A few hands slowly rise.

Then comes the question: How many of you support the educational, political, social and legal equality of women? A sea of hands shoots up.

Those who came of age during the 1960s and 1970s might find it shocking that many young women today shy away from the word "feminist," which can conjure up a radical fringe movement.

Besides, these women say, their mothers already fought the battle and, in large part, won. They believe they can do whatever they want now -- and that includes being a stay-at-home mom or launching a professional life before switching to the mommy track.

Young women today aren't so strident in the view that they must juggle a full-time career and a family to have a worthwhile future. They're eschewing the grind that baby boomers embraced. Earlier this year, The New York Times conducted an unscientific survey of female students at Yale and found that 60 percent plan to cut back on work or stop their careers entirely to have children.

Does this mean young women are abandoning feminism? No, says Diane Kjervik, director of the Carolina Women's Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. She believes they're molding it for their own generation, making savvy decisions about their education, work and family.

"To me, feminism is about choice and political equality," she says.

Women in Kjervik's generation -- she's 60 -- generally had two career options: teaching and nursing. The college students she knows have endless possibilities, and they want flexibility. "They assume they will have a lot of choices throughout their lives," Kjervik says.

Kelly Beth Smith, a 21-year-old Meredith College student, sees herself as a feminist. The student government president is an ambitious woman. She is applying to graduate school and plans to get a Ph.D. in psychology.

She also got married last year, a move that surprised some of her classmates. She and her husband will have children someday, she says, and at that point they'll decide who "stops out" to stay home with them.

"It will definitely be a balance," she says. "I've learned a lesson on that. You can't have it all at the same time. But you can have it all."

For some, finding a balance is code for women trading business suits for aprons.

In a recent essay, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd lamented what she says is a return to a 1950s mentality by young women. She cited recent studies that show a drop in the number of college-educated women who keep their birth names after marriage.

"Maybe we should have known that the story of women's progress would be more of a zigzag than a superhighway, that the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years," wrote Dowd, whose new book is titled, "Are Men Necessary: When Sexes Collide."

Laura Carpenter Bingham, president of Peace College, a women's school in Raleigh, believes the women's movement is "alive but confused."

"With all social movements and evolutionary things," she says, "they go through highs and lows and some degree of plateauing."

She thinks this is sort of a gray period, with women looking for balance and simplicity. Some of them were raised in split families and lived complicated lives or saw their mothers being consumed by careers.

"It's no longer about making the choice that has a high consequence or sacrifice," she says. "They want to be able to make temporary choices. They opt in and out of the work force."

Next page >

Get $150+ in coupons in every Sunday N&O. Click here for convenient home delivery.