Boston ? I went to see “Mona Lisa Smile” despite — or was it because of — the review that dismissed it as full of “feel-good feminist platitudes.” I mean, when was the last time that feminism and feel-good were even in the same sentence?

The movie portrays Wellesley College, circa 1953-54, as an academic not-so-Eden where elite women were educated to become elite wives. Onto that campus comes Julia Roberts, an art professor who wants to open the minds of the young women to abstract expression and premature feminism.

Wellesley graduates of a certain age have complained that their alma mater was neither as snobbish nor as ignorant of Jackson Pollock as the Hollywood version. But a portrait of the powerful pressures on the best and the brightest women is a welcome antidote to the current nostalgia for airbrushed 1950s. It’s a refresher course on what Madeleine Albright, class of 1959, had to overcome and what Hillary Clinton was rebelling against in her famous valedictorian speech of 1969.

What struck me most was the way the movie arced across generations from the post-suffragist to the post-feminist, from the era of the characters to the era of actresses and the audience.

Two bits of generational dialogue stay in my mind. The first came when the (vaguely) subversive art teacher confronts the (fairly) conservative college president, accusing her of running “a finishing school disguised as a college.” The older woman replies to the younger, “I think you should look back and see how far we’ve come.”

This is the absolutely accurate and yet utterly conservative statement of the 1950s. And the 2000s. It’s one way to look at the long run while subtly defending the status quo.

The second scene is when Roberts’ character is confronted by a student she encouraged to apply to law school. When the student, played by Julia Stiles, turns down the offer of law school for the offer of marriage, she tells her disappointed professor, “You said I could do anything I want. This is what I want.”

Until that moment, the entire movie had been designed to show the powerful pressures on women to conform and use their education as an attractive accessory to their husband’s careers. The younger woman’s claim of free choice — “this is what I want” — in a time of such stark choices seemed as out of place as a nose ring in the era of circle pins.

But of course, this exchange was written less for the pre-feminists of then than for the post-feminists of now. See how far we’ve come?

The college president of the 1950s could see back half a century to the time when higher education was itself a radical act, when the Wellesleys and Vassars and Smiths had to prove that a woman’s uterus wouldn’t shrink if her brain expanded.

The good news by mid-century was that college wasn’t just for radicals. The bad news was that women’s colleges were hanging on to their mission by their fingernails during a postwar, back-to-home ethic. The gains made by one generation of women were seen as old-fashioned by the next.

Now we’ve come all the way through the second feminist wave. On many campuses, professors hold the tenured candle of the women’s movement. But they often face a generation of students described as post-feminists. They see how far we’ve come. But do they know how far there is to go?

Women no longer face a conflict between graduate school and marriage. The crunch often comes 10 years later between a 24/7 profession and 24/7 motherhood. Meanwhile, every six months there’s another wave of stories about the best and the brightest doctors, lawyers, CEOs choosing home: “This is what I want.”

The passion of the women’s movement was to empower women to make their own lives. They could do what the art professor only imagined: “Bake your cake and eat it too.” But are women today as blind to the limits of their choices as those who competed in hoop-rolling contests?

What are the limits? The 70-hour workweek? Child care? The double-jeopardy economy? The fact that these discussions are still largely by and about and between women?

The movie ends with a slide show of 1950s ads designed to make us feel smug in our seats. Indeed, the 36-year-old star, Julia Roberts, told an interviewer, “For me the film is a way to inform women who grew up with feminism that it wasn’t always this way.”

“This way”? Which way? What, I wonder, will the class of 2054 say about how far we’ve come and where we’ve gotten stuck?

Ellen Goodman is a columnist for Washington Post Writers Group.