Or, that's no way to treat a lady.

"Defend yourself." That's the lesson Harvey Mansfield drew for Larry Summers the week before Harvard's president was forced to resign.

Like countless other women who cherish improvement in the situation of women in the United States and throughout the world, I was initially quick to embrace feminism as the best way to secure our "rights" and our dignity as persons. Like countless others, I was seriously misled.

A new letter from the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has called for a renewed collaboration of men and women.

AS a retired professor of English who now and again returns to teaching, I am aware that the work I try to do with my students has less and less in common with what is going on in adjacent classrooms. I regret being out of step, but it is too late to break the habits of a lifetime, and in any case I cannot believe that they are bad habits.

Can one be both Catholic and feminist? Many of us these days are asking the question, sometimes with considerable anguish. The real question, however, is why is this a question at all. Why do so many of us see the relations between Catholicism and feminists as problematic?

From these women and men comes the really bad news for the feminist movement: The overwhelming majority of American women perceive feminism as irrelevant. In their view, feminism is not talking about the women's issues that most concern them and it is not writing a compelling story about women's lives. Worse, it is not writing a convincing story about our world.

I would get angry looking at bumper stickers on people's cars! I would get angry at the way the whole debate was being twisted in the media so that if you were antiabortion you were anti-woman.

Secularized feminism raises excellent questions but cannot answer them, says an American theologian who points to a Christian feminism as an antidote.

The Catholic Church has been a vigorous proponent in international settings of social and economic justice for women. This article provides evidence of an enviable historical record of concern for women by the Church.