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A noisy group of adolescents, enjoying the beginning of the weekend , ambled by. Jennifer waited for things to quiet down before speaking. While she waited, she took the opportunity to busy herself with her ice-cream cone.

When the noise had subsided, Jennifer said: "Some feminists have pointed out that, historically, there have been a disproportionate number of women intellectuals who have ended their lives in suicide, or in silence, or in illness, or in convents. These maladies are all considered by feminists to be symptomatic of the underlying interstitial disease that has arrested the healthy development of identity formation.

"In short, women were being denied the same chance which men had: to discover or invent their true selves by means of exploring and engaging the world of role proliferation. The effects of this denial and confinement showed up, in one way or another, as a life of suffering and misery.

"Without wishing to condone any of the people, forces and pressures that led women to suicide, silence, illness or seclusion, the fact of the matter is this. Women intellectuals have made, and are making, the same mistake as male intellectuals when we assume the life of the intellect will be our salvation. Intellect alone has not been able to save men from entanglements with their false selves, nor will intellect, by itself, be able to save women from our false selves.

"The frustration and despair which comes from having the ambitions of the intellect thwarted is an affair of the ego or false self. A calling that seeks to enlist the assistance of the intellect in the realization of one's true self and essential capacity is quite independent of any considerations of ambition."

After taking a few more mouthfuls of her ice-cream and pausing long enough to swallow, Jennifer continued on: "The process of coming to realize the true self also often results in a life of silence, seclusion, illness and death. However, the meaning of these conditions to the seeker after true self-realization is quite different from their significance to one who is caught-up in the thwarted ambitions of the false self's use of intellect.

"To the former individual, silence and seclusion become matters of choice rather than something into which one is forced. One is silent because the intellect cannot comprehend what the heart and spirit know and, as a result, verbalization often only leads to distortion of the truth.

"Moreover, the one who desires to realize the true self often seeks out seclusion. Seclusion permits one to withdraw from the cacophony created by the way false selves, including one's own, have become entangled in desire for a world from which the sacred has been actively removed by the activities of these same false selves.

"In addition, although we all suffer from the illnesses that are contracted by our false selves, in the struggle for deliverance from these illness, there is a potential for healing. When the 'death' of the ego or false self occurs, the recovery of spiritual health will have been achieved, and the true self will be in ascendency."

Nibbling on her cone from time to time, she added: "Being accorded equal access to educational, economic, legal, social and/or political services and opportunities, is one thing. The ideology of progress through access to role proliferation is quite another matter.

"Having access to role proliferation has done nothing but confuse men about who, in essence, they are. Whatever 'progress' some men may have made politically, socially, and economically, has been paralleled by a progressive devolution in their spiritual lives.

"Men have not found themselves through the proliferation of roles. They have lost themselves.

"With the proliferation of roles, men have became increasingly vulnerable to the temptation of being seduced away from their true selves. In the process, many men have become entangled in the false selves of one, or more, of the proliferated roles to which they have access.

"Those feminists who look to the proliferation of role opportunities as the yellow brick road to true identity are making the same mistake as many men have made. Such people suppose the real self is to be found among the proliferation of roles.

"The true self is not about roles, proliferated or otherwise. The call to self-realization cannot be achieved through the trying-on of roles that come from the outside. Self-realization only can come by answering the call of the heart and spirit.

"Many feminist perspectives seem to approach the issue of identity in terms of emphasizing the issue of creating identity instead of discovering its already made presence. They appear to believe that everything must be invented anew in the feminine voice in order to flush out all of the patriarchal and gendering poisons with which women have been afflicted."

Having finished my simple, working man's cone, I inquired: "Would you agree that, in some ways, various strains of feminism have become just so many additional external ideologies that must be internalized by the individual? In a sense, at least in the case of some kinds of feminism, the individual, seemingly, is being told that someone else's personal experience and voice must be ingested and digested before one may consider oneself to have become a real woman, with one's own identity.

"Although this process of internalization is said to be a process of consciousness-raising," I continued, "consciousness has not necessarily been raised, as much as one's angle of engagement of experience has been changed. However, the new and different are often mistaken for, or assumed to be, the higher and better."

"In certain respects," Jennifer acknowledged, "there are some feminist theorists who, like theorists in other conceptual systems, promote their view of things as the revealed truth - as opposed to just a possibility which is to be accepted or rejected on its merits. To the extent this occurs, then, I agree with you, David, that women are being invited to internalize someone else's invented identity as if it were their own. Such imported frameworks are antithetical to a woman being able to discover her own true identity and essential capacity.

"Tragically, so many women have made such tremendous efforts to break free of the influence of the male ego, only to succumb to another ego, either their own or that of other women. Like many men before them, an increasing number of women have permitted their own ego or the egos of other women to sweet-talk them into becoming addicted to the blind ambition of the kind of individualism that renders the voice of calling inaudible.

"From a mystical perspective, many women, despite all of our worldly gains, have not become free in any essential sense. Instead, we merely have redecorated the interior and exterior nature of the place where we will reside during our enslavement. Instead of being subjugated to the whims of a male ego or false self, we have become subjugated to the whims of a female ego or false self."

Eating the last of her cone, Jennifer concluded: "Since one ego or false self is, more or less, identical with any other false self or ego, whether male or female, this kind of an exchange would appear to be something of a Pyrrhic victory. We have gained the world at the potential cost of our own soul."

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