Young women have abandoned feminism, being more interested in wearing slutty clothes and texting their boyfriends, writer Maureen Dowd tells Seán O'Driscoll in New York

Maureen Dowd is sitting upright in the back of a limo as we drive towards the Fox News headquarters and she is preparing for the worst. Her New York Times column is a favourite target for the station's right-wing pundits and she has loaded up with a can of Red Bull, preparing to drop witty one-liners for what turns out to be a surprisingly mild interview.

This month she features widely in the US media, both for her new book Are Men Necessary? and for an explosive column, in which she skewered fellow New York Times journalist Judith Miller for sycophantically following the Bush administration's line about weapons of mass destruction. ("Investigative journalism is not stenography," wrote Dowd witheringly.) She also suggested Miller got herself locked in prison on contempt charges as a desperate attempt at faux-heroism.

Miller resigned last week as Dowd's position was strongly backed by the New York Times. Externally, the New York Post and many US talk shows billed the Dowd-Miller spat as a "cat fight", as if two Pulitzer-prize winning women were incapable of an intelligent argument without it degenerating into nail scratching.

The "cat fight" phenomenon is a central theme of Dowd's new book, a comic exploration of how ambitious women end up becoming what Washington Times columnist Tina Brown called "alpha geishas" who cover up the mistakes of incompetents like President Bush.

"I knew the Miller column would be portrayed as WMD catfight," Dowd says. "But it would be selfish of me not to write it just because I was afraid it would be labelled as a cat fight. I had to write it because, ultimately, Judith's relationship with the White House had done a lot of harm."

As the limo turns the corner onto Broadway, Dowd recalls her fury when a male editor asked her not to be jealous when another attractive female was about to join the New York Times staff.

"When [New York Times media critic] Alexandra Stanley first came, the Washington bureau chief said to me: "Now, I don't want you to be jealous that Alexandra is here." So I wrote this furious letter saying: "You may not remember but I'm the one who recommended her. She's my best friend. I'm not jealous." In the end, she says, women should keep a perspective on how they are going to be labelled by men.

"I've decided to keep a sense of humour about it and take the Seinfeld approach. When [Seinfeld character] Elaine asks Jerry: "Why do men love cat fights so much?" he says: "Because at the end of it, we hope that the women will end up kissing."

The night before this interview, 900 people, mostly female, packed the Kaufmann Concert Hall in Manhattan to hear Dowd talk about women in the modern world. Concerned that women have been lulled back into accepting financial security instead of independence, she hopes to revive women's interest in sexual politics..

"Hollywood's remake of The Stepford Wives stumbled because it is no longer satire but documentary," she writes in the new book, adding: "American society has moved from 'the big bang of the Sexual Revolution to the big busts of the Plastic Revolution'."

"Many are just as confused as I am," says Dowd of the hour-long queue of women that waited at the Kaufmann Concert Hall to meet America's most famous female columnist. The daughter of Irish immigrants, she inherited her flaming red hair from her family, she says, and she is not seeking the vixen title bestowed on her by the tabloids.

Her looks consume some of the women in the book-signing queue. One of them asks me if she is as beautiful in real life, another comments wistfully that it's easier to be glamorous when, like Dowd, you don't have a husband and family. Dowd laughs at the comments. Once a proud post-feminist, she has had to review her theories after what she sees as the abandonment of women's rights by a younger generation.

"I felt like I was a post-feminist. But now that young women today are post-feminist in that they don't care at all, I'm back to being a feminist. Now I'm saying: 'Hey, wait a minute, you girls better pay attention to the Supreme Court nominations and stop text messaging your boyfriends because the nominations are about to change your lives in ways you can't even understand'." She wants Are Men Necessary? to be a light-hearted way for men and women to discuss the gender divide.

"It's all about excess," she says. "I didn't like early feminism because I wanted more sexuality; I wanted more fun, cool clothes, Sex in the City clothes. But now we have pre-teens with T-shirts saying: 'My Dad Thinks I'm A Virgin' and 'You Were Hotter Online' and going to school just looking like little sluts.

"Now I miss the early feminists' passionate desire to change the world because now all you've got is girls text messaging their boyfriends and wearing slutty clothes. So there has to be something in between."

Young women are not fully to blame for the collapse of the women's movement, she says. "The early feminists were trying to turn us into little miniatures of men. We were supposed to dress just like men in those little blue power suits that made us look like football full-backs, and we were going to work as hard as men and have orgasms just like men. That could never work because we're simply not men."

She wants her book to help redefine "modern, intelligent, post-Mary Robinson women" but she also wants it to be a "breezy, fun change-of-topic from the Iraq war to the gender war".

"Let's face it," she says, "I've covered the Bush family for two generations so it's not often I get to write about sex."

She is fascinated by how women define themselves in the nebulous world of post-feminist. "Feminists thought they could protect women from being sex objects and a lot of woman now want to be sex objects. They thought they could protect from trading beauty with status by saying: 'Okay, we're going to split the check [bill] with the date.' And now women want the date to pick up the check because it's a way of assessing their sexuality and knowing if it's a real date," she says.

Her research uncovered another surprising detail - that married American women enjoy the term Mrs, even after a decade-long war within the New York Times to have the Miss/Mrs distinction abolished in print.

"In 1986, (former executive editor) Abe Rosenthal finally changed it from Mrs to Ms and (feminist writer) Gloria Steinem sent Abe flowers that day. And now Mrs is one of the chief status symbols for women in society, even among Ivy League women. They want to be known as a man's property."

All of this commentary has led to some biting comments about Dowd from Tina Brown and other female journalists. "It's funny that the women have been very critical," says Dowd. "I got a really good review by a woman on Salon . I don't read the commentary about myself and, anyway, I wrote this book as a good way to start a national conversation because we haven't talked about these subjects in a long time."

Taking the criticism on this book tour has been particularly tough as her mother, Peggy Dowd, passed away in the summer. From a close-knit Irish- American family - her father is from Co Clare and her mother's family are from Co Mayo - Dowd was once told by her mother that she was conceived at an Ancient Order of Hibernians convention.

She dedicated her latest book to Peggy Dowd, "mo cuishle", who defended her during her early days as a New York Times columnist, when she was being attacked by the left and the right.

"Not that I would have told her about all of the mean things people said about me but you could cuddle up with her, she was such a source of warmth. You just knew that there was one person in the world that wanted you to do well."

The book tour and Miller controversy have freed her from facing up to the loss of her mother, she says.

"I have all of my mom's boxes which I haven't unpacked. It's a relief to be out of my house at the moment 'cos every time I start packing, I just start crying." She learnt Irish women's resilience from her mother, who is quoted in the book as complaining that "It's more of a man's world today than ever. Men can eat their cake in unlimited bakeries".

"She was that one person to make you feel that you're going to do well. She kept me going with that one phrase she took from Ireland." Dowd is about to say: "F**k the begrudgers" but suddenly catches herself, as much of the book is consumed with a woman's search for grace and style while competing with men. "Um, of course, that phrase should be: 'Never mind the begrudgers'. One major thing I've learnt is that all women should keep that one close."