What was going on when I was born?

The American public is generally committed to a greater political role for women, a New York Times Poll indicates, with half saying Congress would be improved by having more women as members. This dominant view was supported by a range of arguments that more women would make Congress more temperate, more balanced, more open- minded or more objective. While only one in 10 contended that more women would make Congress worse, a significant minority in the poll held to ideas of male superiority. Moreover, those traditional views appeared to be having immediate political impact. For example, the 40 percent of women who said men are more logical or more honest than women are helping President Reagan by shoring up his standing against the much more critical feelings held by a majority of women. This traditional group, which is somewhat older and slightly less educated than other women, is much more favorable to Mr. Reagan's re- election than are other women. Forty- six percent of this group said he deserved another term, as against 33 percent of other women.

IT is just at that moment when the bird is within shooting range and its dark feathered wings are extended in flight, say many Long Island hunters, that it is almost impossible to tell the difference between a black duck and a female mallard. But while the mallard population has thrived and multiplied in the areas of Long Island that have been developed over the last decade, the black duck population has steadily decreased. A mallard can nest in a backyard, according to Long Island naturalists, but a black duck requires wide open space. At the Quogue Wildlife Refuge, in a building overlooking the old ice pond, Carl Helms spoke at length about how Long Island wildlife has changed during the last two decades in which he has served as director of the refuge. ''Old-timers,'' Mr. Helms said, ''can remember clouds of black ducks going over for hours. There were so many.''

Although cooperatives and condominiums are not entirely new to Lawrence, L.I., they have come about only through conversion of existing buildings: Developers who wanted to build them often met resistance in the upper-middle-class village, part of the Five Towns area in the southwestern corner of Nassau County. Work is now nearing completion, however, on the Carlyle, a 71-unit condominium at 376 Central Avenue whose developers, the Bluestone Organization, believe is the village's first newly constructed condominium.

A series of explosions tore through the Grucci fireworks plant here today, heavily damaging the nation's largest fireworks factory and 100 nearby homes. Two people were killed and 24 were injured, the Suffolk County police said. The blasts, punctuated by bursting skyrockets and a huge mushroom cloud that some witnesses took for a nuclear explosion, erupted between 11:10 and 11:45 A.M. at the New York Pyrotechnic Products Company, a 13-acre complex of warehouses and storage sheds in this Suffolk County community of 2,800 people, 50 miles east of New York City. The cause of the blasts was not immediately determined. The explosions, heard miles away, leveled many of the dozen buildings on the property, blew out the windows of surrounding homes, collapsed roofs, cracked walls and chimneys, overturned cars, knocked out power to 7,000 homes, showered surrounding communities with fragments of fireworks and sent neighbors scurrying after children and fleeing in panic.

Having outlived their usefulness, old mill buildings common to many Northeastern industrial communities are often valued mostly as cheap storage facilities. But now many of these urban white elephants are being sought after and recycled as fashionable office and retail buildings.

Yasir Arafat's branch of the Palestine Liberation Organization found a way to reach an agreement with Israel last week - on a prisoner exchange - but whether the Palestinians could agree among themselves was in doubt. Both Mr. Arafat and the Syrian-backed rebels' chief of staff, Col. Abu Khaled al-Omlah, questioned the reported terms of a cease-fire and withdrawal agreement. The rebels had said that unless there was agreement and Mr. Arafat left Tripoli, they would resume attacking his forces in the heart of the Lebanese city, where he is beseiged. Yesterday, however, there were only minor exchanges of fire in Tripoli.

Inflation Storm Warnings Most economists are confident that no new outbreak of high inflation lies ahead, the consensus predicting only a modest acceleration of prices by 5 percent or so for 1984. But a significant minority rejects such optimism for the year ahead. One of these is Milton Friedman, the monetarist, who has argued for some time that strong money-supply growth during the first half of this year has already made a new surge of inflation inevitable. Now he's joined by Geoffrey H. Moore, director of the Columbia Business School's Center for International Business Cycle Research. Mr. Moore's new index designed to foretell inflation is flashing a warning. The index consists of only three components: the annual rate of change in prices of industrial materials, the change in total outstanding debt and the ratio of employed workers to the working-age population.

When New York University resumed varsity basketball last night after a 12-year hiatus, only one player on the Violet roster had any collegiate experience, and he was nursing a sprained ankle. The player, Kerry Noonan, is a transfer student from Westchester Community College. He was to play with 10 freshman and 5 juniors who came to N.Y.U. when the only basketball offered at the Greenich Village campus was junior varsity or pickup games. Noonan, a 6-foot-2-inch guard from Thornwood, N.Y., began his college career at the University of Denver. After one homesick semester, and without playing a game, he abandoned his basketball scholarship to attend a school closer to home.

THE DISCOVERERS By Daniel J. Boorstin. 745 pp. New York: Random House. $25. FROM his first book, ''The Mysterious Science of the Law,'' written more than 40 years ago, Daniel J. Boorstin, the Librarian of Congress, has demonstrated his ability to bring familiar information into fresh combinations and, from his new arrangements, to draw out unexpected and suggestive findings. And throughout his later writing, much of it devoted to enlarging the understanding of the American experience, he has revealed the capacity to assemble great caches of evidence and work them into large-scale structures of well-ordered, fast moving, vivid narration. He is equally at home with the pungent brief reflection and the instructive grand survey.

LEO J. GALLAGHER JR., a Stamford funeral director, says some of his colleagues in the funeral industry have told him they want ''nothing to do with'' him since he became a partner in a low-cost cremation service. The service, Telophase, is a California company that opened an East Coast office in Stamford last May. It is now competing with the traditional funeral industry in the state. While the cost of a traditional funeral now averages about $3,200, according to the Federal Trade Commission, Telophase provides pre-planned cremation for $390. ''Many of the funeral directors in the state are upset about it,'' said Mr. Gallagher, who operates traditional funeral homes in Stamford and Greenwich, as well as doing cremations for Telophase.

BALTIMORE The name of the hotel is not the Tarantula Arms, but Jessica Tandy is again inhabiting the world of Tennessee Williams. The Tarantula Arms is where Blanche Dubois lived after the fall, where she had her ''intimacies with strangers,'' and it was as Blanche, 36 years ago, that Miss Tandy made her name. It was Mr. Williams himself who crossed the country to cast Miss Tandy in 'A Streetcar Named Desire'' and to reverse her foundering career. Yet in the years that followed her success as Blanche, Miss Tandy rarely returned to the works of Mr. Williams, to his repertory of memorable women. When the playwright died nine months ago, Miss Tandy realized she had few personal recollections of him. But now, as a 74-year-old woman, she is portraying Amanda Wingfield in a production of ''The Glass Menagerie'' that opens on Thursday at the Eugene O'Neill. It is as if Tennessee Williams has come to frame Miss Tandy's life on stage.

The Soviet Union delivered punches last week telegraphed long in advance and therefore not surprising, even though dismaying, to Western leaders. The West German Bundestag, ignoring street demonstrations and warnings from Moscow, voted to proceed with the stationing of American-made, medium-range missiles. When this was almost immediately followed by the arrival of the first nine of 108 Pershing-2's, Moscow broke off the negotiations in Geneva indefinitely, then announced its own deployment.