That well-worn feminist slogan "the personal is political" has taken on a new, exclusive meaning in the past several years. The personal, it seems, is all that's political anymore. Feminism--on college campuses, in the media and even in Washington--has become overwhelmingly personal at the expense of political action. While the economic chasm between rich and poor widens, why have many feminist sources repeatedly trumpeted Monica and masturbation, confessionals, Kegel exercises and Courtney Love?

The one big feminist political issue of the '90s was abortion. Feminists have obsessed over Roe v. Wade and championed Clinton and Gore for defending the right to choose. But at the same time, most women in this country have watched their ability to obtain an abortion disappear. As Miranda Kennedy points out in "Access Denied," 85 percent of counties nationwide have no abortion provider. It's still true that women with money can always access abortion, but women with less cannot.

From health care to the workplace, one important question has been lost: What about women who still lack the basic rights middle- and upper-class women now take for granted? In this issue, In These Times looks at a few of the problems facing those left behind in the feminist revolution. As Barbara Ehrenreich wrote last year in these pages, "While middle-class women gained MBAs, working-class women won the right to not be called 'honey'--and not a whole lot more than that."

It's time to move on to a "fourth wave" of feminism. It's goal should be to close the class gap and extend feminism's gains to all women. Old-time "women's lib" feminists and my generation's riot grrrls need to get busy and get radical. Instead of sticking up for politicians, we need to get in their faces and demand greater economic equality and, in turn, greater freedom for all women.

Kristin Kolb-Angelbeck

When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, feminists were wearing buttons emblazoned "59¢," reflecting how much women earned on average for every dollar earned by men. Today the buttons would read "72¢," a marker of progress and frustration on the road to gender equality on the job.

There is both statistical and anecdotal evidence that women, who now comprise nearly

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47 percent of the labor force, have made significant gains since the '60s, especially in earning advanced degrees and moving into professional fields. Despite continuing evidence of corporate glass ceilings, women have assumed more high-profile positions in management, politics, nonprofit administration and operation of their own businesses.

But a closer look shows that the gains have not been uniformly shared--and in most cases, the closing of the gender pay gap has been a hollow victory. The main reason why women on average earn a higher percentage of the average man's income today is simple: Over the past quarter century, men's wages have been falling sharply in real, inflation-adjusted terms, while women's wages have increased modestly.

According to The State of Working America, an annual report prepared by the Economic Policy Institute, "falling real wages among men can explain 64.9 percent of the closing of the gender gap between 1979 and 1989; correspondingly, only 35.1 percent ... was due to women's rising real wages." In any case, even that spurious progress has slowed in the '90s. If men's real wages had not fallen since 1979, as a joint study by the AFL-CIO and the Institute for Women's Policy Research reported last year, "women's earnings today would be only about 66 percent of men's, representing a remarkably small overall decline in the gender wage gap."

In addition, as economic inequality for the work force as a whole has grown since 1973, there has been growing inequality among women workers: Women in the top fifth of the work force have made significant gains, but women in the bottom half remain--in real terms--only slightly above where they stood a quarter century ago.

Conservatives, led by Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the American Enterprise Institute, claim that the wage gap either has disappeared--or simply reflects women's choices and differences in experience and other "human capital." Among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, they argue, citing the National Longitudinal Study of Youth, women earn nearly 98 percent of what men do. Such a small slice of the work force, however, is not proof that gender inequities are vanishing, but simply a reminder that they often show up in complex ways.