I'll confess it -- I actually subscribe to Glamour magazine. Every month, I grit my teeth and flip through the Editorial pages filled with liberal rhetoric and seductive sound bites of indignation and victimology. Across from sexy, million-dollar perfume advertisements are regular diatribes in favor of affirmative action and activist government policies. My excuse for this weakness? "Hey, I buy it for the pictures."

The trouble with subscriptions, though, is how they pile up in a corner until all of a sudden the next issue has arrived. Skimming through my old March issue of Glamour, I found some interesting tidbits on a page dedicated to the recent appointment of Madeleine Albright to Secretary of State. The editorial staff of Glamour paid their own tribute to her in a few paragraphs and filled the rest of the page with quotes from women leaders around the country. Most were predictably laudatory, but a few went beyond the subject to make broad pronouncements about the state of women in the world.

The most revealing quote came from former Democratic vice-presidential candidate, Geraldine Ferraro. "In 1984," she said, "the primary reason I was chosen to run for vice-president was to break a barrier. In 1996 Madeleine was chosen because of her expertise. When everyone is judged solely on merit, women will do very, very well." Could Ms. Ferraro be complaining about affirmative action?

A Lexis-Nexis review of Ferraro-hosted episodes of Crossfire on CNN will dispel the reader's notion that perhaps she is opposed to gender-based preference programs. Yet she seems to be complaining about her own experience as a "token hire." Implicit in Ferraro's comment is a sense of her own shortcomings in her bid for the vice-presidency. This is the pathos of "affirmative action" that people don't like to talk about: when you get the job under special circumstances, your authority is forever impaired by the perception of inferiority. It's the irony of the preference system: those who it ostensibly helps suffer from that same assistance. Madeleine Albright received unanimous congressional support for her nomination to the office of Secretary of State after earning her stripes at the United Nations. In 1984, on the other hand, a majority of women supported the Reagan-Bush ticket despite the use of Ferraro to shore up female support for the Democratic ticket.

I believe Ferraro's comment to be true: when we are all judged on merit, women will do very well. The rocket-like success of women in the marketplace over the last thirty years clearly demonstrates that achievement reaps its own rewards. The investments women have made in their own careers have paid off; when accorded the same rights as men, women continue to succeed at remarkable rates. It's when women are valued only for their sex--as Ferraro all but admitted she had been--instead of their contributions that we are held back from true achievement.

On a lighter note, my favorite quote in the Glamour piece came from Naomi Wolf, "Third Wave" feminist author of The Beauty Myth and recent advisor to President Clinton on women's issues. "Perhaps we are entering a new phase," she opines, "in which the old American goal of eradicating communism by a new American goal of eradicating the worldwide oppression of women." One wonders just how the President would have responded to this kind of rhetoric from Ms. Wolf, though perhaps Mrs. Clinton has inured him to it. Regardless, Ms. Wolf and her folk are here to remind us that just in case you thought otherwise, the gender wars are apparently very far from over.