In a year in which mainstream female singer-songwriters were hyped as the biggest breakthrough for, indeed the living embodiment of, women in rock, one name you didn't hear quite so much as Jewel or Sarah or Sheryl or Meredith, was Juliana.

As in Juliana Hatfield, the Boston native whose tough, idiosyncratic guitar pop has skirted big-time recognition for the last 10 years - ever since her emergence with proto-alternative Beantown trio Blake Babies.

Yet Hatfield -- a real rocker, not an amped-up folkie -- is doing more for the genre than a crate full of Jewels, a shipload of Sheryls. How? By simply staying out there -- playing, touring, making records, touring some more -- without making any kind of a deal at all about the fact that she is female. Hatfield is a working rock musician among scores of working rock musicians, and to her, gender is not an issue.

Would that it were so among the chroniclers of pop music. A great many female members of the music press spout an unforgiving, hard-line feminist party line, and woe betide anyone not in lockstep along with them, like Hatfield, who's been taken to task more than once for allegedly failing to advance the feminist agenda in her songs. But as Hatfield succinctly puts it, "The act of making music is so much more proactive than whining about being oppressed."

In "Get Off," a potent acid-rocker in 3/4 time from her new EP, Please Do Not Disturb, Hatfield lashes out at those who have derided her because she "didn't talk about the correct ideas in my songs, wasn't being a good little feminist singer. Which is, like...did I ever say that I was?

"Do they realize," she continues tartly, "that by what they do, they're knocking down everything they're probably trying to achieve? They're backpedaling, making it impossible to make changes in the way things are perceived. And I'm not a conservative person; I'm very much into personal freedom."

Actually, the whole idea that women in rock must be recognized as "women in rock" sticks in Hatfield's craw. "Don't get me started. Please," she says darkly. But after being assured that many share her sentiments, Hatfield expresses frustration at this ghettoizing of female musicians. "It's insulting. Music is so much bigger than gender. Chrissie Hynde and Patti Smith and Exene weren't [lumped in] with other women; they were their own entities. But it's only the very, very cream of the crop that get to belong to everyone, and not be labeled 'women in rock.'"

It should be noted that Hatfield did join the all-female Lilith Fair tour for a week this past summer, headlining the second stage. (In fact, she was one of maybe three Lilith acts [which numbered over 60] who weren't acoustic-based songbirds.) "They asked me last fall to do the tour," she relates, "and at first I was, like, 'Women in rock? Fuck that.'

"But I wasn't going to be doing anything over the summer. And I am a musician and I like playing, and I'd get to play in front of a lot of people who maybe never heard me. I thought it would be fun."

And? "It was fine," Hatfield says in a deliberate damning-with-faint-praise tone of voice. "But I wasn't excited."

Listening to Please Do Not Disturb's six compelling, varicolored tracks, it isn't hard to see how the slick songstresses of Lilith Fair would not light Hatfield's fire. She starts off with the sharply observed "Sellout," a song about an anything-to-please doormat who still can't get anyone to like her, and who rationalizes her behavior in the driving, contagious chorus, "It's not a sellout if nobody buys it."

"I'm sort of pointing the finger and sympathizing at the same time," explains Hatfield.

Then there's the melancholy "Trying Not To Think About It," written after Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi River earlier this year. Hatfield and Buckley had toured together in 1995; "I knew him pretty well," she says. The song captures "the feeling you have when someone dies, and you're just filled with all this...stuff, and it won't go away."

"As If Your Life Depended On It," with its pensive, atmospheric cello lines, is on the surface about those instant, intense crushes you can get when you have no major attachments. Hatfield encapsulates it superbly: "Nobody to go home to, your life is boring you/So you're living for the guy that you just met." It's also about acknowledging that even though you wouldn't object to a few strings, you prize your freedom and really don't want anything to change.

Throughout the EP, Hatfield shows that her facility with memorable melodies and irresistible hooks is as strong as ever, and that her guitar work has grown ever more inventive. Her deceptively sweet and girlish voice, which has always sounded so nicely perverse singing her anything-but-sweet-and-girlish lyrics, is a shade or two deeper, more lived-in on this outing.

This recording marks a break from Hatfield's longtime label Atlantic Records. Hoboken, N.J. independent label Bar/None released Please Do Not Disturb as a one-off, nearly three years after her last Atlantic release, Only Everything.

"I have so much new material, and it's not all gonna fit on one album, so I did the six-song EP. [A full-length LP will follow] once I get settled on a new label. I am very slowly putting feelers out, because I want to take my time. I'd like to be somewhere where I get a sense that what I do is understood and enthused about."

MOIRA MCCORMICK