When I started working in a feminist feminine magazine all my life was about rebelling against male authority, which is authority in general is male, so it was rebelling against everything. Everything that was around me made me angry.

I am very grateful for the success, because it has given me the freedom to write without pressure, in my own way, and has enabled me to maintain my family and educate my children and grandchildren, as well as to create a Foundation to empower women and girls.

I'm living in California but I have a place that is mine in Chile and I belong there. I am no longer an exile.

I was not supposed to be in any way a liberated person. I was a female born in the '40s in a patriarchal family; I was supposed to marry and make everyone around me happy.

So firm did Nivea's determination become that she wrote in her diary that she would give up marriage in order to devote herself completely to the struggle for women's suffrage. She was not aware that such a sacrifice would not be necessary, and that she would marry a man for love who would back her up in her political goals.

For women in my lifetime things have changed quite a bit, but not enough. They have only changed for women that have education and access to health care in the Western world. But look at the rest of the world. Still in many places, women are sold into premature marriages, prostitution, forced labor; they are forced to have children that they cannot support or that they don't want. They are abused, tortured, exploited and even killed with impunity.

In my lifetime, the world has become better, not worse. And the world is moving, very slowly but surely with more democracy and more liberal way of thinking, more inclusion and more diversity.