War has often been good for the status of American women. The First World War led to the enfranchisement of women across the West, and shattered the whalebone restraints of Victorian sexual morality. World War II brought millions of women into the workforce, showing that female factory workers and female heads of households were not contradictions in terms. And the turmoil of Vietnam helped to release the social energies that powered the feminist movement. Without those three wars, fought almost entirely by men, the 20th century would surely not have brought such great strides toward women’s liberation.

It is worth asking, then, what effect our current wars are having on the condition of women. Has the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan marked another milestone on the road to equality? Or is the war on terror, which remains a metaphor rather than an all-out mobilization, too different from past wars to make much difference in American society? Few writers are better entitled to answer these questions than Susan Faludi, the author of “Backlash” and “Stiffed,” and one of the strongest feminist voices of her generation.

Yet in “The Terror Dream” (Metropolitan, 296 pages, $26), Ms. Faludi fails to grasp the full dimensions of what has been happening to American women over the last six years. The book contains a good deal of sharp social observation and useful media criticism, and Ms. Faludi once again demonstrates her gift for laying bare the sexist assumptions of what looks like neutral discourse. No reader of “The Terror Dream” will be able to look back without wincing at the way the mass media — especially the TV networks and the newsweeklies — covered the social fallout of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Remember the spate of stories playing up a post-September 11 baby boom, which never materialized? Or the alleged trend of career women rushing to get married and have children (on October 1, 2001, Time magazine announced “a time of homecoming and housecleaning”)? Ms. Faludi does, and she refuses to give a free pass to their unexamined anti-feminism.

Yet Ms. Faludi’s attempt to turn her observations into a theory, to move from what she sees on the TV news to what is happening in America’s soul, remains too fanciful and abstract to be convincing. The problem with Ms. Faludi’s method can already be seen in her title. What interests her is not Islamic terrorism as an actual phenomenon that has already claimed many thousands of American lives, in Baghdad and Kabul as in New York and Washington. Instead, in a way that is natural to people who make their living by analyzing culture, Ms. Faludi concentrates solely on America’s imaginative response to terrorism. She is more at ease talking about the psychodrama of our “terror dream” than about terror itself, to the extent that terror comes to seem like just a dream, a blank screen on which we project our fantasies.

Ms. Faludi means to be tough-minded in the manner of the Freudian analyst, who forces us to confront our damaging illusions. But in fact, her approach has the effect of reinforcing our deepest fantasies of omnipotence. If what matters in the post-September 11 age is not our enemies but our dreams, then we remain effectively invulnerable: only we can hurt ourselves. Ms. Faludi offers a perfect symbol of this delusion in her book’s first pages. Early on September 11, 2001, she writes, she had a dream about being on a hijacked airliner, only to wake to the news of the twin towers attacks. She has literally replaced reality with her own dream.

This rhetorical maneuver helps to explain why Ms. Faludi credits the American media with so much power for ill. By far the best part of “The Terror Dream” is the early chapters, in which Ms. Faludi revisits some of the inane news stories that proliferated in the two years after the attacks, and lays bare their anti-feminist assumptions. There was, for instance, the alleged trend of women flocking to date firemen, made newly desirable by September 11. A reporter for the Orange County Register went on a date with a fireman and made sure to have her toenails painted “fire-engine red”; a correspondent for “The Early Show” on CBS sniggered, “The firemen are cute. I would — I would massage one.”

Firemen themselves, as Ms. Faludi shows, found such fawning silly and insulting. Indeed, in the rush to make heroes out of New York’s bravest, the real ambiguities of their experience — the fear, anger, and helplessness that went along with their courage and resolve — was turned into a cartoon. Sometimes literally: As Ms. Faludi notes, one popular cartoon showed Superman, Batman, and Spider-Man asking a New York fireman for his autograph.

Ms. Faludi is right to point out the anxiety about American masculinity that such stories betrayed — as though, in a time of threat, it was necessary to embrace old stereotypes about helpless women and protective men. “No one is suggesting a Million Mom March on Tora Bora,” John Tierney scoffed in the New York Times, as though feminism were a luxury the nation could no longer afford.

Ms. Faludi goes astray, however, in giving too much credence to such frivolity. The organizing argument of “The Terror Dream” is that, in these news stories, we can glimpse the reemergence of a very old American myth. This is the myth of the captive woman rescued by her man, which Ms. Faludi finds in its purest form in the John Ford movie “The Searchers.” The second half of “The Terror Dream” unexpectedly abandons contemporary America and turns to a close reading of such colonial-era captivity narratives — sensationalistic, often ghost-written accounts of women taken prisoner by hostile Indians, which were a key genre in early American literature. Ms. Faludi introduces us to little-remembered figures like Mary Rowlandson — kidnapped during King Philip’s War, her memoir was a best seller in 1682 — and Hannah Duston, who escaped from captivity after killing and scalping 10 Abenaki Indians in 1697.

Ms. Faludi justifies this abrupt swerve by arguing that these tales contain the “ontogeny,” the primal scene, that was recapitulated in the “phylogeny” of American culture after September 11. “What if the deepest psychological legacy of our original war on terror,” Ms. Faludi writes, “wasn’t the pleasure we now take in dominance but the original shame that domination seeks desperately to conceal?” The failure of colonial men to protect their women from Indian assault, she suggests, is continuous with the failure of the modern American state to defend its citizens against Al Qaeda. In both cases, the resulting shame led to a defensive reinforcement of gender roles. Thus Rowlandson and Duston were written out of history, and the September 11 widows became martyrs for our time.

This is an ingenious conceit, but a thoroughly unconvincing one, since the parallels fail at every point. The victims of September 11, as even Ms. Faludi acknowledges, were not primarily women; on the contrary, men outnumbered women among the killed three to one. Nor can America’s military response to the attacks be construed as a rescue operation: Who was being rescued, and from where? Nor, finally, can our emotional reaction to September 11 be convincingly painted as peculiarly American, conforming to old national patterns. To respond to an unexpected attack with fears about preparedness, to seek revenge for a collective injury — these are surely universal human responses, as evident in the Trojan War as in New York after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Where Ms. Faludi goes wrong is in exaggerating the power of the American media either to reflect or to shape the national consciousness. All the offensive trend pieces she catalogues are really evidence only of the laziness and vulgarity of the mass media. (One may doubt that any woman felt her autonomy threatened by Vanity Fair’s story trumpeting Richard Armitage’s ability to “benchpress 440 pounds.”)

If Ms. Faludi had turned from the dream to the reality, however, she might have noticed that the war on terror has been led and fought by women to a greater extent than any war in American history. A nation that has Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, and that may very well elect Hillary Clinton president, can hardly be considered afraid of female power. At the same time, the conflict between the West and Islam over the rights of women and the nature of sexuality has made our culture’s feminist commitments more explicit than ever before. Ms. Faludi’s approach and assumptions prevent her from noticing it, but future historians may well decide that September 11 and its aftermath marked the moment when female equality became one of the proudest badges of American civilization.

akirsch@nysun.com