The system of patriarchy is a historic construct; it has a beginning; it will have an end. Its time seems to have nearly run its course—it no longer serves the needs of men or women and in its inextricable linkage to militarism, hierarchy, and racism it threatens the very existence of life on earth. What will come after, what kind of structure will be the foundation for alternate forms of social organization we cannot yet know. We are living in an age of unprecedented transformation. We are in the process of becoming.

Women's history is women's right-an essential, indispensable heritage from which we can draw pride, comfort, courage, and long range vision.

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

[There is a] depth and urgency of the search of Jewish and Christian women for connection to the Divine, which found expression in more than 1000 years of feminist Bible criticism and religious re-visioning.

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.

nursing was regarded as simply an extension of the unpaid services performed by the housewife - a characteristic attitude that haunts the profession to this day.

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.