Women have traditionally deferred to the judgment of men although often while intimating a sensibility of their own which is at variance with that judgment.

While men represent powerful activity as assertion and aggression, women in contrast portray acts of nurturance as acts of strength.

The hardest times for me were not when people challenged what I said, but when I felt my voice was not heard.

It all goes back, of course, to Adam and Eve - a story which shows among other things, that if you make a woman out of a man, you are bound to get into trouble.

Both love and democracy depend on voice -- having a voice and also the resonance that makes it possible to speak and be heard.

My research suggests that men and women may speak different languages that they assume are the same, using similar words to encode disparate experiences of self and social relationships. Because these languages share an overlapping moral vocabulary, they contain a propensity for systematic mistranslation.

Maybe love is like rain. Sometimes gentle, sometimes torrential, flooding, eroding, joyful, steady, filling the earth, collecting in underground springs. When it rains, when we love, life grows.