What makes this all the more piquant is that some of these conservatives were themselves once progressives. As she recounts in her splendid memoir, "An Old Wife's Tale" (HarperCollins, 234 pages, $24), Midge Decter made the journey from Roosevelt Democrat through neoconservative to all-out Republican. Born into a family that believed President Roosevelt walked on water, Ms. Decter became a writer and journalist who went to war with the left over communism, affirmative action and family values.

As she started to say the unsayable, she discovered that so-called liberals are tolerant of all views except those that differ from their own. With an ineffable combination of intellectual arrogance, moral blindness and social snobbery, these people found the country's upsurge of conservatism under President Reagan totally inexplicable (an outrage that was to be replicated some two decades later with the election of George W. Bush).

Such a closing of the liberal mind meant that Ms. Decter's reward for telling home truths was to be marginalized and excluded from fashionable literary society. Her early crime was to grasp that the women's liberation movement was a noxious ideology of victimhood that preached hatred of men.

As a sharp-eyed resident of the American postwar suburbs, Ms. Decter knew that the image of women trapped in suburban hell by patriarchal men -- the Betty Friedan dystopia that launched the women's liberation movement -- was a myth. She realized that women's real problem was not male oppression but a clash of two incompatible female ambitions: work and motherhood. Because women failed to square this circle, they blamed men instead.

The absence of self-awareness was startling: the radical feminist Gloria Steinem in a crotch-high suede skirt and knee-length suede boots telling men that women were no longer prepared to be their playthings. It would have been comical were it not for the group libel. Men were making wearisome daily journeys to city jobs they hated to provide their wives and children with material comforts, only to return to the suburbs to find these wives in "consciousness-raising" sessions propagating the doctrine that men were insensitive careerists, thugs and rapists.

As Ms. Decter observes, the deadly mix of the women's movement and the sexual revolution poisoned relations between the sexes, with women explosively complaining and men silently seething. The fallout has been immense and continuing harm.

Men have been harmed by the loss of their role as providers and protectors, creating escalating male rates of mental and physical illness, antisocial behavior and unhappiness. Meanwhile, women who have been taught that only a paid job can provide self-fulfillment often discover to their confusion and shame that once they become mothers they don't want to go back to work. Many mothers who do work find in dismay that they manage to fall short on both motherhood and the job.

Indeed, mothers are indicted by Ms. Decter for using "enlightened" attitudes to camouflage their indifference to their children's need for love and limits. The result is thousands of lost and needy children who are precociously sexualized and whose insecurity expresses itself in self-harming behavior, from drug-taking to navel-piercing to anorexia.

Meanwhile, young women are trapped by a paradox. They become promiscuous while declaring themselves the victims of male sexual predators. Then they find to their amazement they are left on the shelf as their biological clock ticks away and resentful men, vilified and bullied and deprived of a role in any courtship ritual, turn their backs on commitment.

Ms. Decter advances the intriguing theory that such women, while aping male sexual adventurism, are in fact desperate to find an escape route from this free-for-all. Realizing that they stand to lose out heavily from it, they are nevertheless terrified of being pilloried as Victorian prudes. So, she says, the feminists of the women's movement turned anti-man as a device to avoid sex without appearing reactionary. Their daughters have invented further ruses to get them off the sexual hook, such as date rape and the fear of AIDS.

Maybe, though, such women simply want to have their cake and eat it: to enjoy sexual freedom while disclaiming responsibility for their own conduct. For it's not clear that they do understand the harm their "emancipation" is undoubtedly doing to them. Like Wendy Shalit and others, Ms. Decter is right to note that women have torn up their trump card. They have forgotten that they need to induce men to stay with them. Sexual commitment, after all, is based on a bargain: Men stick around in return for sexual fidelity and home comforts. Why on earth should they commit themselves to women who veer dizzyingly between offering oral sex and screaming date rape?

As Ms. Decter understood from the start, far from being about the emancipation of women, modern feminism is about the emancipation from women. It is a revolt against motherhood and womanhood itself. What has now become clear is that women are the losers in this process -- and so is everyone else. It is only former liberal idealists like Ms. Decter who can understand the depth of the liberal betrayal on issues like this, and the harm that is its legacy.