The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences, and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.

Men develop ideas and systems of explanation by absorbing past knowledge and critiquing and superseding it. Women, ignorant of their own history [do] not know what women before them had thought and taught. So generation after generation, they [struggle] for insights others had already had before them, [resulting in] the constant inventing of the wheel.

Autonomy means women defining themselves and the values by which they will live, and beginning to think of institutional arrangements which will order their environment in line with their needs.... Autonomy means moving out from a world in which one is born to marginality, to a past without meaning, and a future determined by others--into a world in which one acts and chooses, aware of a meaningful past and free to shape one's future.

Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy.

The appeal of the New Right is simply that it seems to promise that nothing will change in the domestic realm. People are terrified of change there, because it's the last humanizing force left in society, and they think, correctly, that it must be retained.

Everything that explains the world has in fact explained a world that does not exist, a world in which men are at the center of the human enterprise and women are at the margin "helping' them. Such a world does not exist - never has.

Women's history is the primary tool for women's emancipation.