As other perceptions arise...the total vision of human possibilities enlarges and is transformed.

Women are taught that their main goal in life is to serve others--first men, and later, children. This prescription leads to enormous problems, for it is supposed to be carried out as if women did not have needs of their own, as if one could serve others without simultaneously attending to one's own interests and desires. Carried to its "perfection," it produces the martyr syndrome or the smothering wife and mother.

Conflict begins at the moment of birth.

The man, or the boy, in his development is psychologically deterred from incorporating serving characteristics by an easily observable fact: there are already people around who are clearly meant to serve and they are girls and women. To perform the activities these people are doing is to risk being, and being thought of, and thinking of oneself, as a woman. This has been made a terrifying prospect and has been made to constitute a major threat to masculine identity.

Women will not advance except by joining together in cooperative action.... Unlike other groups, women do not need to set affiliation and strength in opposition one against the other. We can readily integrate the two, search for more and better ways to use affiliation to enhance strength--and strength to enhance affiliation.

They [women] can use their abilities to support each other, even as they develop more effective and appropriate ways of dealing with power.... Women do not need to diminish other women[they] need the power to advance their own development, but they do not "need" the power to limit the development of others.

In a basic sense, the greater the development of each individual the more able, more effective, and less needy of limiting or restricting others she or he will be.