ON the face of it, today's women are better off as a result of feminism. Girls achieve more than boys at school and women are rapidly breaking through glass ceilings (successfully climbing the executive ladder) in many businesses.
The only trouble is that a 25-year-old woman today is 3-to-10 times more likely to be depressed than one in 1950. What went wrong was that American capitalism hijacked feminism and converted it into a method for making profits rather than for liberating women to think and act for themselves.
The dark reality is this: Three-quarters of working women's jobs are low income, low skill and low status.
Bright, attractive, public school and Oxford and Cambridge graduates take glamorous, well-paid jobs in the media or the financial district.
But the reality of the struggle to the top of business, newspapers or television is one of dirty office politics and working ridiculous hours to make other people rich.
The sense that such women have of life being a horrible cheat is, if anything, even stronger than that felt by their less privileged sisters. Cheated into working after school, they find themselves on a treadmill (going round and round) in their 20s.
When Bridget Jones (the heroine of "Bridget Jones' Diary", who is a 30-something single woman) finally gets off the treadmill in her 30s to make babies, her day is taken up with the squealing of infants — one of the most despised of roles.
She looks in the mirror and, to a horrifying extent, sees her mother — the woman who encouraged her to study and work in order to take advantage of the new opportunities that previous generations did not have.
It is not hard to see how women who have been through all this might be just a little bit angry. And, this is a society where the twisting of feminism's goals and career dreams has contributed to the increasing number of divorces.