Not again! was my first response to a new posting on the culturally sophisticated website integralnaked.org. There, right before my eyes, was integral philosopher Ken Wilber responding to—and asking—the question: “Where are the integral women?” Wilber's response sent me reeling: after acknowledging a dearth of women in the up-and-coming integral scene, he explained that he and his colleagues were thinking of ways to take affirmative action to attract more women. Affirmative action for the cultural frontier?!

How on earth did this happen? I wanted to know. Don't tell me we're once again playing catch-up. In the last four hundred years, elite women in Western culture have taken a flying leap out of slavery and servitude to independence and self-assertion. So this is a disturbing turn of events—and somewhat confusing. Haven't women been leading a cultural revolution? Yes, it's true. But while we've been working toward building a society in partnership with men, we seem to have missed the start of something that may well be the next revolution. New ways of thinking are arising to meet the chaos and conflict of our globalizing world, sometimes called “integral” à la Wilber and others, or “second tier” by those in the know about Spiral Dynamics, or “big history,” or simply “post-postmodernism.” And with very few exceptions, the leading proponents of these new views have one noticeable characteristic in common: they are all men. So the question certainly is: Where are we women? And where do we go from here?

A scant forty years ago, women were making history, pushing the leading edge of Western culture from the modern era into the postmodern. The rapidly rising tide of a new consciousness swept through the young women of the New Left, lifting the most courageous out of the “sea of misogyny” that characterized even the most progressive politics, opening their eyes and hearts to the radical possibility of true equality between women and men. Small groups of women, fresh from the civil rights movement, angered by Vietnam, and ridiculed for their passionate intelligence, began to speak with each other about what had theretofore been unnoticed and unspeakable. Something went “click”—as they described it—and a feminist consciousness sparked into life. The social and legal structures that kept hierarchies of dominance and privilege in place suddenly became visible. In pockets across the United States and Europe, women gathered, six, twelve, a couple dozen at a time. A phone call from one woman to a friend in another city would ignite the flame. “News that women were organizing spread . . . like a chain reaction,” says political scientist Jo Freeman. The span of two or three years saw the creation of the National Organization for Women, Redstockings, New York Radical Women, Seattle Radical Women, Cell 16, the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, Bread and Roses, WITCH (Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), and the Female Liberation Front, to name just a few.

Courting outrage, these radical women broke boundaries, taboos, laws, and habits at every turn. Women's minds burst out of the corseted confines of traditional femininity. “The joy of feminism, for those who felt it, often had spiritual proportions,” write Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow in their introduction to The Feminist Memoir Project. “Like a conversion experience—'the scales dropped from my eyes; I saw all things new.' One's inabilities and blockages, resentments, hidden griefs, all the paraphernalia and picturesque qualities of 'girlhood' and 'womanhood' suddenly were ripped open, suddenly fell apart. And 'all things'—from the most mundane and habitual to the most enormous—seemed changed.” In just one afternoon of street protest in 1967, women overturned the long-standing policy of the New York Times to segregate “help wanted” ads by sex, with most major city dailies following shortly thereafter. Like a tidal wave, this new consciousness lifted the institutions of Western culture—marriage, family, work—and dropped them, teetering, on a higher ground.

Fast-forward to the present: the once-outrageous notion that women and men are, or should be, social, economic, and political equals has become the accepted view of the majority, even in the increasingly reactionary U.S. This is an enormous sea change. A 2003 Ms. Magazine poll showed that seventy-five percent of women and seventy-six percent of men surveyed felt that “feminists and the women's movement have been helpful to them”; eighty percent of those surveyed saw the women's movement as “the moving force behind” such positive social changes as “women's greater job opportunities, higher education levels, changes in the workplace that allow combining jobs with families, and better pay.” And yet, after such stunningly rapid change, the final goal of true equity and partnership evades us. On the most basic indicator of economic equality—median wages—women earn seventy-five cents for each dollar that a man with the same experience earns for the same work. Women are still rarely seen in the highest echelons of power in business or politics. And most married working women with children will tell you that they're not only bringing home the bacon—they're frying it, serving it, and then cleaning up.

The traditional feminist arguments about the source of these differences between women's and men's lives are wearing thin. To continue to blame structural biases and inequities doesn't seem to be enough. There's something deeper at work. In fact, if we listen to teenage girls' expectations and aspirations for their lives, we can hear just how deep these differences run. Girls give us a view of life from the upcoming generation, shaped by what has gone before, desirous of more, and unfettered by the practical realities that limit a life. In a 2002 survey of teens by The Committee of 200 and Simmons College School of Management, there is significant parity in girls' and boys' desire for enjoyable and interesting work, respect, and a “balanced life.” Only three percent of girls and two percent of boys don't think that they will need to support themselves financially. But there are critical differences. Girls place a higher priority than boys on work that involves “helping others and making the world a better place.” And even though girls and boys in high school “are equally likely to be leaders of their clubs and teams” and “rate themselves similarly on leadership skills,” girls “are less likely than boys to aspire to leadership positions in their future careers.” Thus, the study showed that while a majority of girls want to change the world, they don't want to take responsibility to lead or to have authority over others in order to do so. When the question of hierarchy enters into the domain of relationship, girls—and, I submit, their mothers and older sisters—balk.

This raises a serious question: Are the differences in men's and women's relationship to hierarchical power hard-wired into us? It's increasingly popular to assume so. And it may well be true. But before we use this evidence to drop the project of achieving a radical and liberated equality between women and men, I want to slow down. There is something that came alive at the birth of the movement for women's liberation in the sixties that points to a potential so powerful that it calls into question everything that we think we know about the female gender. In the forward momentum of that fresh wave of radical feminist consciousness, women were the vehicles for an almost irresistible impulse to reach higher, to break free, to rise up. “It came at us full tide and from all sides and swept our lives into action, sudden meaning, a transforming vitality, a consuming energy that is still unspent,” Kate Millett recalls. The light of this new consciousness shone on everything in women's lives, from shaving one's legs to the institution of marriage to the workings of industries (including pornography, women's magazines, and fashion) that trained women to walk the narrow path of femininity in high heels. Women were lifted into leadership despite themselves. “To give expressive leadership is exhilarating, draining, and terrifying,” explains Meredith Tax, cofounder of Bread and Roses. “It is not just self-expression; it is letting the spirit speak through you. At certain historical moments when change is possible, collective energy fills the air like static electricity, shooting out sparks.”

These women celebrated sisterhood. “To be a feminist in the early seventies—bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” writes Vivian Gornick. “Not an I-love-you in the world could touch it. There was no other place to be, except with each other.” Ignoring their gender's long history of competition and the very real differences between them, for a glorious evolutionary moment these outrageous and outraged pioneers created an ideal of women-as-sisters, giving them ground beneath their feet as they attempted to leap beyond the safety of homebound relationships into something unknown. The ideal of women united in shared struggle kept them together as they undertook the deliberate act of changing women's consciousness. In small groups, they engaged in an experiment in evolution called “consciousness raising,” or CR. Reaching to see every aspect of their personal experience as the product of a social, political, and economic system that had primarily benefited men, they coined the slogan “the personal is political.” This profoundly impersonal perspective on their personal fears, dreams, and desires created a seismic shift in the consciousness of woman—releasing a rage for change. “We expressed individual rage, but on behalf of a more communal political and economic radicalism than is imaginable now,” says Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, of New York Radical Women and Redstockings. “The aim was to challenge the systems through which the classifications of 'masculine' and 'feminine' are constructed and maintained. . . . We downplayed the role of the individual. We never dreamed sexism could be solved by changing one man or one woman.”

Yet this updraft of spirit, this collective move toward liberating the consciousness of woman, didn't last. So much was happening at once that it is hard to pinpoint an exact cause. One factor surely had to do with the vociferousness of men's response. To the women's utter surprise and shock, their demand for “personhood and dignity” was met by “violence and hatred” from their husbands, lovers, colleagues, and peers, “men who,” as Dana Densmore recounts, “until then appeared normal.” Densmore, one of the founders of an early feminist journal called No More Fun & Games, says, “We felt we were girding for an apocalypse in male-female relations.” For some, this threat proved to be too much. Another factor had to do with women themselves. The promise of sisterhood proved to be elusive. Black women wanted to fight for racial equality beside their brothers—not for gender equality beside white women with whom they shared no positive history and whom they had little reason to trust. Radical lesbians charged that true liberation meant freedom from heterosexuality. Differences along the lines of race, class, and sexuality began to rip the movement apart. And something more sinister began to happen. Conflicts erupted that rarely came to any positive resolution. Groups splintered, often shunning each other. And those women who were seen as leaders—the highest-achieving, most competent, and most outspoken—were “trashed” and purged from the movement. “Sisterhood is powerful,” Ti-Grace Atkinson is credited with saying. “It kills sisters.” The movement ate its leaders. In eliminating those women who were pushing the edge, the upward surge of woman rising slowed almost to a halt. This dark unsisterhood has little to do with helping or caring for others—at least not other women. Differences are tolerated as long as they make no difference—in other words, as long as they do not reveal differences in power, ability, or status. And power operates covertly: unacknowledged rather than unused.

Every woman who has lived through seventh grade has in some way experienced these frightening dynamics that enforce a profound and perhaps even pre-rational conformity between women. Stay within the bounds and you can find care, connection, and mutuality. Push beyond and . . . well, watch your back. According to the teen girls with whom I work, this inclusion-exclusion drama that we first played out in girlhood hasn't really changed. No wonder. The roots of this behavior go further back than seventh grade or the sixties. Research on female primates suggests that many of our evolutionary foresisters spend their time grooming others to avoid being picked on and holding grudges against each other that make reconciliation impossible, all to gain an advantage in sexual reproduction.

The evidence seems to be mounting to support the view that women are deeply driven not to lead—so much so that we will stop other women from leading. It seems, in fact, to be not simply an individual preference but a collective one that dates back to the origins of the human species. But I would argue that we can learn something from what happened in the women's movement that could be even more powerful than the momentum of a million years of competition between women to secure a mate. The women's liberation movement had an effect so far beyond those relatively few heroic women who were directly involved. Why? Because they were working to change consciousness itself. Women, compelled to change themselves and the world, decided to evolve consciously for the sake of freedom and equality. And something was liberated that transformed almost every aspect of social life. Yes, we have settled back in, created a new status quo that falls short of full equality and partnership between the sexes. However, it was an extraordinary first step: an attempt to create systemic change at a scale that had never happened before—led by women. We faltered in leaping further because the ideology of the time said that all differences between the sexes came from cultural conditioning, which could be changed. But in fact, there was something more fundamental, more primitive, operating in us at an instinctual level. A deeply rooted, biologically driven impulse to compete against each other not only destroyed the movement's leadership, but it sabotaged sisterhood—and any hope for further collective transformation.

Radical sisterhood was necessary to create a collective change in consciousness. The next step for women's liberation would have been to explore those primitive dynamics of competition and betrayal together. But at the time, this must have been unthinkable. Women were already risking so much, in terms of their relationships with men and all that had given them any kind of security in the world. This radical bid for both autonomy and equality “couldn't last,” notes Wendy Kaminer in her incisive 1993 Atlantic Monthly essay “Feminism's Identity Crisis.” Why? “It was profoundly disruptive for women as well as men. By questioning long-cherished notions about sex, it posed unsettling questions about selfhood. It challenged men and women to shape their own identities without resort to stereotypes. It posed particular existential challenges to women who were accustomed to knowing themselves through the web of familial relations.” Questioning the most fundamental conditioning in ourselves, without the ground of real sisterhood, was too overwhelming. We pulled back. And the wave of transformation that women had unleashed began to lap more and more gently at the shores of the status quo.

The slogan “the personal is political” lost its edge. A new “feminine feminism” became popular, one that celebrated rather than challenged our traditional caretaking roles. By placing the greatest value on our capacity to care, the entire momentum of the movement shifted inward—focusing on women's personal qualities rather than on the sociopolitical mechanisms that imprisoned our minds and spirits. No longer meeting others in the positive intent to raise consciousness, each woman was left on her own to deal with the victimizing forces of oppression and limitation. This feminine feminism created another kind of sisterhood; one not born of shared struggle but rooted in the age-old collusive bond between women—our sense of emotional and moral superiority to men. In this collusive sisterhood, heterosexual women's primary identity involves caring for men and children, and our relationships with other women are too often used to let off steam or kvetch. This sisterhood is two-faced: smiling as the good girl who is selfless and caring when she gets what she wants, but underneath simmering with rage as the angry victim when she doesn't. No longer calling women to rise up in rebellion, this new feminine feminism invited women to lie down—on the therapist's couch. The vertical movement of a new consciousness became dispersed in the self-reflective world of the postmodern self.

Feminism opened the door to untold choices for women, and for men. This was the postmodern revolution: a fracturing of the universal into the particular, the dissolution of Truth into truths, the breaking down of absolutes into relatives, and the one-way-to-be-a-woman into the many. In today's “whatever” world of instant celebrity and a dizzying array of consumer goods catering to every desire, young women find themselves in a free-for-all that is touted as freedom. And this has given rise to the latest incarnation of feminism. “Personal choice seems to be the only [feminist] value,” writes Nation columnist Katha Pollitt. “There are no politics, and no society.” This generation has adopted the key takeaways from the emerging field of evolutionary psychology: women manipulate to get power and seek status through powerful men. Armed with the last decade's research and six years of Sex and the City, young feministas have turned their backs on the good-girl victim to adopt her mirror image: the bad-girl temptress. Sexuality is the coin of the realm for the self-proclaimed “girlie feminists” of Gen X and Gen Y. However, the embrace of sexuality as a source of individual power is ironically just as traditional and limited a landscape for a woman's life as that of the good and caring woman. Both good-girl and bad-girlie feminism are related to our ancestral past, our primate desires to reproduce. Thus, neither liberates us from the deepest part of our conditioning so that we can find new ways of being powerful in the world.

So thank you, Ken Wilber, for raising the question: Where are the women? The female half of the leading edge cannot opt out of the further shift in consciousness that is so desperately needed to meet the crises of our globalizing world. Too many of us progressive women have been seduced by the endless stimulation of the contemporary social scene, held captive by our own primitive desires for sex or safety, and are still fearfully avoidant of the deadly competition that blocks us from being a collective force for change. It's a truism that those who have benefited most from an evolutionary advance are most reluctant to move forward because it requires moving beyond what has been to their advantage. Women benefited immeasurably from this last shift in consciousness. And now we are stuck in the postmodern status quo—too nice or too infatuated with our own desires and feelings to reach beyond it. We don't want to reckon with the fact that, on this planet, the gift of choice is not a narcissistic entitlement to pleasure but a responsibility through which we meet the increasingly high stakes of being human.

Let me ask the question anew: Where are the women who want to evolve consciousness? Who want to find out what it means to be women, not good girls or bad girlies? Who will take the hard-won lessons of feminism's last forty years and consciously choose to evolve, to once again risk placing our hearts in each other's hands and dare to lead? Where are those who will grapple with our primitive drive to compete with each other so that we can realize a higher collective potential? This is what faces us, as women and as human beings. It's a choice that each of us has to reckon with. Only then can we create the new world that has always been the promise of women's liberation.