.

AFTER ALL, "femininity" was the only measure of success that really counted. Only boys founded an identity on extra-sexual criteria. The tests that would make or break them would come in their work or public life. For girls, life without male approval was practically no life at all. I remember sitting home on the night of a big high school dance thinking myself a failure as a person because no one had asked me. Most of the girls I knew were trained to serve the sexual code--in the expertise of how to win a man and keep him, how to flatter and flirt and sell their wiles. We disguised the jagged edges of our personalities to pander to the male appetite, and we sacrificed any principle for male applause. Trying to be siren seductresses was our assent to passivity and receptivity and all that men had laid down the definition of women to be. We gave up claim to doing what we were educated to need.

Now, figuring your self-esteem on little else than male-funded returns means that you are handicapped in loving yourself. You have to do it vicariously through men instead. It is a servile position and servility means degradation. Depressing your ego, your healthy selfishness, to fortify a man's takes shape as a self-hatred. It is being held in contempt and squeezing that role for every gambler's gold ounce it is worth.

I tried very hard to play by the rules of the sexual code, and hushed every self doubt under a louder male catcall or compliment. But a few years of shutting up to make men feel smart, acting timid to make them feel brave, and lying to make them feel stronger left me empty inside. Since the attention I got for my manipulative agility told me that I was a success by the standards of "femininity," I began to think that my problem was neurotic. So I went into psychoanalysis and discovered that I hated men.

Unconscious, my hatred was personal; made conscious, it had pervasive political extensions. A life spent placating men, preening for them and being petted by them in order to share their style, following them to places I didn't want to go and into things I didn't want to do made me hate them for it. I hated them for having the power I didn't, I despised them for not being 'man' enough when they weren't powerful, I hated myself for wanting that power. In short, I was paralyzed by my loyalty to the only feminine ideal I had ever known.

Generalized, my problem described a dilemma central to Feminism: success in a man's world is incompatible with female integrity, while 'femininity' stunts the female identity. Men justify themselves on pride for a world they have built and conquered, and the conquered includes women. Women are born and raised members of a subordinate class in a system of sexual power that admits no equality. When successful by masculine standards they threaten men, and feel guilty for doing so. When they exchange the male oriented language of femininity' for a man's vocabulary and a man's style they trade one form of identity denial for another. And this is why the Feminism that took shape in political action, that claimed for women the right to do everything that men could, didn't answer anybody's questions about what it meant to be a woman.

IN 1969 a feminist was often eaten up by a rage that hungered for nothing less than a total annihilation of the male dominated system. But nobody likes a woman who is angry. Her male friends would shy away from her with a "she'll get over it" condescension, and their condescension would fortify her outrage. You feel ugly fighting with a shrew's snarl, though. It is like using brass knuckles on a balloon for a punching bag. And you begin to wonder if you are worth liking after all.