In the last 25 years, we've convinced ourselves and a majority of the country that women can do what men can do. Now we have to convince the majority of the country - and ourselves - that men can do what women can do. ... Let's face it: until men are fully equal inside the home, women will never be really equal outside it.

I don't remember being thought of as good-looking until I became a feminist. It's more of a comment on people's expectations than of what a feminist would look like. They assumed that if you could get a man, you wouldn't want anything else - what else could you possibly want? So that feminists who were talking about such things as equal pay must be doing so because they were unable to get a husband to support them, and therefore they must be ugl - this was the sort of train of thought. So because I looked different from the stereotype, then people would comment.

Every revolution begins as consciousness because some group of people has to imagine change. You have to have the idea of change or at least have a hope before you can proceed. And that stage goes very quickly because a contagion of consciousness is within your control. But when you get to the stage of institutional change, it becomes a much slower process.

Sex and race, because they are easy and visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups and into the cheap labour on which this system still depends.

This idea of doing it all is the enemy of equality, not the path to do it. It's impossible to do two full-time jobs, and an impossible definition of success is just another way of making women feel like failures... Any definition of success has to include social policies that honor families and men who raise babies as much as women do.

Women fear endangering men's approval so much, we don't even wait for them to say no. Or else we protect them, even if it means saying no to ourselves.

No wonder male religious leaders so often say that humans were born in sin—because we were born to female creatures. Only by obeying the rules of the patriarchy can we be reborn through men. No wonder priests and ministers in skirts sprinkle imitation birth fluid over our heads, give us new names, and promise rebirth into everlasting life.