Writers - we're a little crazy about how much we care about it. We spend a lot of time fussing. At least, I do.

When I was growing up, you were supposed to marry and therefore didn't plan ahead. Planning ahead is one of the few reliable measures of class in the sense that rich people plan for generations forward and poor people plan for Saturday night, and by that measure, women have been lower class. We were less likely to plan ahead because we're more likely to think that who we marry and our children are going to dictate our plans.

We've begun to raise daughters more like sons... but few have the courage to raise our sons more like our daughters.

More than poverty, more than degree of education, religion, access to natural resources, even degree of democracy - violence against females is the biggest indicator of whether a country will be violent in itself or be willing to use military violence against another country.

Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning.

The original languages didn't even have he and she. They didn't have concepts of masculine and feminine. People were people. And the whole idea was that we were in a circle together, not in a hierarchy together.

The father who raises a son to have a profession he once dreamed of, and the mother who uses her daughter as the adult companion her husband is not; the parents who urge their children into accomplishments as status symbols-all these and many more are ways of subordinating a child's authentic self to a parent s needs.