Ten thousand delusions: Judy Rebick's memoirs.

Judy Rebick feels unappreciated. Which may be why she has written Ten Thousand Roses, an oral history of the Canadian feminist movement as told by over one hundred activists who organized, protested, and struggled for change.

The book is a lament to all those second and third generation Canadian women so apparently indifferent to the achievements of the sisterhood and a reminder of why they should be grateful.

"See what we did for you?" Rebick seems to say. "Legalized abortion, pay equity, employment equity, day care, you think that came easy? Why, without us, you'd still be pushing baby carriages in High Park."

Perhaps, but given their so-called "achievements," how bad would that be?

For Rebick, postwar feminism began in the early 1960s with Betty Friedan's bestselling book The Feminine Mystique which described at length "the problem with no name," that is, the profound dissatisfaction many women were feeling about their day-to-day lives which often involved staying at home with children. The answer, they imagined, was a career.

"I sometimes think that a career to a woman is like fooling around is to a man," says Cindy Sonheim, the promiscuous heroine of the film comedy Love at First Bite." It's a lot of fun ... until the right person comes along."

Life being what it is, however, that much-longed-for Hollywood-inspired romance usually ends in disappointment, leaving women like Cindy bored, depressed and confused.

"Part of me wants to be independent," muses Cindy on her dilemma as an I-Want-It-All woman. "Part of me wants to be taken care of, part of me would like to be a wife and a mother, ... and part of me thinks I'm just like an expensive whore who'd sell anything for $1000 a day."

Count Dracula, her would-be lover, is unsympathetic.

"Do you know how many women had a nervous breakdown in the fourteenth century?" he fumes. "Three!"

That sort of reality check would never have satisfied Friedan or Rebick or any other feminist who imagined her unhappiness could be changed by overturning the natural law.

Thus it followed that, as Rebick's angry women marched, the blood-red tide of abortion rose exponentially. The marital bed, the cradle and the nursery were all but abandoned, and society as we knew it was almost wholly dismantled. Today, single-parent families abound, male authority figures have disappeared. Parents never see their children who are raised in daycare and by TV. The authority of teachers has been fatally undermined and the gospel of "self-esteem" flourishes, further ruining kids with secularist mantras about the importance of their feelings while encouraging them to indulge their slightest whim.

No surprise then that by the time the "wanted" child reaches adolescence, the jaws of hell are wide open.

None of this appears on Rebick's screen, of course.

Instead, the former head of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women (NAC) points to the Montreal massacre of 14 female engineering students by Marc Lepine in December 1989 as proof of just the sort of misogyny the sisterhood has been fighting.

But Rebick's optics are wrong.

Lepine was a deeply disturbed individual but might he not also be seen as one of feminism's victims, of which there are many?

Which may be why Rebick and her cohorts are feeling so ignored as they wax nostalgic for their glory days which, as itemised in her book, show them to have been on the wrong side of every issue.

"We went in a single generation from the highest birth rate, the highest rate of weddings, one of the highest rates of religious practice in North America to the lowest," writes filmmaker Monique Simard, referring to Quebec's Quiet Revolution. "A lot of people were damaged, not knowing exactly where to go."

This is progress? With the traditional family now in tatters, why should today's young women be grateful?

Their "quality of life" is grim indeed, their chances for true happiness more remote than ever. Given the holocaust of abortion in Canada, they are fortunate to have been born at all. Once here, they face a childhood of emotional and moral neglect, a soul-destroying culture promising credit-card nirvanah, a careerist promise of being worked into an early grave and the prospect of suffering legalised abuse--from the "right" to abort to the "right" to be sexually used by men and then abandoned. All in the name of self-fulfillment.

Some liberation!

With no one sending flowers anymore, it never seems to have occurred to Rebick or her cohorts that they, who so contemptuously decried the lot of their own mothers, should meet the same fate from subsequent generations of women now saddled with the miserable consequences of their excesses.

The evidence is in the daily headlines. Take March 23, 2005. "Teen kills grandparents, seven others" screams the headline, followed by this story: "Authorities are trying to determine what caused a teenager to gun down his grandfather, put on the man's police-issue belt and bulletproof vest, and drive his marked squad car to a high school, where he began shooting his classmates at will."

This in a week of news that included stories on same-sex marriage, the failure to reinsert Terri Shiavo's feeding tube and a plan to confer a Doctor of Laws degree on Dr Henry Morgentaler.

But hold on. There was a bright spot: a warm tribute in The Spectator devoted to one of its columnists who died the week before. Alice Thomas Ellis was a convert who made Catholicism the centre of her life. For her notions of heaven on earth, Utopian or otherwise, were rubbish. "There is no guarantee of happiness in this life," she told a friend. "Absolutely none."

Nor did she have time for "peace 'n justice" Catholicism. "I sometimes think that the Devil lives in Islington and reads The Tablet," she said of the archly progressive Catholic magazine shortly before her death. "But I may be doing him an injustice."

Which brings me to her greatest statement ever.

When asked what the most important event in women's history was, she replied: "The Annunciation."

Between that eternal reality and the delusions of feminism lies an unbridgable chasm.

Paula Adamick is a journalist who writes from London, England, where she publishes the monthly Canada Post.