Feminism ain't dead yet
I've always liked Maureen Dowd. I have often wondered what Dorothy Parker would have made of her 21st-century impersonator.
The traits she has that drive so many feminists crazy -- the red hair dye and the fishnet stockings -- never bothered me. I enjoy flamboyant types.
Once, when I ran into her at Hickory Hill during the first Bush administration, she flashed her signature rapier wit after a friend introduced us. ''Ah, Globe freeloaders," she sighed. ''You folks just can't pass up an open Kennedy bar, can you?"
It was such an outrageous comment that I could only laugh. I stood in the back of the living room while the late Mary McGrory announced that year's Robert F. Kennedy Foundation journalism awards. I had hoped to catch Maureen's eye when a Globe photographer, Michele McDonald, and I accepted ours. But alas, she was busy chatting up a handsome fellow in the hall.
I had not thought about that encounter until I read an excerpt from Dowd's new book, ''Are Men Necessary?" in The New York Times Magazine. In it, the clever op-ed columnist recycles the tired, old theme that bright women are doomed to lives of barren spinsterhood because smart gals scare smart guys.
Usually, I ignore Times forays into faux social science, especially when the subject is gender. The reports from the field invariably feature new moms getting off the fast track and co-eds harboring fantasies of well-credentialed princes rescuing them from lives of gainful employment. More often than not, the field turns out to have been the writer's social set. If the reporter's Manhattan or Georgetown friends are giving up lucrative partnerships in their law firms for domestic bliss, well, it must be a trend.
Dowd studied at the same school of anecdote and autobiography masquerading as behavioral science. In her magazine excerpt, headlined ''What's a Modern Girl to Do?" we hear from her friend, ''a 26-year-old Times reporter," from her colleague, ''a 30-year-old Metro reporter for The Times," from one of her ''girlfriends, a TV producer in New York," and from ''a young man at my gym." There's the scientific method for you.
This stuff could be dismissed as entertaining fluff if Dowd's Pulitzer Prize and her perch on the op-ed page of The Times did not lend her self-referential musings so much credibility. The piece was the most e-mailed story from the Times last week. At Brandeis University, where I teach a course on the press and politics, women's studies professors worried about its impact on their female students.
There is no need for alarm. For one thing, most students don't read newspapers. For another, in 11 years of writing recommendations for young women applying for jobs or law, medical, or graduate school I have yet to encounter a single one schooled in what Dowd calls ''the venerable tricks of the trade: an absurdly charming little laugh, a pert toss of the head, an air of saucy triumph, dewy eyes and a full knowledge of music, drawing, elegant note writing and geography."
No doubt such women exist, just as there exist men who would rather marry their children's nannies than their professional colleagues. But women do not now fall, nor have they ever fallen, into Dowd's categories of earnest feminists in Birkenstocks and hot babes in Manolo Blahniks. ''Sex and the City" and ''Desperate Housewives" are not cultural barometers. They are campy television shows.
Maybe Boston is too far north of the Washington-New York corridor to have a finger on the pulse of sexual politics, but is there a more absurd assertion than Dowd's that the triumph of feminism lasted ''a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years?"
The backlash is real enough, but women have gotten onto the athletic field, into the corporate boardroom, and even onto the op-ed page of The New York Times in that nanosecond. Not nearly enough women, certainly, but too many to suggest, as Dowd does, that the feminist movement ''was some sort of cruel hoax."
I wonder: What will she wear to her book party?
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
