India, April 18 -- Feminism, in its original impulse, was a refusal. A refusal to accept that a woman's worth could be settled by her body, her compliance, her usefulness to the purposes of others. That refusal was not merely political; it was, in its best moments, a refusal to accept that a human being could be exhausted by her roles, that the woman standing inside all those assigned functions was not also something more. Whatever one thinks of the movement's later directions, that original impulse deserves recognition. It named something real.

And yet something has not followed from that naming. In the century since the refusal was first articulated, laws have changed, doors have opened, and the vocabulary of equality has entered every...