As the major contributor to The Cosmo Girl’s Guide to the New Etiquette, my commitment to the feminist movement is somewhat suspect. I not only authored this counterrevolutionary tract, but I believe in such subversion as — smelling great is good manners, being kept can be kind, and hypocrisy is a civilized art.

     Still, by the parameters that count, I am among the more liberated women in my zip code. Loyally I now focus my concern on the sexist plat du jour. To my sisters who liberated the "Men Only" sanctuaries of refined lunching and raffish pubbing, I offer an assessment. Were the Oak Room at The Plaza and McSorley’s Old Ale House worth liberating?

     "What do you mean…’worth liberating?’" a militant Ms. snapped. "Liberating lunch counters in Mississippi dime stores had nothing to do with fine food."

     "Well, yes, of course…ah hmmmm," I quickly agreed. "But I mean, well…take the Oak Room.  Now there is a room that is simply unflattering to ladies." Her rueful smile…a scornful lash. I’d committed two Aunt Torns in a single sentence. "Ladies"…belittling epithet. And…"flattering." Well, Sisters, craggy and sun-etched may look super on Clint Eastwood. But I am not about to surrender my brow bronzer or my cheek blusher or feeling great in a room that makes me look a little bit like Faye Dunaway.

     And the Oak Room at the Plaza is not at all kind to Dr. Lazlo’s girls. You can see why the turtle-oiled and surgically tucked-up darlings prefer to nibble salads in the pink-kiss glow of the Palm Court just around the corner. Only an occasional adventuress, militant or docile tourist wife invades what was once the daytime stag glare of this soaring wonder of a room, rather like the lobby of a train station — monumental, ebony-faced, with castles painted in the naves, briskly professional service and a feeling of infinite space. Lunch in a tall, tufted leather throne, beside the telephone plus, with a complimentary notebook for "Notes Jotted at The Plaza," is what I imagine dining at a fusty old men’s club might be. Proper, discreet, sophisticated. The food, wholesome and solid. There are omelettes ($4.25), properly moist, one enveloping cubes of ham and forlorn bits of mushroom; entrees from $5.25, including a superb chicken salad ($5.75) with bits of bacon, avocado and Roquefort dressing. With the $1 couvert, lunch for two with drinks, tax and tip can easily run $35. There is also "Rush" lunch in the Oak Bar (75 cents cover) where the corned beef on rye is $5.

     The dinner crowd can be remarkably genteel ("superWasp," my friend the self-styled Male Chauvinist Prig observed one quiet November Thursday). But at ten the corridors began to buzz. An after-theater dazzle descended, including Eli Wallach and Anne Jackson grazing cheeks just an inch away, and Melvin Belli plugged into Ma Bell’s lifeline. Dinner began with a flourish: celery batons in excellent bloody Marys. homey chicken-and-okra soup, and the best snails or recent memory- plump, tender, zestily sauced. The generous ration of nondescript pâté was proudly offered with cornichon and rubbery aspic. The brisket ($6) had no personality, but the ugly little potato pancake escorts were a joy. Bass ($6.50), just slightly overcooked, was served in a stingy but good tomato-flecked duglère sauce. Rack of lamb ($7.50), rare inside as requested, was unhappily beige outside and minus its "persillade." At first the waiter found our parsley complaint merely amusing, but when we persisted, he returned with a confetti of minced green and attempted to press it against the naked chops. Somehow the flaws were less annoying in the glow of a sensual Mèdoc, Château La Lagune ’64, smooth, perfumed and at its prime. Desserts were downhill; the coffee, excellent. Dinner for three with two drinks, tax and tip: $76.85.

     "Look at all the women here tonight," someone remarked as we pulled up to McSorley’s Old Ale House.

     "A tough bunch of broads," our Male Chauvinist Prig observed with a shudder. But then, on closer inspection, all but the neatest of the supposed sisters turned out to be just some scraggly guys…one of them dozing not far from the soporific warmth of the pot-bellied stove and a sleeping cat. There is a lock on the W.C. now, but otherwise the shattering of sexist barriers — so violently accomplished here — has not sweetened the grit, nor lifted the cherished tarnish of age, in Manhattan’s oldest saloon.

     McSorley’s did not surrender easily. Ask sister Lucy Komisar, a mover of NOW, who wrestled her way in on Liberation Day and got doused with a stein of ale. However, my invasion brings not a stir, not a murmur…just a type-cast waiter asking, "May I help ye?", a choice of beer, porter or ale — and the same old motto, "Be Good or Be Gone," posted among McSorley’s memorabilia of wars, political and global, and of favorite sons JFK, FDR and Alfred E. Neuman. At lunch there is hamburger, ham, hash and chili, but there are sandwiches, hard-boiled eggs (20 cents) and cheese all the time. Piled high with thick raw onions and served with a mug of porter (35 cents), everyday liverwurst on commercial rye is transformed — a mystical, masculine alchemy (like watercress on crustless rounds of white, soon to lose all nuance of gender. For traditional rumination: a blast of Liederkranz, onions and crackers.

     It was indefensible to forbid women entry here, but now that our right is legally established, I hope we’ll abdicate McSorley’s to our brothers. The next decade of the sexist struggle will not be easy. All but the most secure and sexually-together males are bound to need a kind of grubby neighborhood hangout where they can be as boozy and boorish as they wish without an implicit call for brilliance from our presence- their more-than-equals.

     Defensive sexism spawned the Woman’s Exchange in 1878 as a sales outlet for the handicraft of indigent ladies. Indigence is no longer a qualification for selling one’s homemade beef tea, needlepoint pillows, sequined Christmas trees or plum pudding in the bazaar upstairs at the New York Exchange for Woman’s Work (its official title). And the restaurant itself never banned men. They simply "wouldn’t be caught dead here in the early days," confided a chatty clerk. The contemporary male is less intimidated. There is a scattering of men at lunch, a parson at dinner, a lone young man sipping milk; even Mr. Kenneth has been spotted among the East Side matriarchs and the unbleached ash blondes with their little gold button earrings. Rose Kennedy mesmerized the place at lunch early in December — the ultimate proof that there is a lot of money on the unchic banquettes of this drab institutional-green room with its exposed fretwork of pipes.

     Writer Betty Rollin, late of Look, now with NBC, a Woman’s Exchange regular, explains the room’s curious appeal: "It makes you feel you’ve stepped out of New York into an old ladies’ home. And old ladies’ home in St. Louis. These women can feel confident here. Nothing nasty will ever happen at the Woman’s Exchange. The hostess calls you ‘dear’ and leads you along as if you were slightly retarded." The waitresses in their institutional green-and-white range from crotchety to treacle, mostly Irish — "Schrafft’s rejects," Betty says. She has the chef’s salad every day, fleshing out the sparse ration of house dressing with an oily homemade mayonnaise. The tomatoes, it must be noted, are exquisitely peeled.

     Otherwise the food is plain and wholesome, mostly edible, occasionally commendable- á la carte entrees from $1.65 to $5.50 at lunch, the table d’hôte lunch $3.75, a similar dinner from $3.75 to $6 or á la carte. There are salads, luncheon sandwiches, steak and chops and Americana: corn fritters with Virginia bacon, whipped codfish balls.  This is not one of those glorious little-old-lady restaurants with sublime popovers and astonishing knockout desserts, though the chef does slip through a fine hot mincemeat pie after striking out with soggy pumpkin and blended cheese so spiked with Tabasco it paralyzes.

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