As the new millennium approaches, a proliferation of books seeking to redefine feminism have hit the shelves. If a new generation of women are looking for an ideology or a movement which will point a way forward, they will not find it in either of these books. They are more likely to feel totally confused. Not only do they send out different messages, but the collection of essays in all the books contradict each other.

"The personal is still political"

I don't want to have my private life "policed by feminism". Yet I want to enjoy a relationship with a man , wear make-up, dress in short skirts and high heels without feeling that I am betraying the struggle for equal rights.

Women today are led to believe that anything goes: that wearing a frilly dress is reclaiming the right to be feminine, that laughing at sexist jokes is ironic proof of how far we've come, that plastic surgery is fine because it makes you feel good. But try asking for equal pay while wearing a baby-doll frock! The personal-is-political was never meant to be a prescription of how to live your life... what it was really meant to do was create an awareness of how our personal lives are ruled by political factors. Of how the fact that women were not economically and politically equal to men meant that their relationships with men were unequal too.

The mainstream media continue to concentrate on lifestyle matters. Women's issues are reduced to relationships, the laments of single women, body image, holistic medicine and therapy. Feminism is thus bled of its radical social or political agenda, and I for one am sick of it.

To women on or below the breadline, whose main problems are shopping for food or watching out for discarded needles in their children's play areas, those feminists who focus on the personal, the mystical, the psychological and, yes, the sexual aspects of feminism might as well be staring up their own fannies without a speculum... It is difficult to see what feminism can do when what is needed is money, jobs, job training, housing, educational opportunity etc, I mean lets get real here! Hopefully things will change for the better when Bush and the neocons go bye bye!