Sex and the City's last scenes seemed to echo its very first: Both the series' opening credits and its concluding moments feature a self-satisfied Carrie Bradshaw (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) strutting down the streets of her beloved Manhattan. There they part, however. In the opening sequence, a bus going through a puddle sprays the daydreaming, tutu-wearing sex columnist. In the last scenes of the series finale, which wrapped up six seasons of the HBO show on Sunday night, there is no such peril, only Carrie, grinning mightily, folded into the anonymous embrace of a crowd of fellow New Yorkers.

"I would not call myself a feminist," says Natalie, a University of Michigan junior. "I'm experiencing a lot of the advantages that feminists worked to achieve, and I'm thankful. ... But I don't know that women are still that much uneven from men, especially in the workplace." Told that on average a woman today makes only 76 cents to a man's dollar, Natalie is shocked. "I don't understand how that could be fair or even possible," she says.