But in Mexico, things haven't exactly worked that way. Forty years after Betty Friedan's "The Feminine Mystique" sparked a massive consciousness-raising movement among American women and helped launch a publishing sub-industry, many Mexican women are awaiting their feminist ur text.

In this socially conservative, profoundly Roman Catholic country, where abortion is illegal, women didn't gain the right to vote until 1953, and it's still perfectly OK for employers to run secretarial help-wanted ads seeking an "attractive" 25-year-old, the primary mass-culture venues for exploring women's inner lives are the lurid, cliché-besotted Cinderella stories of the telenovelas (soap operas) that saturate prime-time TV.

When Mexico's female intelligentsia talks about home-grown feminist role models, they usually cite Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz, the brilliant nun who challenged the patriarchy when she wasn't busy penning erotic poetry. Unfortunately, Sor Juana passed away in 1695.

So it was understandable that when the Mexican division of Random House published "Gritos y Susurros" (Cries and Whispers), a collection of witty, well-written and unusually candid first-person essays by 38 Mexican women last July, its initial print run was an unassuming 10,000 copies.

Cutting a swath through an array of topics — sexual betrayal, macho men, creeping mortality, the joys and frustrations of single parenthood and the harrowing challenges of middle age — the book, which has become a surprise best seller and a budding pop-culture phenomenon of sorts, paints an intimate, painful and at times painfully humorous mosaic of modern Mexican womanhood.

Several essays deal with deadly serious subjects. Journalist Rossana Fuentes-Beráin writes about the dismissive, machista attitude of the male editors at a Mexico City daily newspaper when she began to investigate the murders of scores of women in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. One or two entries have set jaws flapping in the capital's higher circles, such as Guadalupe Loaeza's red-faced remembrance of a midnight screaming match she had with "the other woman" while her two-timing beau stood by.

Among the most revelatory essays is that of Marta Lamas, one of Mexico's leading feminist scholars, who also runs a pro-choice advocacy group here. In her essay, titled "My Breach," she writes about having had a passionate affair some years ago with an unnamed married man, a member of Mexico's judicial forces, whose social status and conservative views were diametrically opposed to her own. For Mexicans, it was as if Gloria Steinem had admitted to having an affair with Newt Gingrich.

To reach U.S. markets

Six months and an additional 25,000 copies later, "Gritos y Susurros" is in its sixth printing and will go on sale in Spanish this month in the Los Angeles area and other U.S. markets.

Perhaps more significantly, Mexico's largest entertainment network, Televisa, recently finished shooting an adaptation of the book that will air on Mexican entertainment in January and also will be broadcast on Univision, the Spanish-language U.S. network — a virtually unprecedented effort on behalf of a book about Mexican women with no pop diva or supermodel's name attached.

Meanwhile, the Mexican media have lavished attention on "Gritos y Susurros." "Delightful and touching" was the verdict of radio commentator Ricardo Rocha. Glossy women's magazines have devoted lengthy, full-color spreads to the book and its contributors, while a few male writers have reacted with respectful but puzzled essays of the "what-do-women-want?" variety.

Localized editions of the book already are in the works for other Latin American countries, and a planned English-language U.S. version will feature prominent Latina Americans.

Great response

While marketers haven't determined exactly who's buying and reading the book, letters and e-mails of thanks have been pouring in from both men and women, some offering their own intimate tales of personal crusades, life-altering experiences and/or thoughts on the state of male-female relations in Mexico.

"Suddenly I'm like this political Ann Landers, which is a role I'd never envisioned for myself," says Denise Dresser, 41, the Mexican-born, Princeton-educated political scientist who arm-twisted the project into being. Dresser admits that even she has been slightly "bewildered" by the reaction to a project that began for her partly as a way to meet other interesting, accomplished women.

"I think people are sort of stunned," she says. "It's pushing back the boundaries of what's permissible to say as a woman in Mexico."

Dresser's who's who

While few contributors to "Gritos y Susurros" are household names north of, say, Galveston, Texas, many are well known in Mexico and across the Latin world. They include Elena Poniatowska, a journalist-novelist and gray eminence of Mexican letters; Laura Esquivel, author and screenwriter, whose adaptation of her 1992 magic-realist novel, "Like Water for Chocolate," is one of the highest-grossing films in Latin movie history; and veteran actress Patricia Reyes Spíndola, who played Salma Hayek's mother in "Frida."

Among the other contributors are artists, academics, political activists, a dramaturge, a scientist, a restaurateur, a singer and a supreme court minister.

What all have in common, according to Dresser, is that they mainly "are known for their professional profile," their outward success, while their personal lives have been tightly guarded.

"It was women that for me are an enigma, mysterious, complex, they have been the subject of scandal, or that I have wanted to meet."

The idealized woman is nowhere to be seen. "Here are women admitting they are dyslexic, they are insecure, they were only trying to please their mothers, they were beaten by their fathers, they were cheated on by their lovers," says Dresser. "These are women as far from Sor Juana as you can get, and I think that's a good thing."

Three questions

Subtitled "Untimely Experiences of 38 Women," "Gritos y Susurros" takes its name from Ingmar Bergman's exquisitely observed, angst-ridden 1972 film about three sisters in turn-of-the-century Norway.

Dresser posed three questions to her contributors: What has taken you by surprise in life? In what moments and under what circumstances have you felt under-prepared? And what has constituted an unusual and disquieting challenge for you?

Mexico isn't a prudish society, but it is a very private one. Family, political and religious loyalties run deep, and it's considered bad form, if not suicidal, to tattle on one's colleagues or "betray" one's own class interests. Women too have played their assigned roles in what Dresser calls Mexico's "culture of complicity, of secrecy."

But when she began receiving the essays, Dresser was "astounded" at how far some of the women had been willing to go in breaking the privacy taboo. Politician Rosario Robles writes about having to make a decision to use force against student demonstrators while serving as head of Mexico City's government.

Julieta Fierro, a leading astronomer, recounts that after her mother's death, her father wanted her to stay home and look after her brothers and how instead she channeled her energy into science; her latest side-project is a book titled "El Manual de la Amante Perfecta" (The Manual of the Perfect Lover).

"Many women have talked to me about their texts as being cathartic, as if they were waiting to exhale and then did so, about [exorcising] demons, about carrying around that story for a long time," Dresser says. "And then for some women, like Julieta Fierro, I felt like the attitude was, 'To hell with it.' "

A characteristically Mexican sense of decorum clings to these essays, along with a between-the-lines conviction that each woman's individual struggle belongs to a broader crusade for equality and opportunity shared by all Mexican women.

"This is not a book about women complaining," Dresser says. "There's very little in this book that is self-absorbed, because these women are still fighting to make Mexico a better country."