Though a classic piece of Friedan bravado, the protest was a bit of a jaw-dropper; a self-described "ham," Friedan is notorious for being one of feminism's biggest microphone hogs. The caller's lament, however, is far from new. Feminists have a long and rich history of disparaging the media's interest in "stars," as the early radical women's liberation groups scornfully dubbed any woman who garnered too much attention. The point was supposed to be the ideas, the analysis (arrived at collectively, of course), the action called for, not the spokeswoman: the message, not the messenger.

An odd position, when you consider that this is the movement that came up with the slogan "the personal is the political." Now that feminism's great "Second Wave" of the '60s and '70s is a good 25 years past, and its veterans and chroniclers are setting down records of its history with the benefit of perspective, the issue of "personality" remains a tricky one. More's the pity because no political movement of the past century was so bursting with fascinating, combative, maddening and outrageous characters. Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Shulamith Firestone, Flo Kennedy, Susan Brownmiller, Robin Morgan, Rita Mae Brown and the profoundly wacky Ti-Grace Atkinson: There's raw material here for a half dozen Verdi operas and at least a couple of Shakespearean plays.

In recent years, some feminists, like Friedan, have written accounts of their experiences intending to counteract other writers' less than flattering versions of the same events. Still others, such as Ruth Rosen ("The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America") and Brownmiller ("In Our Time"), have written histories in order to preserve a vanishing body of memories or to inform younger generations whose ignorance astonishes them.

It shouldn't. The women's movement hasn't metamorphosed into a pop cultural-historical artifact the way the civil rights movement has, by becoming the subject of "landmark" TV documentaries, approved high school curricula, recognized holidays and earnest issue-oriented movies, even though its influence has been at least as widespread. Perhaps that's because Americans are still so ambivalent about the changes it prompted and the intimate battles it enjoined (particularly when it comes to the murky matter of who, exactly, were the bad guys). Or perhaps it's because feminism has obtained the reputation of being dour, prissy and, worst of all, dissembling when it comes to admitting the complexities of gender relations and human character.

For this last reason, I suspect, few people realize how immensely entertaining histories of Second Wave feminism can be -- though often it's the least "respectable" books that are the most fun. Rosen's history, published this March, and Flora Davis' 1991 volume, "Moving the Mountain: The Women's Movement in America Since 1960," are worthy and valuable books written by professional historians, but it was Marcia Cohen's "The Sisterhood: The True Story of the Women Who Changed the World" (1988), a breathless and ever-so-slightly trashy account of the lives of feminism's movers and shakers, that had me avidly turning pages.

Judith Hennessee's 1999 biography "Betty Friedan: Her Life" and Sydney Ladensohn Stern's equally unauthorized "Gloria Steinem: Her Passion, Politics, and Mystique" (1997) make for somewhat less guilty pleasure, while the unreflective "Life So Far" offers readers the chance to witness Friedan explaining -- or more often ignoring -- her more egregious episodes of bad behavior. (When Betty was bad, she was horrid.) And as for Christine Wallace's 1999 biography "Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew," well, lay in a supply of ice cream, pull up the quilt and get ready for an all-nighter.

What makes these books so juicy, however, is their inclusion of exactly those elements -- conflict and "personalities" -- that feminists wanted (and probably still want) to erase from the movement's public image. Their reasons? The most radical activists (who often refused to talk to male journalists, or any journalists at all) believed that they needed to protect some members from feeling overshadowed by others and to give everyone a chance in the spotlight, but most feminists seemed to feel that a focus on visible spokeswomen gave insufficient credit to the grass roots and in some way trivialized the movement. Men, they retorted, would never be subjected to this kind of attention.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"