Washington ? When President Bush took up residency in the White House last year, advocates for women’s rights were certain they heard the door slam shut behind him.

But now Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, walks right in.

“I did not expect in any way in the first year to meet in the White House. And we did,” said Smeal, who has been there several times.

Since Sept. 11, women’s activists and White House officials say, the Bush administration has forged a new alliance with several of its most vocal feminist former critics to work first on the treatment of women in Afghanistan and now on challenges to women in other countries and at home.

Having lost the women’s vote to former Vice President Al Gore by a margin of 11 percentage points, Bush has been reaching out to feminists and moderate women’s groups, in addition to those in his conservative base.

This is a dramatic turn from his first days in office, when the president angered many leading women’s advocates by prohibiting federal money from going to organizations that support abortions overseas and by abolishing a White House office on women’s initiatives.

Abortion is now the only issue that is off the table, according to White House officials and women’s leaders. Everything else including seed money for women entrepreneurs, flexible work schedules for parents, money for breast cancer research, domestic violence and even the Equal Rights Amendment is fair game.

“Let’s really analyze where we can come together,” Lezlee Westine, the White House director of public liaison, said she tells women’s groups. “The president is pro-life. I understand some of you may not be. Let’s find out where we can agree.”

Westine and other administration officials are just beginning to work with women’s groups to explore potential common ground. The State Department, through meetings with Smeal and other women’s activists, already has agreed to take up the fight against international sex trafficking in women and girls. The Labor Department, following an outcry by women’s groups, rejected a plan by the president’s budget office to close 10 regional women’s bureaus.

“We are going to be sitting down with a broad range of women’s groups to discuss issues that are important to them and to share with them issues of importance to the administration,” said Paula Dobriansky, undersecretary of state for global affairs.

The administration recently appointed a senior coordinator for international women’s issues, April Palmerlee, to continue work begun by former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Dobriansky also opened the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons to eliminate the sale of, primarily, women and girls. And, she said, she will place particular emphasis on helping women gain economic and political rights.

No one is more surprised by the administration’s new openness than feminist leaders, who expected to wait out their time with Bush outside the White House gates, as they had with his father and as conservatives did with former President Bill Clinton.

“I think communication is without question better than what I expected it to be. Progress on women’s plight in Afghanistan is better than I expected it to be,” said Martha Burk, chairwoman of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, which represents more than 100 national women’s groups. “The punitive stand on abortion is every bit as bad as I expected it to be. And the rest remains to be seen.”

Burk, whose bipartisan organization represents 6 million women from liberal and moderate groups, said she has been to the White House three or four times and talks by phone to administration officials almost every week.

“We were certainly out in the cold during Bush One,” she said, referring to the administration of President George H.W. Bush. “This is immeasurably better than it was then. …

“I think the administration recognizes that to get re-elected, they have to curry the favor of women. They are not willing to do that on abortion, so they have to look to other things.”

Some of the women’s goals such as the ERA are “long shots,” Burk said. But others, such as increasing the number of women-owned businesses that receive federal contracts, are eminently doable, according to Westine and women’s advocates.

The newfound fellowship between the Bush White House and women’s leaders began in earnest in early October, when Westine asked Betsy Myers, the Clinton administration’s director of Office of Women’s Initiatives and Outreach, to help be host to a meeting of female leaders from business, health and feminist organizations.

“She wanted to let them know she was working with me . . . that she was available and accessible,” said Myers, now director of alumni programs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

But the big splash came in November, when first lady Laura Bush delivered a radio address deploring brutality against women in Afghanistan and then met with Smeal, Verveer and some Afghan women. The group also spoke with Secretary of State Colin Powell. Bush punctuated the issue in his State of the Union address Tuesday, when he said that “respect for women” is one of the “non-negotiable demands of human dignity.”

“Some very strong statements were made from the White House about Afghan women,” said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women. “The cynical part of me thinks it was to gain support from women for fighting in Afghanistan. But the hopeful part of me wants to think that this concern for women will be extended to Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Iran and other countries.”

White House officials said Bush, with the help of strong women appointees, is trying to correct the perception that he doesn’t care about women’s issues.

“Republicans have not always put their best foot forward,” said Cindi Williams, who leads women’s outreach in the White House Office of Public Liaison.

Not all women activists applaud the budding cooperation between the White House and women’s groups.

“Most of the women I talk to don’t like to consider women as a group a subset that should be treated as though they were some kind of ethnic minority,” said Phyllis Schlafly, president of the conservative Eagle Forum.