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Nancy Frank chose to bear a child as a single woman in her thirties; Shelley Diamond made a decision to be sterilized at age 21. Both felt they were exercising freedom to define their own "family values" according to the feminist principles by which they lived.

The two women spoke at a panel entitled "Feminist Values/Family Values," at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco earlier this month. They were joined by Judy Schwartz, LCSW and branch director of the Marin JFCS; Rabbi Rona Shapiro of Berkeley Hillel; and Judith Stacey, a professor of women's studies at U.C. Davis.

During an evening of warm, personal presentations, several of the panelists honored their "traditional" Jewish mothers. They expressed the hope, however, that modern Judaism could embrace nontraditional family models.

Diamond, a personal coach-counselor who said she knew even as a child that she never wanted to have children, recalled a favorite saying of her mother's: "I'm so happy to have sacrificed my life for you." The phrase made Diamond uneasy.

"I asked her once, `If you sacrificed your life for me, and I sacrifice mine for my kids, and so on, then who gets to live?'" she said.

Schwartz said her mother, a devoted homemaker, emphatically sought to teach her about being a good wife and mother. "It didn't quite work out as she imagined," said Schwartz, who came out as a lesbian in college and now lives with a partner and two adopted daughters. But due in part to her mother's training, "we're just about as traditional a family as you could imagine."

Stacey, author of the book "In the Name of the Family: Rethinking Family Values in the Postmodern Age," said, "The nuclear, heterosexual family is now in the minority." Increasingly prevalent are nontraditional situations such as single-parent families, gay parents and families with nonbiological ties.

As for children of same-sex parents, "They're doing fine," she said, "despite the fact that they're dealing with enormous social and institutional discrimination." She added, "Every researcher knows that children in families where there's a high level of parental conflict look much worse than those whose parents divorce amicably."

Addressing the Jewish perspective, Shapiro said, laughing, "I won't gloss over the facts: Judaism prefers a patriarchal family." The rabbi, who has officiated at several gay marriages, said she expected Jewish law to catch up with her inclusive policies. "If you look at Rabbi Akiva and other great rabbis, you see that they sometimes overturned the law and acted according to conscience."

Shapiro went on to emphasize the need for communities to support families of all types. Throughout Jewish history, she said, widows and single parents have been helped by their communities. In turn-of-the-century Brooklyn, N.Y., for example, Jews gathered around communal ovens and cooked together.

But she cited a current a tendency toward isolation. "The real issue is not feminism or divorce. The real issue is community."

On an evening when the political was certainly the personal, perhaps the most moving speech came from Frank, an independent health-care consultant.

"I would have preferred to be in a nuclear family; it didn't come my way," she said of her decision to bear a child without a partner. But she sees feminism and family values as complementary.

"Feminism means being able to choose what's right for you. I feel privileged to be healthy, to own my own home and to be a single mother."