Women have taken this lesson to heart. To prove our femininity and avoid the slings and arrows of antifeminism, we have learned to assure the world that while we may have more mastery of our lives, we've balanced it with more misery. We are careful to stress that we are working only because we have to, not because we might also take pleasure from our jobs.

Sexuality for women comes with the same warning: If you have sex and enjoy it, prepare to face the consequences. That may be why many who favor a ban on abortion are willing to look the other way when the woman in question has been raped or is the victim of incest; she doesn't need to be punished because she hasn't gotten any pleasure out of the encounter.

Enthusiastic activism is cast in the same dim light as sexual activity. Indeed, the phrase "public woman" has traditionally meant a prostitute; the lady of the evening and the lady of social advocacy often seem interchangeable in society's eyes. Victorian male pundits raged against the "whorish" behavior of the decidedly unwhorish women of the era who were reformers and suffragists. In his 1844 address to the Young Ladies' Institute of Pittsfield, Mass., William Buell Sprague intoned that he would rather his daughter join a nunnery than go "up and down the world haranguing promiscuous assemblies."

The connection between sexual and political pleasure explains one of the more bizarre slips of the tongue by a media man contemplating the Hillary Threat. In a "Nightline" report this fall about the First Lady's proper "role," Ted Koppel asked R. Emmett Tyrell, editor of The American Spectator, "What would you do with [ Ms. Clinton ] , put her in a convent for the next four years?"

Eleanor Roosevelt noted that women could be either biblical "Marthas" or "Marys." Take the part of the giggly party girl or assume the role of the dowdy activist. Mrs. Roosevelt cast her lot with the Marys. Historically, First Lady Marys have presented themselves as dour and self-denigrating. They have insisted their political activities were really a terrible burden -- a "splendid misery," as Abigail Adams put it.

The list of First Ladies who moaned about their ineptitude at public speaking is endless -- and the most adept moaned the loudest. Eleanor Roosevelt "never missed an opportunity to discount her influence," biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook writes, and she "was rarely direct or confrontational."

Hillary Clinton, however, is a Martha-Mary, an independent woman who has happily and openly ventured into the stream of public life. It's her refusal to play the penitent Mary that most enrages the antifeminist commentators. "There is no reason she ought to be forgiven, when she hasn't repented," fumed Daniel Wattenberg in The American Spectator.