Three Faces of Eve.

Sex and Power, by Susan Estrich (Riverhead, 287 pp., $24.95)

Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, by bell hooks (South End, 123 pp., $12)

Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Farrar, Straus, 240 pp., $15)

To be a feminist these days, apparently, is to feel deeply stigmatized: Few young women call themselves feminists, and the meaning of the word itself appears in dispute and flux. What do feminists want? Why does one of the most powerful and successful social movements in this country's history appear to have no second act? Three new books, each representing a different face of contemporary feminism, attempt to explain the decline and to jump-start feminism's renewal as a mass movement.

Susan Estrich is a power feminist, preoccupied with moving more women into the upper echelons of business and politics. A professor at USC Law School who headed Michael Dukakis's 1988 presidential campaign, she is an expert on sexual-harassment law, as well as a pundit and talking head. Part of the aging Second Wave of feminists who transformed America in the early '70s, Estrich is old enough to have been the first female president of the Harvard Law Review and head of the National Organization for Women's first task force on employment discrimination; yet still young enough, as she sourly notes, to benefit from "legs almost as good as those of the twenty- and thirty-something blondes with whom I'm usually paired" on television.

For those who may have wondered how feminists could support Anita Hill and not Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, or Kathleen Willey, Estrich offers the following casuistical primer: First, throw in the towel on Anita Hill. Hill's charges, even if true, "only proved that Thomas was crude, not that he was a lawbreaker, or morally unqualified to serve." Next, claim that your abandonment of Paula Jones et al. was justified by "loyalty" or "standing by people when they're in trouble, when they need you, because they need you." In other words, loyalty to the powerful man who is able to help you politically trumps loyalty to the not-powerful woman accusing him of sexual abuse. Finally, she says, Bill Clinton was "wrongly accused." Why won't she believe Jones, Willey, or Juanita Broaddrick? "Bill Clinton doesn't need to do that," since there are "still millions of women in this country who would have happily traded places with Monica." Guys with wives or girlfriends (or especially both simultaneously), if President of the United States, pro-abortion, and a friend of Susan's, cannot commit "real rape."

This is a feminist defense? Trust Bill Clinton to knock feminist leaders off the moral high ground and back in their place-as members of the Democratic ladies' auxiliary.

For Estrich, the bigger problem is that it's lonely at the top. Few women have followed her trail. Those who preceded her don't use their power in behalf of other women, and those who came after don't seem so interested in power: "Younger women, looking at the sacrifices made by women of my generation to make partner and get ahead, increasingly want none of it." She flirts with a feminism that is not constructed according to "boys' rules that say that career matters more than family, that success is measured in partnerships and titles." But motherhood doesn't need defenders, she concludes, while female ambition does: There are but 63 women among the top 2,500 earners in the country, and only three Fortune 500 companies are run by women. "Dropping out, pulling back, letting niceness get the best of you, not asking for enough, not pushing hard enough, is also a selfish decision, from the collective perspective of feminism," chides Estrich. "It negatively affects other women. It retards change." Seek power where men do, Estrich seems to be saying, even if you don't want it, for the sake of those who come next, even if they don't want it. Estrich's formula for the rebirth of feminism? Sisters: Help Rich Women Sit on More Corporate Boards! Hardly the stuff of a mass political movement.

Which is exactly bell hooks's complaint. An unreconstructed black radical feminist, hooks (who insists on the lowercase letters) has nothing but disdain for "reformists" like Estrich who sought only to claim the "class privilege" their brothers enjoyed. "While it was in the interest of mainstream white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to suppress visionary feminist thinking . . . reformist feminists were also eager to silence these forces. Reformist feminism became their route to class mobility." hooks is equally disdainful of what she calls "lifestyle feminism," in which "the politics was slowly removed from feminism." I wish I could tell you in more detail what hooks's revolution might look like, but in 123 pages she never gets around to explaining what "ending sexist oppression" means, aside from abortion on demand and contraceptives for all. Equally hard to explain is her naive idea that all that prevents the triumph of radical feminism is bad marketing: "Let's start over. Let's have T-shirts and bumper stickers and postcards and hip-hop music, television and radio commercials, ads everywhere and billboards, and all manner of printed material that tells the world . . . that feminism is a movement to end sexist oppression."

In contrast, Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, two hip "Third Wave" feminists, seek to bridge the generation gap between the aging feminists who changed America and an emerging brand of youthful feminism that "wants its own institutions and a right to its own attitudes" including "porn, sexual aggressiveness, and remaining single and childless until pretty late in life."

Here's their "manifesta": Have all-female dinner parties, grouse about men who give you "STDs" (sexually transmitted diseases), demand the right to put on nail polish in corporate boardrooms, thrill to the beat of all-girl rock bands, and "recast the slut as rebel." Oh, and by the way, adopt their 13-point political agenda ranging from "equal access to health care, regardless of income" to "liberat[ing] adolescents from slut-bashing, listless educators, sexual harassment, and bullying at school."

Call it the Monica Lewinsky view of life. Baumgardner and Richards want to revel in their youthful sexual power with the approval and respect of their frowning feminist mothers. But what happens when that sexual power wanes? "Younger women certainly harbor a fear of being old ladies," the authors confess. Their solution? "As young women we have the opportunity-and the responsibility-to change the rules about who is sexy while we're still young and sexy and have the power to attribute sexiness to women of every age." What can one say to two young women, now already in their 30s, who remain so sexually ignorant? Fearful of adult responsibility, locked in an extended adolescence, these "girlie" feminists are a help to no one and a threat only to themselves.

There is indeed a "gendered" relationship between sex and power: Young women have a sexual power that men can only dream of. As Susan Estrich notes wryly, "No male interns, to my knowledge, have commanded the attention of the president's best friend." That kind of power can be used to channel lust into love, marriage, and children; to create a sphere of life not driven by market rules. But it is of relatively little use in the pursuit of power in politics or the corporation, where, as Estrich points out, more Monicas sleep their way to the bottom than to the top. An ambitious woman may use her sexual power as an entree to the game, but the women who get to the top tend to be those who know how to become "honorary men," valued for their skills and not as objects of male desire.

Feminist dreams of sexual sameness in the pursuit of power are doomed to be frustrated by another, subtler gender difference: For women, power is just power, it is not also sexual power. Henry Kissinger famously quipped, "Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac." But who believes that being appointed secretary of state enhanced Madeleine Albright's sex appeal? The psychic rewards of power differ for men and women.

These are not the sort of problems that can be solved by universal day care. And there is another problem that a new generation of feminists might ponder: how to reconcile the opportunities inherent in the creative explosion of capi- talism and individualism in the 21st century with women's desire to sustain the nonmarket realms of family and civil society. The feminist solution-open up men's jobs to women, untether sex and marriage-created new opportunities but also enormous new problems. Women raising children on their own have never been more vulnerable, and children in the age of allegedly independent women have never been more likely to be abandoned by their fathers. The broader issue of how to reconcile the material and emotional needs of women, children, men, and society is a problem that today's feminist "thinkers" have not yet dared to confront.