Perhaps well-to-do women and unemployed ghetto teenagers have something in common. Neither group has been allowed to develop the self-confidence that comes from knowing you can support yourselves.

Only when women rebel against patriarchal standards does female muscle become more accepted.

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.

Don't worry about your background, whether it's odd or ordinary, use it, build on it.

It's going to take a while because for the last 500 years patriarchal societies have been devoted to controlling reproduction and that means controlling women. So we got into this masculine/feminine, dominant/passive paradigm, and it's going to take a while to get out.

Women tend to be conservative in youth and get more radical as they get older because they lose power with age. So, if a young woman is not a feminist, I say, just wait.

That's a huge fear for middle-class women. It's not so much a fear for poor women, because poor women have always assumed that they are going to have to support themselves. It's middle-class women who have this fantasy that somebody else is going to support them.