Whether or not she becomes the junior senator from New York, Caroline Kennedy has already become the poster-woman for those of us thriving, changing, and taking chances at an age when our mothers were encouraged to retire modestly to sitting by the phone, awaiting a call to baby-sit for their...

Bella Abzug - the shrewd, hard-hitting, passionate and idealistic legislative genius who led the women's movement and represented New York in Congress - once remarked that we would only have true gender equality when an incompetent woman could go as far as an incompetent man. That milestone appears to have...