At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry.

What we experience in our childhoods that comes to seem normal, or even inevitable, is that if you are placed in a hierarchy, you probably are immediately anxious about going further down and you're striving to go further up, so your energies get placed into becoming "more than," or at least not becoming "less than," instead of becoming "part of."

Now we know that women can do what men can do..., but we don't know that men can do what women can do.

It still may take some explaining, but many more women are keeping their birth names (and not calling them maiden names, with all the sexual double standards that implies).

Unequal access to money and media plus bias, external and internalized, and male-dominant religions and illegality at the polls - all those are reasons for women's wildly unequal political power.

Language can't solve everything, of course, but it does carry our dreams and our ideas.

We're communal animals. If we're by ourselves, we can feel wrong and crazy and out of step with society. We really need those talking circles.