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.

Long-term commitment to an intimate relationship with one person of whatever sex is an essential need that people have in order to breed the qualities out of which nurturing thought can rise.

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.

The effect on men has been very bad, too, of the omission of women's history, because men have been given the impression that they're much more important in the world than they actually are. It has fostered illusions of grandeur in every man that are unwarranted. If you can think as a man that everything great in the world and its civilization was created by men, then naturally you have to look down on women. And naturally, you have to have different aspirations for your sons and for your daughters.

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.

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

[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.