For a mother the project of raising a boy is the most fulfilling project she can hope for.

Women have been taught that, for us, the earth is flat, and that if we venture out, we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off. It is my faith, my feminist faith, that we will not.

Under patriarchy, every woman's son is her potential betrayer and also the inevitable rapist or exploiter of another woman.

To be rapeable, a position that is social, not biological, defines what a woman is.

Could women's liberation ever be a revolutionary movement, not rhetorically but on the ground?

Being stigmatied by sex is being marked by its meaning in a human life of loneliness and imperfection, where some pain is indelible.

Only when manhood is dead - and it will perish when ravaged femininity no longer sustains it - only then will we know what it is to be free.