We are literally linked in a circle, including with nature, as well as with other human beings. Old societies didn't have and still don't have "he" and "she." They don't have gendered pronouns. They don't have a word for nature, because we're not separate from nature.

I always trust the microcosm over the macrocosm.

We've learned that women can and should do 'men's jobs,' for instance, and we've won the principle (if not the fact) of getting equal pay. But we haven't yet established the principle (much less the fact) that men can and should do 'women's jobs': that homemaking and child-rearing are as much a man's responsibility, too, and that those jobs in which women are concentrated outside the home would probably be better paid if more men became secretaries, file clerks, and nurses, too.

I want to say to you that there is life and dreams and surprises after 30-and 40, and 50, and 60, and 77! Believe me, life is one long surprise.

If you look at the public opinion polls even, support for all the issues, people who self-identify as feminists are as least as many as those who self-identify as Republicans.

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."

It used to be said that this country was a child-centered one. Nothing could be further from the truth. Children have been our lowest priority, both in economic and emotional spending.