TO HELL WITH WELL BEHAVED

Recently a young mother asked for advice. What, she wanted to know, was she to do with a 7-year-old who was obstreperous, outspoken and inconveniently willful?

"Keep her," I replied.

Not helpful, but heartfelt. I have never been a fan of tractable women, having mostly experienced self-loathing when I tried to masquerade as one. Yet despite progress and change, liberation and self-examination, she has a way of resurrecting herself, the girl who sits with her hands folded, the woman who keeps her mouth shut.

WELL-BEHAVED WOMEN DON'T MAKE HISTORY, says the T shirt a college student sent me. It's been worn and washed so often, it's the texture of tissue.

Here she comes again, the fantasy and the reality. Hollywood has showcased her in a remake of "The Stepford Wives," in which judges, doctors and executives are remade by their husbands into Stay-at-Home Barbies, and apparently the most shocking thing a woman can admit is that she's more accomplished than her spouse. As punishment for this heresy, she must be transformed into a vacuous trophy wife. This is either satire or wish fulfillment, depending on how you see studio execs. Of course, there is the sub rosa suggestion abroad in the world that it is actually more soothing to shop and lunch than perform surgery. But only if you're a girl. When it is suggested that men might be happier playing golf full time than closing a deal, it is called downsizing and is a bad thing.

And in real life we have the Stepford voters, who are supposed to go along to get along, taking what they're given. At cause luncheons throughout the country, women who are interested and involved in politics talk quietly about how no one seems to be chasing their support. Then they sigh and move on. Which may be what John Kerry will be doing if he keeps this up.

The gender gap has been the most persistent voter phenomenon in presidential elections in the past 25 years. Men disproportionately support the Republicans and women the Democrats. Depending on whom you talk to, this is either because men are more interested in fiscal issues and women in social concerns or because men couldn't care less about sex discrimination, sexual harassment and unwanted pregnancies and women have to live with all three. Although not so the ruling Republicans would notice.

Many progressive Republican women--not an oxymoron--have become disenchanted with George W. Bush, who began his term by blocking aid to foreign family-planning groups and went on to allow his attorney general to try to rifle through the private medical files of women who had had abortions. A golden opportunity for the Democratic challenger thus presents itself. Poll figures suggest women are more inclined to see things his way to begin with. And if the pattern of the last election continues, female voters will participate at a higher rate than their male counterparts.

Which makes you wonder why the Kerry campaign seems to be taking women for granted. Where are the commercials that discuss the trifecta of child care, health care and jobs that constitutes real homeland security for women juggling work and family? What was the deal with that lame answer about appointing judges hostile to abortion rights as long as the vote on Roe wasn't too close? Where is the emphasis in events and in message? Just for a moment, pretend we're autoworkers!

More than 20 million unmarried American women, a group polls have found are more liberal than the average person, never even voted in the 2000 presidential election. They didn't think it was worth the effort. If he reached out to those women as aerobically as George W. Bush has to evangelicals, Kerry could be working on his Inaugural speech right now. Instead the Democrats seem to be figuring that most female voters have nowhere else to go.

They're counting on the gratitude factor. Democrats better than Republicans, 14 female senators better than none, America better than Afghanistan. Who thinks this way? Do prison reformers back off because at least in Attica inmates aren't stacked naked in a pile having their pictures taken? Here's an antidote to gratitude: the new interim Constitution for Iraq mandates 25 percent female representation in Parliament, which thoroughly trumps the United States on the democracy scale.

History tells us that women's equality is often becalmed by the press of outside events, that the movement that begat suffrage, for example, slowed in the face of the Great Depression. But I suspect that some of the slowdown is always about our fear of unfolding our hands and pointing a finger. In "Iron Jawed Angels," the recent HBO film about the suffrage movement, you saw young women who fought and kicked all the way to a prison cell. It's dispiriting to think that they were bloodied but unbowed so their granddaughters could halfheartedly vote for someone who assumes their support instead of seeking it. Those suffragists refused to be polite in demanding what they wanted or grateful for getting what they deserved. Works for me.