When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.

Just as darkness is sometimes defined as the absence of light, so age is defined as the absence of youth.

I won a really big fellowship to go straight on to get my Ph.D. And I went through agonies of indecision, and then I decided not to accept it. I just decided I didn't want to be an academic.

I'm my age and I feel glorious.

Over and over again, stories in women's magazines insist that women can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child. They deny the years when she can no longer look forward to giving birth, even if she repeats the act over and over again. In the feminine mystique, there is no other way for a woman to dream of creation or of the future. There is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children's mother, her husband's wife.

When I was in high school, even in college, I didn't have any real image of a career woman or a professional woman.

We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my home.'