WALT Whitman once observed, "In America, the men hate the women and the women hate the men." That sounds like a commentary on feminism and probably was. Although Whitman was caught up in personal sexual conflicts more befitting a sensitive poet, he lived through most of the 19th century, when women were in vociferous pursuit of the vote, so he probably muttered his share of "If I hear 'vote' one more time "

To judge from our current cris de coeur, his remark about the battle of the sexes rings truer for our own time than his. The Republicans are accused of waging a "war on women" ranging from the curtailing of abortion rights to unequal pay for equal work; TV psychologists regularly hold forth on "battered-wife syndrome; and "domestic violence" now rivals gunfire as our most frequent police call.

Much of this is blamed on tensions arising from our failing economy, but that's a big answer and big answers tend to be pat answers. Something really has happened between men and women, and I am just the right age to remember the difference.

Climb into my time capsule for a trip to the years just before World War II. I am sitting on the back steps waiting to signal someone who is making his way down the alley. He carries a small wheel on his shoulder and every few steps he throws back his head and calls out, "Sizzaman!"

My British father called him "the scissors grinder" but such precise diction was rare in the still-Southern Washington of my childhood. The rest of us, like the grinder, were generic Virginians or Marylanders with tongues influenced by black English, so we called him, as he called himself, "the sizzaman."

He was in his 60s, with thick white hair and rosy cheeks, as Dickensian as all get-out. He sharpened all the knives and scissors in the house for only 50 cents, but it was understood that you were supposed to offer him food and drink. He ate his way through the neighborhood--a sandwich here, a bowl of oyster stew there, pie and coffee somewhere else--making it possible for him to live cheaply in a single room with virtually no expenses except rent.

SPEAKING HOUSEWIFE