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.

Control is a big issue when you're sick. It's the first thing you lose - other losses come later.

Before devising any blueprint that includes the assumption of Having It All, we need to ask ... Why do we need Everything?

Children's liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.

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

In the supposedly enlightened eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, parental indifference, child neglect, and raw cruelty appearedamong Europeans of all classes.... In mid-nineteenth- century France, families abandoned their children at the rate of thirty-three thousand a year.... It took sixty years after the criminalization of cruelty to animals for cruelty to children to be made punishable under English law.... Industrialized America added brutalizing child labor to the oppressions of the young.

Illness is the proving ground of friendship.