Chosen motherhood is the real liberation. The choice to have a child makes the whole experience of motherhood different, and the choice to be generative in other ways can at last be made, and is being made by many women now, without guilt.

The only way for a woman, as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.

The real joke that history played on American women is not the one that makes people snigger, with cheap Freudian sophistication, at the dead feminists. It is the joke that Freudian thought played on living women, twisting the memory of the feminists into the man-eating phantom of the feminine mystique, shriveling the very wish to be more than just a wife and mother.

Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?

I wouldn't be satisfied with a life lived solely on the barricades. I reserve my right to be frivolous.

Today the problem that has no name is how to juggle work, love, home and children.

Being Jewish, you didn't get into a sorority. So I really was much more outgoing and gregarious. I really didn't want to spend an Emily Dickinson adolescence reading poetry on gravestones, which I did.