COLUMN LEFT/ JANE O’REILLY : The GOP and Women: a Tale Gone Sour : The Republicans, who championed suffrage, have turned against a whole gender.

Let this year be another turning point. In 1968, 66 women won seats in state legislatures. Not all that many, by today’s standards, but the point is that 62 of those women were Republicans. They were part of the long, proud history of a party that first included an equal rights plank in its platform almost 100 years ago. The party that elected the first woman to Congress in 1916. The party that finally passed the Equal Suffrage Amendment in 1919. The party that endorsed a constitutional amendment guaranteeing women equal rights in 1940.

In 1977, Republican women helped define the vision of an equal society at the National Women’s Conference in Houston. And at that point, the story of women in the Republican Party turned sour. Even as 20,000 women, elected as representatives from every corner in America, were struggling toward community, another group--fearful and apocalyptic--was camped in protest across town. Phyllis Schlafly appeared on “Meet the Press” to tell the nation that the death of the women’s movement was at hand.

As it turned out, her prediction was correct only inside her own party. Schlafly was and is a woman of the old far right. For many years she enjoyed a certain limited success objecting to sex education in the schools, the SALT talks, fluoride in public drinking water--the standard issues of the old right. In the mid-1970s, a new theme began to share the pages of her Eagle Forum newsletter. Readers were advised of an urgent need to save the family by blocking the equal rights amendment. Schlafly would save American women from themselves.

The right understood that the notion of extending personal freedom to women is truly revolutionary. The right took the women’s movement seriously (as the tepid majority did not) and used those issues that were most obviously women’s--the ERA and abortion--to organize itself into the “new” right. Feminism, if presented in a certain way, could arouse people’s most basic fears of change, of freedom, of the “other,” of disorder.

Ronald Reagan was elected by the right. But he was a popular President and the 1980s seemed to be an exuberant time. If many of the best and the brightest of the younger women found other ways to serve their country, if the ERA was defeated and the Supreme Court turned against us--well, the truth is that most Republican women were the last to feel their options narrowing down.

But this time, this year, again in Houston, there was a painful awakening for many party loyalists. These women have recognized the assaults from the podium and the blandly demagogic passages of the platform for what they truly are.

It is not a question of merely being excluded. Or silenced. Or misunderstood. This time, the Republican Party is running against women. We are the political targets that communism and runaway spending used to be. Women are now the enemy.

Hillary Clinton has been presented as the “other.” Worst of all, she has been presented as an essentially insignificant but strangely overwhelming symbol, insulted and dismissed at once.

But we are Hillary Clinton. We are Barbara Bush. We are Murphy Brown. We are the women who have been hurt by the policies of the last 12 years. We are Dan Quayle’s daughter and George Bush’s granddaughter. We are Americans. Some of us are Republicans.

Most of us understood why Anita Hill did not quit her job. We understand why some women keep returning to battering spouses. We do not intend ever again to be persuaded to silence by trusted male governors “for the good of the party,” whichever party we belong to. We are the parties, their good depends on us, and we did not come to Houston to be insulted.

Furthermore, thanks to the Republican Party, we vote.

So what’s a woman to do?

Go home and try hard--for ourselves. We will save our money and our energy and our hearts for women. We can turn this country around. One city council race, one phone tree established, one network meeting regularly, are affirmations.

Republican and Democratic women, for the first time in years, are ready to work together, to form coalitions that will put women everywhere--into the statehouses and universities and corporate boardrooms where presidents and cabinets are formed.

Now we know what happens if we allow ourselves to be silenced. From now on, we will speak for ourselves.