Tapu Misa: You're as free as a bird - if that's the way you want it

What's a feminist to do? The veteran women's campaigner Sandra Coney tries to get a little respect by pointing out that advertising which refers to women as "nice birds" is sexist and Herald readers tell her: "get a life".

The next day, "rampant feminism" gets the blame for shutting out GPs from our seriously out of whack birthing business.

I'm sure it's the fault of feminists, too, that the risk-averse airlines won't let men sit next to unaccompanied children for safety reasons. Let's also add political correctness to the list of charges while we're at it. That, surely, was a feminist innovation.

In fact, is there anything we can't lay at the feet of feminists and their anti-men, anti-family agenda that's made the country so toxic for men and such a haven for powerful women? Not according to the conspiracy theorists.

Strange, then, that at the Women's Studies Association Conference in Auckland last weekend, titled Sustaining Women - Regenerating Feminism, there was talk about the decline of the women's movement and feminism's lack of relevance for many women today.

For women engaged in the devil's work, and with such untrammelled power, they seemed remarkably low-key and lacking in horns. But perhaps they were just trying to lure me in.

I, who had never called myself a feminist, had been invited into the inner sanctum, where I chose to theorise about why Pacific women had never really taken to feminism.

It did not require much perspicacity on my part to figure out why most Pacific women had never seen the individualistic Western model of feminism espoused by white, middle-class women as being a particularly good fit.

Feminism was "whining with white women", to borrow the words of the talented Tongan-Palagi-Samoa poet Karlo Mila. Even back in the 80s, many Pacific women - who didn't even own a bra they could burn - were inclined to view feminism as anti-family and anti-children, therefore at odds with their identities as Pacific women. Besides, like Maori women, they were more interested in advancing whole communities. They weren't inclined to divorce their struggle as women from their struggle as a people, or to leave their men out in the cold.

As the late Hana Jackson told the first Pacific Women's Conference in 1975: Maori women were fighting for "economic, social and cultural survival", and Maori women suffered "with our men in their battle to survive as men".

You can still spot the cultural disconnect - as when Governor-General Dame Silvia Cartwright was accused of cultural imperialism for drawing attention to the back-seat relegation of women at this year's Waitangi Day celebrations.

Maramena Roderick, a former Herald and TVNZ journalist, wrote that she and her Maori mates - all strong, capable Maori women who did not need liberating, thanks very much - were outraged by the G-G's comments. What many saw as sexism, Roderick protested, was in fact protection. The frontline was the firing line. Men sat in the front row to shield the women.

I'm not sure why such strong, capable Maori women should need a shield in the 21st century, but perhaps Roderick's embrace of culture over feminism is part of a wider malaise facing feminism.

Feminists aren't the united group of the 1970s. Tania Domett and Jacqui True, of Auckland University, say feminists have fractured into distinct groups with fundamental differences about what gender equality looks like and might be achieved. That might explain why some women think feminism is dead, or at least in need of regeneration. And why others believe the revolution wasn't all it was cracked up to be.

In her controversial book Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide, Maureen Dowd, the New York Times' only female editorial columnist, writes that women's progress has been "more of a zigzag than a superhighway", and that the triumph of feminism lasted a "nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years".

Dowd wonders if feminism has been trumped by narcissism and whether, as a still-single 53-year-old, feminism was some cruel hoax which forgot to tell her she would get less desirable as she became more successful.

I agree with Dowd that there are some ominous signs, as the Bush administration pulls back some of the gains made by the women's movement on abortion and contraception.

But I don't share her bleak view. She would be less pessimistic if she had a daughter, like mine, who is a living testament to the triumphs of feminism - confident of her ability to achieve alongside the best of the boys, yet undeniably female and a girl who likes to have fun.

Feminism's greatest triumph is getting women to the point where we have the freedom to choose. That includes the freedom to be "birds", if that's what some women really want.