The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel, it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.

We teach what we need to learn.

The nineteenth-century wave of feminism was started by older women who had been through the radicalizing experience of getting married and becoming the legal chattel of their husbands (or the equally radicalizing experience of not getting married and being treated as spinsters).

A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.

We know from many forms of suffering that what is important first is a witness - people want to know that someone else knows what's happening, that they're not alone - and someone who listens to what is needed and tries to help.

Even when educators survey grade school texts and create new bibliographies to help teachers include Asians, Eskimos, and other Americans, females in and out of those groups may be down-played or forgotten.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one?