Housework is the only activity at which men are allowed to be consistently inept because they are thought to be so competent at everything else.

When men are oppressed, it's a tragedy. When women are oppressed, it's tradition.

If knowledge is power, clandestine knowledge is power squared; it can be withheld, exchanged, and leveraged.

As the mother of a son, I do not accept that alienation from me is necessary for his discovery of himself. As a woman, I will not cooperate in demeaning womanly things so that he can be proud to be a man. I like to think the women in my son's future are counting on me.

Boys don't make passes at female smart asses.

I didn't anticipate the primal quality of my pleasure, the raw physicality of it, the way my whole body leaps forward when I see my grandsons after a few days' absence.

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children.