After a lot of tugging and swaying, the Hollywood celebrities forged ahead, and I found myself arm-in-arm with several dozen "peacekeepers," a bubble of bodies protecting the second front line of organizers and politicians including Smeal, Gandy, Cole, Planned Parenthood president Gloria Feldt, Albright, Pelosi and United Farm Workers of America founder Dolores Huerta. After over an hour of stop-and-go marching, through media and protesters with more bloody-fetus posters and rosaries, we pulled back toward the Mall, where someone had decided to play decidedly youth-inappropriate music like Vanilla Ice and Billy Joel. Breaking out of formation and striding toward the afternoon stage, Madeleine Albright said, "I marched in 1989, and this is much bigger. I have just been told that this is the biggest march in American history."

As the Indigo Girls took the stage, the study in paleo-feminism reached my own generation. From Betty Friedan to Holly Near to Lynda Carter to my college memories of angry white chicks with guitars, almost every antiquated layer of the women's movement of the past five decades had been unearthed and introduced onstage on Sunday -- except, of course, for the cultural signifiers for the generation behind me.

Organizers had been right: The young people had come. The streets were thronged with high-school and college students, men and women. They had cheered and giggled and marched. But it felt like a young crowd attending a party thrown by an old organization. How could 18-year-olds, no matter how eager they were to sign up, get onboard with '60s folk singers and Whoopi Goldberg, who had taken the stage with a coat hanger and said in an almost accusatory voice, "You understand me, women under 30? This is what we used!" It was an attempt to connect, but it came out sounding like she was scolding a generation for its privilege.

But haven't we been making the point for years that reproductive freedom wasn't a privilege? That it was a right that these kids should be able to take for granted? Isn't that exactly what Whoopi Goldberg and Gloria Steinem and Holly Near and Tyne Daly had hoped and fought for for so long? So the question was: Where were the people who could speak to this generation that has grown up not knowing what a coat hanger has to do with feminism from their own perspective? Where were Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen? Where was Britney? Hell, 10 years older than they, I have no idea who might be able to lead them. But I know that I didn't see her at the march.

And where were John Kerry or his wife, Teresa? It seemed like bad form not to have shown up. Especially when Howard Dean, in a spiffy dark suit with a red beetle-tie, was kibitzing backstage. "This is exactly the energy we had on our campaign," said Dean. "You just need someone to strike a match under it, and that's what I did."

Onstage, Gloria Steinem was speaking, and she was finally talking -- for real -- about the young women in the crowd. Repeating the statistic that one-third of the demonstrators were under 25, Steinem said, "Let's never again hear about how there are no young activists. It's just that some of us older folks don't recognize the form in which they protest. We thought we had to cover up our bodies. They are saying rightly that they want to be nude and safe ... They don't all sound like issues of the past and they shouldn't."

It was the march's first moment of real reach beyond the age barrier, or at least an acknowledgement that there were communication challenges between grandmotherly activists and their daughters and granddaughters. But did Steinem have any choice? She was there for my mother; she was there for me. But I doubt that any daughter of mine will know who she is. Who will be there for her? It's been 12 years since the last march. Twelve years from now, Steinem will be 82 years old. Who will take her place onstage? Who else will combine good politics and good brains and good looks in a way that makes young women stop dead in their tracks to shake her hand? It must have been scary, to look over three quarters of a million people, and realize that she doesn't have anyone to hand a torch to.

"Before I leave you all," she said, "let me hear you say it! 'Do we have the power?' Let me hear you say it: 'We have the power! We have the power!'"

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