Burrowing within.

Would you believe that at my corner newsstand--in the heart of Manhattan, where trees, not to mention privately owned gardens, are rare--there are no fewer than forty-one magazines devoted to houses, gardens, or some combination of the two? A close second--coming in at twenty-eight--are publications on pregnancy, child-birth, and parenting. This boom signals a widespread immersion with personal, private life--a trend that is puzzling, even troubling. The demographic these magazines target is the very baby-boom cohort for whom this kind of 1950s retreat to domesticity was anathema.

"The personal is political," cried the boomers in another decade, as they renounced the sheltered, politically blindered lifestyle of the suburban communities from which they had come, and headed for the streets to change the world. But here they are, back in the good old suburbs or working like mad to build their own little faux-suburban havens in the midst of a heartless urban world.

So why was I counting magazines about kids and houses, far to the rear of my usual periodical browsing grounds? On a trendsetter's tip from The New York Times business section, I was checking out the premier edition of the new House and Garden--a staple in my own childhood home. The old House and Garden went under several years ago, as fewer and fewer women had the time or the inclination to follow subtle developments in the world of window treatment and flower arranging. According to the Times, however, it was set to reemerge, with a brand new updated-for-the-nineties look and focus, and a splash of celebratory hoopla. Conde Nast's decision to bring the old girl back was based on a fascinating bit of marketing research on the baby-boom generation and its current preoccupations. According to a study conducted by Yankelovich Partners. homes--and especially gardens--have suddenly emerged as "the chic new playgrounds of the thirty-to-forty-nine-year-old demographic segment, of whom no less than 65 percent said all or most of their satisfaction came from home and family these days. Quite a switch from the old days on the barricades and picket lines.

A casual glance at the classy first issue of House and Garden quickly reveals how seriously the editors have taken this information and its cultural and political implications. Not only is the concern for public life denigrated, there is a distinct emphasis on soft-focus nostalgia for the very suburban coziness, privacy, and social isolation this generation so militantly repudiated in the old days.

The issue is filled with beautifully written and laid-out pieces harking back to the oft-denigrated 1950s with a newfound revisionist respect verging on reverence. An article on picture windows, for example, waxes eloquent on the solid "cultural values" of the 1950s. "The unfenced front lawn and the unmullioned picture window were twin flags of allegiance to the suburban codes of like-mindedness and nuclear normalcy," writes author Michael Pollan proudly. "The family that flew them both was saying it had nothing to hide from its neighbors, that it led an inspection-worthy existence.... 'Behold this, our wonderful life! "'

There was a time when such prose would have sounded as offensive and inane to most baby boomers as it does to me. But those days, it seems, are gone. Marketing researchers, who know what's what, seem to believe that such blatantly smug isolationism and jingoism is just the brand of personal politics that will appeal to the newly familied and newly propertied boomers. And judging from the traffic at my local newsstand, they are right. The proprietor tells me that yes, indeed, home and-garden books are a growth industry. "I can't keep these things in stock, and there are new ones coming in every day," she marvels. "I wouldn't have believed it five years ago."

At which point I picked up a few more examples and leafed through them. Not surprisingly, they were all pretty much the same, whether they specialized in one area of the home--bathrooms or kitchens, for example--or covered the entire range of rooms, gardens, frontyards, and backyards. The prose that accompanied the elegant, upscale pictures was a marvel of self-conscious rationalization and justification. In the loftiest of tones, it attempted to place the self-absorption and self-satisfaction that the photos promoted in a context of enlightened cultural and historic pursuit. The introductory statement of House and Garden editor Dominique Browning was typical. "Sure, shopping and arranging and collecting (or hoarding) are materialistic pursuits," she grants, "but they are also connected to deeper passions.... They nurture our souls.... We burrow into coziness; we play with the cutting edges of light and metal and glass; we retreat into other centuries.... That's materialism in the service of history, a pretty grand idea."

The history Browning invokes is to be found not in books or documentaries or struggles, but rather in antique stores--where the things of earlier eras often commissioned for the private pleasure and comfort of the bygone upper class can be appropriated for one's own decorative use. The price for such treasures is hefty, of course. But then, one is buying not merely things, or even history, but rather the right to pluck historical objects from the very context that gave them social, historical, and political meaning and to redefine them as commodities, objects in the service of one's own political mission: to make a statement to one's neighbors about "this, our wonderful house!" and "this, our wonderful life!"

To be sure, these magazines do not entirely obscure or renounce politics, even political activism. No, no. Political "activists" who tend toward the mushy mainstream middle where ideology is less important than style and personality are just the kinds of subjects the upscale advertisers love. For example, American Express features married celebrity Bush adviser Mary Matalin and Clinton adviser James Carville--"political strategists, writers, lovebirds," as the copy reads--in a two-page ad that appears in most of the issues I scanned. The ad pictures them standing in their palatial country lawn--in front of a barn, no less--surrounded by the many pricey, trendy commodities their upper-range Amex credit limit has allowed them to "hoard." Lawn equipment, baby paraphernalia, gourmet-cooking necessities, a grand piano, and of course antiques are only a few of the items seen, and identified by brand name and source, on the lawn of chez Matalin-Carville, where the code to live by is the Amex slogan: "Cardmembers Go Shopping."

House and Garden isn't the first to cash in on the current interest in homes and gardens. Martha Stewart, for example has built a financial empire with her TV show--now broadcast twice daily on the Lifetime channel--and her own glitzy magazine, called Martha Stewart Living, which comes out bimonthly. Martha is the mistress of post feminist self-sufficiency and "empowerment," as demonstrated by her single-handed maintenance and control of every aspect of her three private estates--from garden to kitchen to dining room to home repairs. She is a formidable presence indeed. Without a man in sight--except an occasional hired hand--she works tirelessly and efficiently to accomplish, in half an hour, what most families of four would be unable to do in a month of commuter Sundays. No messy drippings or omelets gone off-orbit and onto the floor, a la Julia Child, for Martha. Without a hair out of place, or a stain to be found on her L.L. Bean workshirts, she shows us how to achieve our own private utopia on one plot of land.

Of course, you have to be able to devote full time to the enterprise. It's serious business to master the skills of cutting out stencils to paint lattice patterns on your garage walls or creating your own tool-carrying kit out of wood slats and coffee cans. (She has a ready supply of Chock Full o' Nuts, for the emergency moments when company arrives--horrors!-unannounced.)

And the dinner parties she manages! Everything, down to the elaborate centerpiece, is handmade for the occasion. Never mind the expense and time of hunting down the supplies and ingredients needed for such galas, or the trial-and-error practice sessions, which she doesn't need but you undoubtedly will. (Have you ever tried to create a perfect bouquet of garden flowers, stems, stamen, petals, buds, intricate color shadings and all, out of birthday-cake frosting? Trust me, you'd best begin six months before the big day.)

But even Martha wasn't the first to start this self-absorption craze. That honor goes to Jane Fonda, always ahead of the lifestyle curve, as revealed by her cutting-edge choices in marital partners--Roger Vadim when French New Wave cinema was hot; Tom Hayden for the radical years; and Ted Turner when corporate greed and excess became the preferred practice of the socially with-it. It was Jane, after all, who first sensed--and capitalized on, big time--the post-feminist shift from collectively changing the world, to "empowering" oneself, through the pursuit of a more manageable goal: the perfection of one's own physical being.

Fitness gurus have proliferated since Jane, and none has cashed in more cleverly on the contradictory post-feminist "personal-empowerment" thing than Susan Powter, named a year or two ago as one of Ms. magazine's Women of the Year. Her infomercials are known to insomniacs everywhere, and her best-selling fitness and nutrition books are not a bad read. They engagingly mix equal parts self-absorption and anti-corporate diatribe. Her latest book, Food, for example, handily exposes the sins and horrors of the food-packaging industries and gives useful advice on what to eat, where to find it, and how to prepare it--all admirably geared to getting us all to "take charge" (as the jargon now goes) of our own health. She spices it up with juicy tidbits about her disastrous life with her ax-husband, "the Prince," in case you want a bit of old-style consciousness-raising thrown in for good measure. The woman loves to dish, and exclamation points! are her favorite punctuation mark.

It's all very chatty and uplifting, and you won't waste your $5.98 if you buy it. Nutrition, exercise, and the desire to become physically strong and capable are not, after all, bad things. Nor, for that matter, is the desire to live in beautiful, comfortable surroundings. Along with a lot of other more ambitious, less self-centered goals, these things do improve our lives, and, in the case of fitness, comprise an important element in the overall feminist agenda of empowerment. But, like the focus on home improvement, the pursuit of bodily perfection as a major--indeed, for many these days, the exclusive--feminine-betterment project, points to a narcissistic narrowing of life vision that is depressing and even pathetic, especially for a generation that once had bigger fish to fry. As the title of a recent Style section piece in the Times, on the increase in cosmetic sales to aging female boomers, aptly put it, THEY ONCE WANTED TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD; Now THEY SETTLE FOR A PERSONAL MAKEOVER.

The problem--and this is true of virtually every one of the "personally empowering" books and TV shows and workout tapes and magazine articles, from the most politically offensive to the most "progressive"--is that the advice they offer is based on a disingenuous assumption: that all you need to perfect your life is your own good sense and energy and dedication. This is quite simply nonsense and always has been. Not only does this perspective dig you deeper and deeper into a hole of self-absorption, it also avoids all suggestion that there might be some factors in your current state of personal dis-ease--about whatever aspect of your life is bugging you--that not only are beyond your personal control but require collective, public action to remedy.

There is a class of people, less visible in media and marketing campaigns than the aging baby-boom cohort, that has never bought into the myth of individual isolated effort, although this class touts it loudly to the rest of us. These are the folks who own and control the transnational empires that produce all these books and TV shows and videos and magazines. The corporate owning class--of whom Fonda's hubby is an illustrious member--is forever merging and collectivizing, the better to enforce and profit from its power over the rest of us. Media conglomerates are the ones that publish the "self-empowering," self-sufficient Powter, Fonda, Stewart, and the rest.

Never mind what the gurus tell you. The real power resides with Time-Warner and Disney/ABC and the like, who reap most of the profits from all this stuff. And it's not just media that are merging these days. With the move to managed care, the health-care industry itself is going through a series of mergers, as hospitals join forces, consolidate their power, and fire their now superfluous staffs.

So it goes across the corporate board. For as these guys know--although they aren't publishing many books that say so--real power does not come from staying home to work our abs or perfect our petunias.

Elayne Rapping, most recently the author of "The Culture of Recovery" (Beacon), appears in this space every other month.