I'm not saying that all women are blameless - all women are not. There are women with despicable characters who are cruel and terrible and some of them are mothers. But why do we blame our mothers more than our fathers? We let our fathers get away scot-free. We hardly even knew who they were in many cases, given the way this culture raises kids, and they may have been quite cruel. They may even have raped us as children, but even if they raped us, we will blame our mothers for not protecting us instead of blaming our fathers who actually did it.

I don't know if fury can compete with necessity as the mother of invention, but I recommend it.

They're all qualities wrongly called feminine: attention to detail, patience, empathy. I don't have children, but I was raised as a female to have those qualities because they're perceived as feminine. Until men are raised with those qualities, too, they won't have the full circle of human qualities.

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.

I don't know Beyoncé, but I have the impression that she's sincere, that she really is a feminist and wanted to put the word out there to make it a good word in a big way by putting it in big letters on the stage, and especially because she was quoting the African novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie who said, "We should all be feminists." She's a very accomplished and important novelist.

It's not okay for a woman to be in control of her own body, her own reproductive system, much less of her life. There's opposition even to that. So passivity is rewarded as feminine.

The belief that women should control our own bodies may be a majority belief, but the minority that believes otherwise is against not only safe and legal abortions but contraception and even sex education.